My Mega Man Universe

For all we know, Mega Man Universe could still turn up awesome. It's a possibility anyway, but I can't say my hopes are up for the moment. Right now we know the biggest draw Capcom is pushing for this game is the ability to play as other characters, with enough footage of three different re-skinned Mega Mans, all sharing the same moves and abilities. But we've also got to assume some characters will play different at least, being as touted as Ryu is in all over the trailers. If we ignore the characters who are simply reskins, we could be possibly sitting on something here.

I'd like to share with you for a moment my vision of Mega Man Universe. You turn on the game and are presented with a few scenarios at the screen select. Story Mode, Custom Mode, Challenge Mode, and maybe a few others after some thought put into it.

I'll get to the others in a minute, but for now, lets go with custom mode. A character selection screen pops up, but instead of being robot masters, this time it's for characters the player can choose. In it exists a huge cast of Mega Man characters spanning nearly 25 years of games. We can choose a character, and then we're given the option to choose a game. One of the games from over the years, of any of the series.

Well it'd be ludicrous to have Capcom to recreate each game with new characters and jam pack it all into this game, so instead, this mode choose from some of the best moments of a given series. We set ourselves to a randomly assigned game and suddenly we end up with something like this...
Or how about we fiddle with the options a bit more, and get something like this?
Suddenly we've opened up a whole new world of possibilities! How would you like to relive some of the best Mega Man moments, with the character cards shuffled a bit? Wouldn't be awesome to go back to say... X5, and for the X versus Zero showdown, instead we're playing as say... Bass?

How about running a digger scenario from Legends with Geo and Sonia? Let's get real ridiculous and face the final boss of Zero 4 with a servbot! How about taking 8-bit classic Mega Man, and putting him in his level 7 and 8 games? How about we can walk into this thing, and have it randomly choose the characters and setup for us, so we can be surprised by the constant different gameplay.
Why stop there even? Why not celebrate all of Capcom with us? Have Dante show up in Mega Man Star Force, play as the bionic commando Mega Man 2, and since Frank West already has the X-Buster, why not let us play a level of Dead Rising as X?

Going through story mode should be something akin to the story mode of Super Smash Brothers Brawl. A big, nonsensical epic tale of Dr. Wily working with Sigma and Dr. Wiel to really screw up the space time continuum. All of our Mega characters work together, and the player unlocks new characters as we go along!

Challenge mode sets us up in preplanned unusual scenarios, like using Tron's Gustav to beat up Chill Penguin or something, or buster dueling Mega Man Juno with Mega Man classic. Completing these, and in fact, completing a large list of scenarios, unlocks more characters, more levels, and more modes.

Imagine a Wario-Ware style mode, where the player quickly shuffles through random setups and goals. I really see potential in celebrating the blue bomber this way, and I think going this route would encourage new fans to seek out some of the other games! Mega Man Powered Up proved to me that Mega Man can be fun as hell with new characters, so lets see Mega Man Universe really push the envelope with this, instead of being another rehashed Mega Man 2!