Mega Man’s flexibility is the series’ greatest strength and weakness
Mega Man has missed as much as it’s hit over the decades
Buried beneath his milquetoast but iconic international title, the secret to Mega Man’s success is right there in his original Japanese name—Rockman. Rock ’n’ roll is an alchemical formula that can be added to and subtracted from to create wild new expressions, a familiar base with replicable rules that naturally lend themselves to experimentation and embellishment.
Similarly, Rockman is a form, and his 30 years as a fixture in video game canon comes from formal elegance. The character and his attendant games offer an almost infinite opportunity for riffing on a central theme, for making small textural changes to create something outwardly similar but new. All Mega Man games are the same to the untrained ear, but Mega Man 2 wasn’t just the foundation for a cynical, abused video game cash crop. It was The Beatles’ “Love Me Do,” a catalyst for both a series that’s been fruitful on its own and a model for countless others ever since.
We keep playing Mega Man games for the same reason we keep buying rock records not called Rubber Soul: There’s always a new way to do it, even when that new thing is called something else. Since Keiji Inafune—illustrator of the original Mega Man who went on to become the series’ producer for more than two decades—departed Capcom in 2010, official Mega Man games have been restricted to archival releases. Meanwhile, other studios like Yacht Club, Batterystaple, and Inafune’s own Comcept have made games like Shovel Knight, 20XX, and Mighty No. 9 that are Mega Man games in all but name. After all, power-pop bands kept writing would-be Beatles songs for decades, and Paul McCartney started a fruitful solo career. (Mighty No. 9 is the Wings of the Mega Man universe.) Like the former Beatle, Mega Man has missed as much as it’s hit over the decades, with putrid spin-offs and erratic experiments sandwiched between canonized classics and modern successors.
Best: Mega Man X (1993)
By the end of 1993, Mega Man had already gone through its first arc of wild success and audience disinterest. The 1987 original directed by Akira Kitamura established the series’ formula. That first game was inspired, full of the emotive music, demanding action, and wide-eyed cartoon art that have remained signatures in all the series’ peaks. But it was also rough around the edges. It was Mega Man 2 and 3 that polished the formula while creating an impressionistic storytelling style that made Mega Man 2, in particular, a staple. Mega Man 4, 5, and 6 were released on the NES through 1993, a period that saw many developers turning to more powerful 16-bit machines. While still good, all three felt rote and partially hampered by some questionable additions. First was the needless lengthening of the game by the introduction of new villains (all of them just working for Dr. Wily), and then there’s the Mega Buster, a charged shot that gave Mega Man a stronger base weapon but resulted in an irritating whine dominating the game’s aural landscape. Kitamura’s formula had gone as far as it could at the time. Rather than simplifying it, though, Inafune embellished even more when transitioning the games to the Super NES and came away with the best in the series: Mega Man X.
Sequels tend to drown when weighed down by the belief that quality is born of quantity, but Mega Man X is the rare example where more of everything is ultimately a net positive. The simple, suggestive sprite art of the NES games is replaced by detailed, thickly colored characters like X, Mega Man’s descendant who can feel and think for himself. The implicit narrative evolves into an anime melodrama with surprisingly effective (if cliché) beats, like the long dead Dr. Light leaving hidden messages and combat upgrades for X or the sacrifice of Zero, X’s David Lee Rothbot-with-a-laser-sword role-model. The run, jump, and shoot action gains new texture thanks to added complexity, but where additions like a robot-dog helper and the Mega Buster diluted what worked in the NES games, Mega Man X’s growth made it more fun to play. Finding X’s long-lost armor, which granted skills like the ability to destroy walls with his head or dash forward, layered welcome new goals into the straightforward survival gauntlets his predecessor suffered through. Even simple moves like jumping against a wall to climb upward felt like magic, a staccato touch on top of the old Mega Man beat.
The art, the crushing rock music in stages like Central Highway—a story-centric tutorial stage rather than a robot master rush, another new wrinkle—and the world of sentient robots trying to overthrow mankind culminate in a game that feels like far more than the sum of its parts, and things people held dear about Mega Man 2 and 3 were sacrificed in the process. Those games were paintings of an alien world that you have to dance through, and they could be profoundly moving, as Mega Man 2’s haunting tone poem of an ending proves. Mega Man X wove that world into a textural whole, a complete place with history and humanity. The earlier games had grace, but Mega Man X’s fullness elevates it even now. Unfortunately, its propensity for tinkering resulted in the series’ worst game 10 years later.
Worst: Mega Man X7 (2003)
After X carved a path for spin-offs and all kinds of experimentation, Capcom went nuts for the better part of a decade. The original Mega Man returned in a handful of bizarre sequels (more on those later), as well as digital board games, a text adventure, arcade fighting games, and even one of the worst soccer games ever made. Even more Mega Men messed with the original games’ structure. The superb Mega Man Legends dug deeper into lore and character customization by reimagining the hero as a spelunking treasure hunter thousands of years into the future of the series. Mega Man Battle Network stripped away the reflex-based action and adapted the rock-paper-scissors interplay between robot master abilities into a strategic card game, something 2002’s Mega Man Zero tried to reintegrate into a side-scrolling action game to limited success. (Rather than a deck of computer chip cards, Zero collected Cyber-elves, an attempt to infuse a Pokémon-style patina into the Mega Man blueprint.) Meanwhile, Capcom continued to produce Mega Man X games, to increasingly poor results, the nadir of which was Mega Man X7.