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?

The Mega Man Fan Film

I figured what better way to start off the new year on my blog with a review, and this time I've finally gotten around to watching the Mega Man Fan Film by Eddie Lebron. Is it everything we could have hoped for in a Mega Man Movie or nothing more than a glorified Live Action Fan Fic? Well don't just take my opinion below, see it for yourself on Screwattack!

Plot Synopsis
The story of Mega Man is far from a complex tale, after all it fit into about a paragraph or so in the original game's instruction manual. Dr. Thomas Light, genius in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence, constructs 8 new powerfully advanced robots with the assistance of his long time confidant and lab technician, Dr. Wily. After introducing his robots to the world, and being adored by the media, Dr. Light decides the next robot he'd like to create without Dr. Wily's assistance, due to a complication relating to their first prototype. This of course infuriates Dr. Wily, who hatches a nefarious plot for revenge and world domination!

The new Robot turns out to be Rock, programed and designed to be the most human like in both body and mind of all Dr. Light's robots. After only a day of being built, Rock goes through a mid life crisis, unable to find purpose with his existence. This goes on FOREVER until Dr. Wily finally kidnaps Dr. Light's robots and sends them loose on the city.

Knowing he is the only one who can stop Dr. Wily, Rock convinces Dr. Light to upgrade him into a super fighting robot, now known as Mega Man. Mega Man initially struggles to defeat each robot master but then is aided by the mysterious prototype robot who had fled from Dr. Light's lab. This robot, Blues, through a mistake in his core design, somehow managed to have free will, and for now, has decided to aid Mega Man in his quest against Dr. Wily.

Eventually Mega Man defeats all of Dr. Wily's robot masters, but is then trounced by Wily's war machine, The Yellow Devil. Blues destroys the monster and takes Mega Man back to Dr. Light where, broken and battered, he tries to recover.

Meanwhile, Dr. Wily has stolen Mega Man's schematics, and sent in a Copy Machine to kidnap Roll to use as a hostage. Roll is easily deceived by the Copy Machine and captured just as Mega Man recovers. Dr. Wily threatens to kill Roll if Mega Man doesn't come and surrender at his floating skull fortress of doom! Mega Man eventually beats the Copy Machine, defeats Wily, and saves Roll. Dr. Wily surrenders and begs Mega Man to not hurt him just as the police arrive.

Mega Man and Roll are then seen looking at the city from a park bench, with Mega Man stating that he now feels fulfilled. The two then spot Blues from a distance as they are leaving, while Mega Man gives an approving nod.

Critique
From the off-set this movie has many things going against it. First, being an independent film, it has some horrendous acting in it! Truly the most robotic performance here is that of Dr. Light. Edward X. Young has a great voice, but is so deadpan and emotionless that his character is so hard to care about. Most of the acting is stiff as it is, with Mega Man and Roll being particularly bad as well.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, Dr. Wily gives a hilarious, if a bit hammy, performance that I think single-handedly saves the film! It's insane, it's over dramatic, but damn if I couldn't wait to see what the guy would say next!

The second problem with the film is that it is based on a franchise of which the auteur is, if anything, fellating, rather than adding to. There is a lot of tongue n' cheek references, humor, and camp added to this movie that not only feels unnecessary, but I think ultimately hurts the film. Much of the film has representations of Mega Man using his 8-bit sprite, and there is a particularly groan inducing sight gag (which you would only get if you had played the games) where Dr. Light suggests tracking the robots using the select screen from the first game. Of course this never comes up again, so it only serves as a pointless reference.

The robot masters themselves are also ripped straight out of Mega Man Powered Up, exhibiting the exact same personality traits, such as Ice Man's split personality, and Fire Man's BURNING JUSTICE! The characterization here though isn't done for the purposes of the story, but to nod and wink to all those fans that "got it."

That said, I love the direction they went with Proto Man, and the orchestral remix that was done with his theme is a huge highlight to the film. It really fits the mood, and Proto Man's dilemma between death and free will easily makes him the most interesting of all the characters. If the cast was as interesting as Proto Man, this could have been a much better film.

Next, working on a low budget means cruddy special effects, and bad fight choreography. While there isn't a lot an independent director can do about some of this stuff, the cheese factor is off the charts with the badly rendered 3D models of some of the robot masters. Perhaps if all the robot masters were 3D rendered, this wouldn't have looked as bad, but Mega Man vs. Guts Man for example, looks just so silly.

On top of this, the fights are extremely quick, incredibly anti-climatic, and lack creativity in the weapon usage. I grant the games don't give much wiggle room in say doing something like, using the Rolling Cutter to cut a tree down so it falls on somebody for instance, but this movie had every opportunity to keep the fights from being "Mega Man blasts robot, robot blasts Mega Man." Unfortunately for the majority of the fights, they decided the back and forth shooting was the route to go.

There was one really good use of the special effects, and that would be Ice Man's surfing freeze move, which was done quick and not focused on heavily enough to detract from the effect. Good movies disguise their faults, but this one seems to take no issue with it.

Finally there's the writing. There's a story in here about the humanity of man and what it really means to be alive... except it's really hamfisted in here and painfully delivered. So blatant are the characters emotions, the dialogue may as well be "Beep boop, I am sad." "Boop Beep, I am sad too."

There's a lot of milling around in this movie, especially at the beginning as the director tries to establish these characters for the audience, and they really eat up a portion of the movie. The characterization doesn't come off very well, as the cast redundantly goes over the same issues, from the same perspective, the same way. Scenes not dedicated to Mega Man's post-activation depression feel like the characters are quizzing each other on plot holes. A typical scene plays out like this:

Mega Man: Dr. Light! Why doesn't Dr. Wily do this?
Dr. Light: Oh Mega Man! Because of this technology thingie!
Mega Man: Well how bout I do this?
Dr. Light: Sorry Mega, you're stuck with this other technology babble thing!

