Mega Man 8 - Sword Man's Stage

Now for a bit of a weird stage... Sword Man's stage does something a fair bit different from most Mega Man stages... The focus for the first half of the stage is more about puzzles than anything else. Each of the first four robot master weapons are made use of to aide in a set of rooms to reach a switch to press. The weapon is not mandatory for some of them, but not all of them. After the four trial rooms comes a mini-boss that is extremely annoying when fought with just the buster, but is a complete joke when fought with Flash Bombs. The boss rarely moves so it gets hit over and over by the explosion, causing some pretty intense damage. The second half of the stage is more of what one would expect in a Mega Man game. Lots of dangerous platforming and action and so forth. In this case, there is plenty of lava around, eager to kill Mega Man, and plenty of enemies around eager to knock him into the lava. Thus, you have to tread carefully through these rooms to make it to the boss without ending up rather well done. Sword Man himself is a pretty quick fight. He only has a few moves, all of which are perfectly possible to see coming and avoid. Just memorize what he does and respond in kind and he should be done quite quickly even with just the buster. Enjoy!~