Mega Man's cultural impact has far outstripped its sales impact in the industry, which causes some confusion because we always assume the two are one and the same. There are a few other titles like this, such as Chrono Trigger (the SNES game sold about 200k in the US, never released in Europe, and I'm not sure any of the later rereleases even came close to breaking 1 million outside Japan). It's kinda weird to think that Cuphead, a quirky vintage animation game based on Treasure-style action games much more niche than Mega Man, has sold nearly 3 times as much as the highest selling MM ever.
I thought MM11 was an excellent really tightly designed experience, doing exactly what it needed to do without any superfluous fluff tacked on top. Even when ignoring the gear system (which I more or less did) I think it iterated on the classic formula just enough and in just the right ways. It's like it ignored everything about the post-8-bit sequels (sans the shop), systematically examined what made the original games really tick design wise, and then carefully decided on how to build on top of that in ways that feel more fundamentally meaningful.
One of my favorite things is how it still largely conforms to the screen being locked to scrolling on just one axis and basing the level design on that just like the NES games (something originally rooted in technical limitations but ends up being paramount to the game design), but there are a few select rooms that do scroll on both the X and Y axis, making those moments feel more calculated/distinguished and add some contrast to the pacing of the levels, almost like some sort of set piece. Just having multi-directional scrolling used indiscriminately simply because you can is something better left for the X series with its more fast paced acrobatic controls (something the 32-bit X games largely ignored, ironically)
