The MBoard

I've been playing a lot of the Classic Mega Man games recently and I've been thinking.

Rush Jet.  Is there any real use for this power?  I liked the way it was handed in Mega Man 3 since you could move it all your own.  But the later games only see some practical use.  Was Rush Jet actually necessary in the later games?  Could it have been handled differently?  I will add that I though the idea of MM8's use of Rush Jet as a Gradius/R-TYPE shooter.  What are your thoughts?

It was good in 3 but also really broken since you could use it to skip harder sections. I still used it for that in the other games but the forced forward movement and slower movement up and down made it only useful in very specific sections. And then the fact that hitting any solid object made Rush warp out and drop you to your death wasn't very helpful either.

...and then in 7 Rush can get hit and then warp out too.

Personally I kinda liked MM6's Jet Mega Man form over Rush Jet from the other games outside 3. And then there's the Super Adapter in 7 which was a bit nerfed flight wise but still pretty useful.

I mean Rush Coil was definitely useful as it allowed you to reach higher places.  Also Item 1, Balloon, and Wire were also very useful in their respective games.  But there were never any long sections where you could really use Rush Jet (except for maybe Gyro Man, Dark Man 3, and Cossack 1)

It's utility was fine, it was just vastly underutilized in stage design.  Which considering you don't start with Rush Jet, makes sense, as parts of stages would be unbeatable.  Like most games that used master weapons which had more utilitarian secondary attributes, they could have (and did in some cases) make parts of stages easier/faster if you had Rush Jet.  Then in the post master stages, have areas which you HAD to have Rush Jet to get through.  This was actually done in several games, but the degree to which it succeeded is debatable.

I like Rush Jet, as well as Rush Coil, as both are still useful expansions of Mega Man's move set, even if they're not particularly well used most of the time in the games.  I prefer them to the adapter armors myself because they feel like more of an accessory rather than power up.  The other iterations of Rush such as the Rush Marine (great idea, horribly underused to the point of irrelevance) and all the Mega Man 8 "summons" were just "here's Rush he's helping" and never really gave you anything close to the utility of Jet and Coil.

Other non-Rush accessories such as balloon, wire, item-1, 2, and 3, etc all had some good uses, but many were just basically the same utility Jet or Coil provided, and the others just as underutilized or pointless as Marine, but lacked the iconic Rush style.

I'd have loved to see things like Wire used more in stage design, but with the limited number of stages, and it being a hidden power up, it's understandable why they didn't.  Although at that point, why even include it?  That's the problem with a lot of the utility items in the series.  The stage design just wasn't done with them in mind 80% of the time.