What Makes it a Mega Man?

Rockman Day Wallpaper showing most incarnations of the series.

Pardon me for the abstract thinking of today's post, but after seeing the latest wallpaper released by Capcom on the fan holiday of Rockman Day (June 9th, see this post by Protodude), I got to thinking about this series in its roots, and in its saturation. 

In a recent presentation, series creator, and former Capcom Keiji Inafune, stated that Capcom had a policy in place setup to reject new Intellectual Properties.  Here's a snippet from Joystiq:

In one anecdote, former Capcom exec Keiji Inafune illustrates how he got so high up in the company and the kind of behavior that likely led to his hasty exit. During a presentation at Kyoto's Ritsumeikan University, the Neptunia Mk-II weapon dished on the corporate culture at Capcom, and how he gamed it to get Lost Planet and Dead Rising made.

Before those games, he said, Capcom had a rule requiring 70-80 percent of the games produced at the company to be sequels, and the management rejected pitches for new titles even beyond that proportion. Inafune started up two new projects, Lost Planet and Dead Rising, and just kept them going even after the prototypes were rejected.  Source Joystiq

Keeping that in mind and seeing all the incarnations of Mega Man as he is today, one has to ask themselves how many of these games would even exists if they did not bare the Mega Man label?  Beyond profit motivations, and references to past games, what ties these games to the Mega Man property?

Classic Mega Man

We'll ignore the main series for now of the 10 classic series games.  Of the franchise, these are quite clearly the most relevant to the Mega Man series. Each game has you playing as Mega Man in 2D-side scrolling environments, of which you choose the order in which you conquer, and hands you a vast array of weaponry after defeating the stage boss - weapons which you can use against other bosses in a weakness chain.  These features are very distinct to the Mega Man franchise - or are they?

We get some minute changes in the X series.  X arrives as the new protagonist, wall kicking and dashing are new game mechanics introduced, and new power-ups arrive in the form of armor upgrades.  This series feels like the classic series, and the formula is mostly unchanged.  Pick your boss, take their weapon, and use it on the next boss.  While the cast is different, the core of the game is the same.

After this series though, things get more complicated.  Legends would come out next, and was much more loosely tied to the original blue bomber.  Our protagonist here, Mega Man Volnutt, merely shares his name coincidentally with the franchise starter, as does his foster sister, Roll, share her name with the Roll from the classic series.  No solid ties are made to our original cast of mad scientists and out of control robots, and the gameplay is vastly different as well.  Volnutt explores 3D dig sites (underground temples of past society) in a linear order, while looking for parts to build sidearms (of which he is only allowed to carry one at a time) and fights giant robots, which take a pretty baseline amount of damage from just about everything.

Legends really has little to do with the Mega Man franchise in terms of gameplay, but the action roots are still strong with in it, and for what it's worth, if you didn't know the franchise all that well, Volnutt looks as much like Mega Man as any Mega Man character does, albeit a bit older.  If the character design was changed though, the names changed, the art different, did it still need to be a Mega Man game?

Even one of Capcom's community managers Greg Moore (GregaMan), an intermediate between the Japanese and American Capcom communities, brought up this topic.

Topic: Mega Man Legends dispensed with many of the conventions, characters, and basic elements of previous Mega Man games and gave birth to myriad new ones; So, does it really even need to be a "Mega Man" game? What do you suppose the Mega Man license contributes to this series? Would it have been the same game if instead of Mega Man and Roll, it had been "Adventurer X" and "Random Mechanic Girl Y"?   Source:  Capcom-Unity

The Zero and ZX series follow.  The gameplay is closer related to the original series with the 2D action platforming, but the actual Mega Man character is sidelined for new protagonists, and in ZXA almost entirely absent.  Bear in mind I'm talking about X here instead of classic Mega Man, who makes no appearance in the series.  While there are changes to the basic formula for gameplay; more open world exploration, selecting weapons in styles instead of straight up weapons - the feel is definitely more Mega Man than Legends.

In Battle Network, the formula is completely different.  The setting is less action oriented, more strategic, and heavy in story of unrelated characters.  Everything is a reference to the original games to some degree, but this game, as much as Legends, could easily have been a brand new IP.  Finding and collecting battle chips, fighting bosses on a grid, strictly linear gameplay, these elements are quite different from the series roots.  The games did try to hark back a bit with the introduction of Double-Soul and Soul-Crosses, a method of allowing MegaMan.exe to copy the powers of his friends and foes, but the majority of the game was very different, and the audiences don't necessarily overlap between these styles of games.

MegaMan.exe definitely looks like Mega Man though, and is instantly recognizable as the character to those who have only played the original classics.  When we get to Star Force however, the similarities start ending.  In short, Star Force has nothing to do with the roots of the series except for the names.  Geo Stelar is an 11 year old human child fighting aliens from space, he's not even a robot!  Star Force takes its roots more from comic book heroes than Mega Man.  The gameplay breaks even from Battle Network, and there are very few characters who could arguably be drawn from inspirations of past games.

Geo Stelar and Omega-Xis from Mega Man Star Force

Don't get me wrong, none of these are necessarily bad games.  I loved Star Force, but it demonstrates a problem when a company will not push a title unless it has an established brand slapped on it.  I'm not one to argue that all sequels are bad, but refusing to push forward innovation stagnates the classic series as they're raided for tie-ins to the new games, and great games like Dead Rising or Lost Planet almost didn't make it because of corporate thinking by Capcom.  That's not even taking into account the hundreds of one-offs like Mega Man Soccer, Mega Man Battle and Chase, or the cell phone games.  It's certainly hurt Mega Man as a franchise to have these loosely connected titles, which one only needs to see the decline of popularity of the Star Force series as proof.

In this regard, Mega Man needs some time to be shelved, allowing fans to get pumped for the next incarnation as the developers work tirelessly to perfect it.  Examine all the hype around a new Final Fantasy, Legend of Zelda or Mario game.  The major titles in these series are released generally a few years apart, and when they're announced, the hype is huge.  Mega Man is a classic gaming icon, and I think he deserves this treatment as well.

With regards to new properties in the Mega Man franchise, they have to go to the roots.  Legends 3 is starting to shape up to be pretty good looking (despite my earlier fears), but I'd like to see a push towards taking this game more to its Classic roots than Legends roots.  Simple things like allowing Volnutt to change between all his weapons, acquiring weapons from bosses, allowing a big choice of stages to pick from.  Heck, even just changing Volnutt's armor color with his weapons would be a nice throwback.  These things would be a way to push towards formulas that have worked, while adding in the Legends exploration and RPGish elements to keep it all fresh.  What Mega Man doesn't need, is another host of new redesigns that could easily go into making brand new series.