The game follows the adventures of the protagonist Mega Man as he must defend the Earth from a group of powerful robots from outer space called the Stardroids.

Mega Man V is an action platformer in which the player selects stages in a non-linear fashion and acquires the weapon of each boss defeated to use as their own.

[4] The game opens in an unspecified year in the 21st century ("20XX AD"), several months after the events of Mega Man IV and another failure by the infamous Dr. Wily to conquer the world.

Mega Man and his sister Roll are strolling through a grassy field, when they are confronted by a mysterious robot who calls himself Terra.

In the base, Mega Man has rematches with four foes from his previous adventures (Enker, Quint, Punk, and Ballade) as well as all of the Stardroids (minus Terra).

Charging up and releasing the firing button causes Mega Man's arm to detach, strike an enemy, and then reattach.

[9][10] Destroying the boss at the end of each stage adds its special weapon to Mega Man's arsenal for the rest of the game.

These bosses are known in game as "Mercury", "Venus", "Mars", "Jupiter", "Saturn", "Uranus", "Neptune", and "Pluto", named after the first, second, fourth, and fifth through eighth planets in our Solar System.

Defeating some bosses will allow the player to access Mega Man's robot dog Rush, who can transform into useful "Coil" and "Jet" modes for easier stage navigation.

Like the bird Beat from previous installments in the series, Tango will appear on the screen when summoned to attack enemies, transforming into a buzzsaw and ricocheting around the room.

[10][11] As in Mega Man IV, the player can return to Dr. Light between stages to purchase items using "Power Chips (P-Chips)" scattered throughout the game.

[11][12][13] Mega Man V instead features entirely original enemy characters with the Stardroids, who are all named after the planets in the Solar System: Neptune, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Pluto, Uranus, Jupiter, Saturn and Terra (Earth).

According to Mega Man series artist Keiji Inafune, the fifth installment took the longest time to develop of all five of these titles.

[2] Inafune, who always enjoyed working on animal support characters, was especially pleased to design Tango due to the artist's personal fondness for cats.

[26] On July 18, 2013, it was confirmed that Mega Man V is planned for release on the 3DS Virtual Console;[27] it came out November 6, 2013 in Japan, on May 22, 2014 in North America.