I love that you included the "jump through gate" thing from Mega Man. No Mega Man game is complete without "jump through gate" thing. Even a number of Mega Man games forget to include it for some reason.
I was pleasantly surprised to see you move the HUD to the top of the screen when the player is close to the bottom of the screen! Very nice attention to detail. Also retrying a boss after dying will automatically skip the cutscene! I appreciate that! :)
Also, it feels like the player runs faster than in the original Game Boy Mega Man games. That's one of the biggest problems with those games is that Mega Man runs at a minimally briskest of light jogs and Merc Boy runs at a nice pace. It never felt like I was going too slow or too fast :)
I love that the basic pirate grunts, like, fall over lol I almost feel bad for them! ...Almost!
The generous checkpoints made the game more palatable to modern standards, especially for the purpose of a game jam.
The music by Forte is also very good! It has that Game Boy Mega Man feel. :)