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Mega Man III Ultimate

Levels: Good

Graphics: No Change

Music: No Change

Enemies: No Change

Bosses: Good (few damage tweaks)

Weapons: Okay (few tweaks)

Castle: Good

Difficulty: EASY

Comments: While Mega Man 3 Improvement may be the de facto best rendition of Mega Man 3, Ultimate is no slouch either. Where Improvement seeks to be loyal, Ultimate aims to (actually) improve the base game, producing admirable results. Many stages feature soft introductions to their stage mechanics now, like the tops in Top Man's stage and the darkness machines in Shadow Man's stage. Around 50% of a level is identical to its old design, while the other half is greatly modified and generally better (I'm quite fond of the egg puzzles put into Gemini Man's stage). Best of all is that the Doc Robots have been toned down, doing less damage and taking two pips of damage per mega buster shot, rendering their stages less of a roadblock. There are still some issues here and there—the last screen of Gemini Man's stage is still dumb, no checkpoint before Yellow Devil, Wily 5 & 6 are still nothingburger levels—but what has been edited here is appreciated. Improvement is the best way to experience vanilla Mega Man 3, but Ultimate honestly isn't too far behind.

Most of the changes introduced to the regular Robot Master stages feel very needless. The Doc Robot stages, however, features some much-needed balancing and so do the Wily stages. Unfortunately, Needle Man's Doc Robot stage still has the huge gap which you need to cross using Rush Jet. If you die even once, you will be left with too little energy to cross the gap, and you're basically forced to game-over yourself.

This stage is the very reason I came with the idea to edit the games so weapon energy refills whenever you lose a life. However, even that is not enough to actually cross this gap without perfection. You actually don't even have enough energy to fully cross the gap without picking up the various weapon restore items lying around. These items vanish as soon as you've picked them up, even after losing a life. This all means that you still have to cross the gap within a single life, or you're forced to redo the entire stage. The fact that this design choice has been completely overlooked for this hack, a hack that claims to make the Doc Robot stages not-ridiculous, is baffling to me.

I played through this hack, and I really enjoyed it. However, I noticed some strange graphic issues. For one, in Top and I believe Snake Man's stage there are 4 square blocks which are apparently supposed to be spikes. I realize making entirely new spike graphics would be really tough, but it's still kinda weird looking. Shadow Man's Doc stage also has some glitchy spike graphics. Other than that I really enjoyed the game, good work!