There is that, and I also felt like the boss fights went a bit too "throw everything and the kitchen sink at the player" with their approach. This felt like trying to find justifiable uses for the Met helmet mechanic, as some boss attack patterns could be blocked but... I just decicded to dodge 99% of the time instead. If you can dodge, why block? You could block only so many times before you'd be out of guard meter. The only place where I felt like I was consciously using the Met helmet (outside of designated puzzles) was the knight boss fight during Wilet stages, and even then, only for the bow knight.
I was hoping for the game to lean more into its "main" gimmick, but as it is, it's just a few changes away from being a traditional Mega Man title. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but kind of a waste of a potentially cool mechanic. Charge buster being as good as it was not helping matters. I didn't even touch the special weapons.
Both fair comments; we decided to design the game around the shield not being forced, like eg. using too many bullet hell attacks. I imagine it also varies between players, and how well they can dodge.
But yeah, in a world where we would be making a MMt2, the shielding mechanic (player and bosses) would be the first order of business.
I went back and played around with some of the boss fights, and about 80% of the attacks used by bosses do not engage with the blocking mechanic at all. Doesn't help you in Magnet Met or Tornado Met's boss fights, the only thing you can really do is dodge.
Also it seems like most of the shield-focused mechanics were saved for the Wilet stages, which... one of them is just 3 reflecting light lazer puzzles which are always lame.
Yeah, I felt the reflectable laser puzzles kind of broke the pacing of that one level. Of course, that's the sort of issue you can potentially run into if you do dedicated puzzles to get something out of a mechanic.
Also, can I just say, I wish you'd be able to turn off the sound effect for your guard meter recharging. It's distractingly loud (as are many other sound effects, like the ice storm in Ice Met's stage, I turned sound effects down to 20% because of that).