Mega Man 9 is not that hard.

Mega Man 9 came out on Monday for the Wii Virtual Console, and since then there have been people both praising and criticizing it for its apparently insurmountable difficulty. It has even become a fliggin' Internet meme!

Personally, I think you're all a bunch of pussies.

My entire experience with the Mega Man series up until last night amounted to about 20 minutes that I spent with a ROM dump of Mega Man 2, yet I'm already half-way done Mega Man 9. No, it's not an easy game, but its difficulty is hardly noteworthy when compared to other classics from the same era that it is unabashedly trying to emulate.

It's common knowledge that kids these days don't know the meaning of difficult when it comes to video games. Play Halo on "Legendary" and then play Contra 3 without the Konami code and then tell me which is harder. But it isn't the new generation of gamers that is playing Mega Man 9. This game is aimed squarely at those gamers who are aged 20 and up; those who supposedly grew up with this type of game and should therefore be used to the challenge.

Yet still you bitch. Did you simply forget how hard games used to be, or are you too used to having all of your classic games memorized? It's a lot harder when you don't know where every single enemy or power-up is, isn't it?

And all this time, you've been lecturing younger gamers on how much harder the games you used to play were, and then mocking them when they inevitably suck at a 20-year-old game that they've never played before. Yet clearly you haven't experienced a real challenge yourself since 1989. You've been pussified by your own stagnation and false sense of superiority.

To be good at something is not to be able to memorize and repeat; it is to be able to overcome new obstacles as they present themselves.

Now, if it's MM9's list of challenges that you're talking about, then I'll concede. Trying to clear the entire game without taking any damage is going to result in you getting your ass kicked. But I know that most people, when referring to the "tremendous difficulty," are talking about the base game itself. However, I can name five games from recent memory that have given me more grief: Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, Halo 3 on "Legendary," Metroid Prime 3: Corruption on "Hyper Mode," Nanostray 2 and Alien Shooter Vengeance (the final level of which would leave an ordinary man soiled and in tears).

Like I said, I'm practically a Mega Man virgin and yet I'm blowing through MM9 at a steady pace. Why is this game getting so much credit for its difficulty level? I've played turn-based RPGs with more challenge than this—a genre typically intended for girls and weeaboos, but I make it my responsibility to be well versed in all aspects of video ga-- oh fuck it. I just really liked Final Fantasy X, okay?

Why can't you just accept our love?!