Sentences written about this title, gathered by type from the Japanese and English Wikipedia articles (as of 2026-8-30).
Inafune recalled the final two months of development as particularly turbulent, when he had to take responsibility for assessing and dividing up tasks among the team members who were not meeting deadlines.
Inafune concluded, "I knew that if we had more time to polish it, we could do a lot of things better, make it a better game, but the company said that we needed to release it.
Harumi Fujita, credited as "Mrs. Tarumi", was the initial composer of the game, but she only completed a few songs before giving birth and having to drop off the project.
Thomas of IGN, Christian Nutt and Justin Speer of GameSpot, Hartley, Patricia, and Kirk Lesser ("The Lessers") of Dragon, Dan Whitehead of Eurogamer, Edward J.
Nutt and Speer summarized Mega Man 3 as a "top-notch game" and Capcom's "pinnacle of NES effort".
GamePro contributor McKinley Noble comically stated that actions such as "pulling teeth, lifting a car over your head or performing open-heart surgery" are all significantly easier than beating Mega Man 3.
EGM listed Mega Man 3 as "The Best Sequel to an Existing Game" in its 1991 Video Game Buyer's Guide.
The readers of Nintendo Power voted it the third-best game of 1990 in the magazine's "Nintendo Power Awards" for that year.
IGN included it at number 16 on its "Top 100 NES Games of All Time".
Unlike the first two installments of the series, artist and designer Keiji Inafune has considered the creation of Mega Man 3 to be very stressful due to time constraints and his own increased responsibilities during its development.
Capcom did this not only to be consistent with Rockman's English name, but because they thought that the name Blues made no sense.
Harumi Fujita, credited as "Mrs. Tarumi", was the initial composer of the game, but she only completed a few songs before giving birth and having to drop off the project.
Mega Man 3 has seen releases on many consoles and other devices since its 1990 debut on the NES.
It is the only Mega Man game in Nintendo's PlayChoice-10 arcade library.
In the "Cross Review" feature of the magazine Famitsu,the game scored a total of 23 out of 40. In the "Game Report Card" reader poll run by Family Computer Magazine,it scored 23.52 out of 30, as shown below.
Following the success of Mega Man 2 released two years earlier, Mega Man 3 has sold 1.08 million copies and has been positively received in critical reviews.
Proto Man's original Japanese name, Blues, was changed by Capcom's North American division despite Inafune's protests.
The publication listed Mega Man 3 as the 11th best NES video game in their 20th anniversary issue in 2008.
Proto Man's original Japanese name, Blues, was changed by Capcom's North American division despite Inafune's protests.
The NES edition of the game was also part of a North American compilation of ten titles in the series called Mega Man Anniversary Collection, which was released for the PlayStation 2 and GameCube in 2004, and the Xbox in 2005.
It is the third installment of the original Mega Man series and was originally released in Japan on September 28, 1990.
Its presentation and gameplay have been especially praised, although many sources found the game to be too difficult.
Its presentation and gameplay have been especially praised, although many sources found the game to be too difficult.
Inafune recalled the final two months of development as particularly turbulent, when he had to take responsibility for assessing and dividing up tasks among the team members who were not meeting deadlines.
The passages quoted on this page are taken verbatim from the Japanese and English Wikipedia articles.Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) — reusable under those terms. They are the work of the people who wrote them.