r&f_no_damage

ROCKMAN & FORTE NO DAMAGE

This is my ninth challenge of the Classic Mega Man series to beat each game damageless & deathless. Mega Man 1, 2 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 & 9 have been completed without taking damage. Check out YT playlist of past successful runs on YT (Pastebin blocks links, it's https :// youtube . com / cleartonic)

RULES:
- No damage of any kind
- No deaths
- Single segment, no longer than 15 minutes of break
- No zips or glitches - Rockman & Forte has a lot of potential for both zips and glitches. Ice Wall is infamously used for zipping through walls and allowing Rockman to skip rooms through doors. Lightning Bolt can be used to execute a 1 frame jump out of a pause. These are disallowed
- Some techniques are still allowed, like being able to cancel a Lightning Bolt with the pause menu. This feels more like a mechanic nuance than it does a trick or glitch
- Shopping is allowed, but Beat is not allowed. Beat can be bought from the shop later in the game. Beat functions like a shield that automatically drains weapon energy, then drains more weapon energy if Rockman is actively taking an attack. I decided to not allow it because of just how cheap/degenerate the strategy could wind up being with it, since you could sit still and farm enemies for weapon energy, then simply walk through enemies for most of the game. I think it's reasonable to use it if someone wanted to, I just decided against it.

ROUTE:
Rockman & Forte is just a tough game overall. There are a lot of enemies, and some of them are placed in difficult places to deal with. Further, compared to a speedrun, there are a decent number of fights that are added in because of no zips, including the Dynamo Man miniboss and the King fight in King 2 Part 3. And because we can't take any damage, we can't use Counter Attacker to deal extra damage while in critical health, so every fight takes longer. However, the weapons in this game are quite good and there's a lot of interesting utility you still get out of all of them.

The Robot Master stages are tackled mostly in speedrun order. Cold Man is an obvious start, then it follows a zipless route to the end. Out of the Robot Masters, Pirate Man's fight is tricky and Dynamo Man's fight is the hardest, and the rest are reasonable. The final stretch of the game is definitely the hard part, between the 3 Castle stages forcing the player to conserve weapon energy the whole time, the numerous bosses and the difficulty of regular enemies