Of course the recharge timer is still there so you can still retrieve cards by strafing and avoiding attacks, but it just makes the battle last longer than is desired. The game itself, though on a Nintendo DS, feels like it was designed for the Gameboy Advance. The game totally forgoes the “stylus and a virtual mini-keyboard” when writing an e-mail or writing any other text in-game. Instead, it forces you to d-pad your way through the alphabet to find the right character. This makes every e-mail sent (or writing up secret Cipher mails) annoying and lengthy.

To customize the card collection or a player deck, using the stylus to move them around and select them could have been fantastic. Instead, you are forced to scroll through all the cards in sequence and d-pad around the options. Though it scrolls quickly, going from card #1 to card #150 is protracted and inane when the stylus is sitting in your hand - unused during these times of micromanagement. Tipping the balance, the in-game character cannot be moved around with a stylus. This shouldn’t be an issue normally, but the game’s finicky movement makes you wish you could just drag the character across the map with a pen instead. In fact, just crossing the street can be troublesome.

You only get to use the DS’s stylus for some menu commands/selections and two mini-games: a bull-riding game and a rocket hunting game. Both these mini-games are quite lame.

Honestly, the design of the game is baffling. This version of Mega Man was designed specifically for the Nintendo DS, not the PSP or Gameboy Advance. The game even has three different versions to help sell it. Yet the designers ignore the strengths of the DS, and the only true stylus-based functions feel “tacked on”. Though the game’s visuals and sound effects are pretty good (the music is awful though), this isn’t enough to drag the game out of the mud. There are a lot of cool and nifty ideas here, but in the end it’s just too tedious to recommend.