I beat Paper Mario 3D Land, but I had regular collision issues, maybe due to it aping the Paper Mario aesthetic, maybe due to it lacking the 3DS’s 3D that the original Super Mario 3D Land has. Worse, all bosses are wait-to-attack, and all have their own exclusive, unintuitive gimmick you gotta figure out before you can damage them. Also, stages are quite derivative of Super Mario 3D Land/World, so if you’ve played those games, you have little reason to play this one.
Next, I beat Psycho Waluigi, and although level design is okay for the most part, there isn’t much of a difficulty curve except for the difficulty spikes when the game throws cheap hits your way. It doesn’t help that some of the game’s issues involve its core mechanic/controls: you can’t grab enemies if they’re too close (not to mention your grabbing hitbox is the eye, not the whole cloud), and when you’re in an airplane, you can’t move up/down until your airplane is tilted all the way up/down first, even though some of the stuff the game throws at you requires you to react quickly.
And then–THEN, I beat Rockmen R: Dr. Wily’s Counterattack, and this game made me feel like I owed an apology to the last three games I beat. The game’s Metalls are so small, your shots go clear over them unless you shoot a fully charged shot, and that’s just the intro stage. Nearly all the Robot Masters have something unfair in their level: crabs that’ll abruptly fall on you while you try to jump over pits, switch-bombs that won’t appear until after the screen-transition has finished scrolling (requiring memorization or luck because nobody can react that fast), the spike-crushers from Metal Man’s stage being placed past a jump so you can’t bait it down or run through unscathed, Gilliam Knights that’ll abruptly boost onto you before you can kill them (unless you have a fully-charged shot ready to go AND anticipate when they’ll spawn), multiple cannons placed in positions where you can’t avoid their shots, the Quick Man lasers–there’s a lot. Plus, when the game isn’t being cheap, it’s being dull: a multi-screen room with no enemies and only the most basic of jumps? Yeah, that happens a few times.
Oh, and there’s no full-screen option, apparently.
You also don’t get a new password for beating any of the Wily stages, meaning you have to clear all of them in one sitting (the official games did this, too, but still). The second Wily stage has a lazy rehash of the Item 2 tunnel from Mega Man 2’s Wily stage 2, which normally wouldn’t be worth mentioning, but Wily Stage 3 also requires that you use Rush Jet, except now you’re down a bunch of energy and have to grind on the same two enemies to fill it back up. Also, the whole level requires Rush-Jetting, and it lasts so long that you’ll need to use W Tanks to refill its energy, and while the level does have two W Tanks, they don’t respawn when you die; only when you Game Over (which puts you back at the start of the level). Speaking of thoughtless copying, the first three Wily stage bosses are mediocre clones of official Robot Masters: Cut Man, Heat Man, and Air Man. Wily stage 4 was mostly okay, but the ice platforms have the same issue as the switch-bombs, and one time, I encountered a glitch where the screen transitioned twice and almost got me stuck (thankfully, I was able to kill myself to fix the bug). The final Wily stage is where you re-fight all the Robot Masters, and while you’d think this wouldn’t be that bad since weakness weapons stun the bosses in this game, this doesn’t happen for Power Man. In fact, you actually run out of weapon energy before he dies, even if all your attacks land, and the boss’s pattern is unpredictable enough that you won’t know if he’ll dig up rocks or charge forward after landing (and you kinda have to know due to how close he can get to you after he jumps). I had to use E-Tanks just to get past him, and that’s not even taking into consideration the two-phase final boss, the second of which regularly teleports to the top of the screen (where only two weapons can reach, and only one can reach reliably, and that one is Power Man’s weakness), and both phases–of course–have projectile attacks that are nearly impossible (if not actually impossible) to avoid sometimes. I only won because the game lets you replay Robot Master stages you’ve beaten so you can grind for E-Tanks (no shop in this game).
No wonder this game never got an English translation. If this was the standard back then, I can see how other games got the praise they did. Not recommended.