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As I'm marathoning through all the Mega Man games again, it's odd to me that I loved MM3 and MM5, but 4 felt particularly off to me. I ran MM4 through with the Free of Charge mod, and although I feel the game itself has it's own inherent design problems, this mod coupled with the faster boss health bar refill really enhanced the overall experience for me. I think the balance for enemy health felt absolutely spot on without the Mega Buster charged shot. An idea for a future tweak to this hack would be to edit the intro cinematic to exclude the 'new Mega Buster' line or change it to a kind of joke :P

I am personally a fan of the charge shot, so I thought that this hack wouldn't work well, but the hack turned out to be surprisingly good - most of the game works well without the charge shot and most of the changes fit in perfectly. There are a few problems, though.

• The refights against midbosses in Ring Man were removed. Which is weird, since every other midboss refight was kept, and the health of Ring Man's midbosses was already decreased. Not having refights in the rooms where they appear leads to pointless, empty corridors, as there are no midbosses there anymore.

• Some changes make weapons less useful. One particular example is the big, stomping enemy that appears in Dust Man and others - it was originally really tough to destroy, but Drill Man's weapon destroyed it in one shot. Here, it's pretty easy to destroy even without turbo buttons, which makes the weapon less useful.

• The change to Wily Machine Phase 2 makes the weakness work differently - now you don't need to detonate Drill Man's weapon manually to deal high damage.

Aside from those issues, this was still a fun way to play this great game and the author did a great job.

Just finished a playthrough of this hack. I'm not one of those people who believe the charge shot ruined the series, and in fact quite like it in the X series and later, when taking a hit didn't cause you to drop your charge. It's amazing how much less useful 5 and 6 made the charge shot after introducing it in 4 by comparison. But out of curiosity, I gave this a try.

I appreciate that this hack went to the trouble of rebalancing the game with an eye towards how things would work without the charge shot, rather than just disabling the charge shot altogether. It made for a very different experience playing the game, one that I thoroughly enjoyed. I don't think I'd say it makes MM4 better in my opinion, and I think vanilla is still my preferred way to play, but this is absolutely worth a try!

A couple of comments:

• It feels like the game has been made a little too easy in some parts thanks to reduced enemy health. Particularly fighting the minibosses in Ring Man stage, and especially if you have a turbo controller. Those parts are balanced out by it being more difficult in other parts. It's a wild experience to fight Toad Man, and actually have him get a few hits in for once.
• Ring Man's stage feels a little empty without the repeat minibosses. It was a little excessive with 4 minibosses in the stage, but their absence leaves a couple of stretches of just empty space with nothing going on.
• I played this hack combined with the Boss Health Fill Speedup patch, and the Graphics Fixes patch. All three hacks work together.

While it won't replace vanilla for me, I'm glad this hack exists, and I highly recommend giving it a try. If the author makes similar hacks for 5 and 6, I'll be first in line to try those too.

I normally don't like hacks that remove features because they "broke the game", but this hack understands not just what feature needed to be removed, but why. I have played every single Megaman Game, and I love the charge shot... in Megaman X on forward (plus Megaman 11). In the classic games, particularly on NES, Capcom made the charge shot work by making the regular shot almost worthless. It was very hard to kill an enemy coming at you unless you had a charge ready to go. This hack not only removes the charge, but rebalances the rest of the game so that the non-charged shot is worthwhile. I was on the fence about my favorite NES megaman game, but with this hack, I can easily say that it's MM4.