By contrast, the actions sequences are incredibly brief, as if the director was feeling the need to rush through them to get back to the character scenes.

At the end of the day, this movie doesn't stand on it's own legs. It's made for Mega Man fans, and that's it. So absorbed is this movie in it's own franchise that it's really impossible to enjoy knowing nothing about Mega Man. Take that away and you've got a badly acted drama about robots with some fight scenes glossed over. The movie celebrates the franchise but brings nothing to it. This movie isn't going to bring new fans to the table, or bring back fans of the classics. While it's not the worst movie I've ever seen, at best, the enjoyment of the film comes at it's own expense (in the so bad it's good way) and at worst, it's a hero-worship title without any ambition to do the series any favors. Maybe worth watching if you're insatiability curios, but you won't miss anything by skipping it either.

Mega Man Turns 23!

It's December 17th, and 23 years ago today, a buggy, quirky, and excruciatingly hard game came out that started a franchise so overwhelmingly popular, that now even Capcom doesn't know how many damn games there are.

This year was pretty good for Mega Man. Mega Man 10 and Zero Collection came out, and Mega Man Universe, Mega Man Legends 3, and Rockman Online were all announced. This will be the first anniversary without Keiji Inafune, but his company is starting up, and I don't think the franchise is in any trouble without him either.

As for me, well I'm looking to establish some free time before I start another series of reviews. Believe it or not, working in the game industry is a REAL time sink. Sitting on my plate is Rockman.exe Beast, and the Mega Man movie, but there's no way I'm getting to any of that till next year.

Alright, I'm Excited

While I'm having nagging doubts and worrisome thoughts about Legends 3, and I've yet to see anything from Universe that looks to satiate me, I gotta say, I'm god damned excited about Rockman Online.

I'm glad to see some company actually put some effort into the Mega Man Franchise. Inafune basically admitted he was sick of working at Capcom, Capcom themselves have half-assed the series for quite a while, and even when the good games do come out, they're usually just good instead of exceptional.

I ask you where is Mega Man's push to the next generation? It's starting in Korea.



Granted, it's another cutscene trailer, but it has a hell of a lot more imagination and effort in it then what we've seen in a long time. But hey, the game itself is shaping up pretty awesomely too! TOO BAD THERE'S NO PLANS FOR IT IN THE US YET! ARRG!

Even so, Capcom Unit, the official Capcom blog site, is hyped up for it, so who knows what the future may hold. Here's a hint though, the authors at Capcom Unity's pull around the company is JACK SHIT.

Didn't See That One Coming

Kotaku is reporting that Inafune is out. At this point that takes the Mega Man franchise out of his hands for good at the end of the month. I gotta say I'm a bit surprised that he's calling it quits just as the one game he's been pushing to get made for years and years finally gets green-lighted.

Although the creator is being removed from the project, this may be a good thing in the end. If any franchise needs new blood in it, it's this one. This could be a chance for a young gun developer to take hold of the franchise and breath some new life into it.

I had my misgivings about Legends 3 ever since it was announced for a hand held. While that doesn't necessarily mean it'll be bad, or even not amazing, it seemed to me that Capcom was playing it safe trying to be the big game at the system launch amid the sea of crap that always hits at release date. It was as if they didn't trust that it was going to do well enough on its own.

Furthermore, this co-development by the fans thing is looking like a huge gimmick to me. I've always hated the "design by committee" approach to just about everything, because you either get an incredibly bland product, or a completely directionless product.

I guess it's okay so far, with just a series of contests between the developers with fans voting on the best works, but the more interaction the fans get, the more chances we could end up with Portal references or just flat out weird fan-fictiony interactions between the characters, particularly Mega Man, Roll and Tron.

With Inafune washing his hands of the franchise, and the reasons above, we could be up for a rocky start in the new era of Mega Man games. Something different and awesome could come out of this after a while though. Games are only good when the creator has a hold of them right?

Legends 3 In Developement

So I gotta say, I'm incredibly disappointed Capcom is continuing this series on another hand-held. The 3DS to me, looks pretty much like a big gimmick in the making, with more games coming out that focus on the graphics than the gameplay. It also sounds like limiting yourself so much when you've got to design a game for this little tiny screen instead of something out there for the consoles. I find it so frustrating that the only damn Mega Man games that come out on the consoles are essentially Mega Man 2 remakes, while the franchise continues to advance slowly on the hand-helds.

That said, the announcement finally got me to look at the 3DS, and at least from the screenshots I've seen, it looks like we've got the power of a gamecube coming to our hands in the least, which should be more than enough for this game. Sure, I just complained about games based on graphics, but I'd at least like to see the game advance past the Playstation 1 days. I don't need to see the individual hairs on the monkey's ass here, but the 3DS should make Legends 3 a pretty game.

With all my complaints about the game being on a hand held, it's hard to watch Inafune come out like this and not get excited.



You can feel the enthusiasm in his voice. You can see the excitement in his eyes as he stumbles over his words. And you can see that the man has been humbled by an audience that has basically given him the mandate, support, and opportunity, to create this game that's been ten years in the making.

Right now I'm not worried that Legends 3 will be a bad game. Inafune looks to be really fired up over this. I mean, he decided to break the news over Youtube and through Capcom's website. This is a relatively big news story in the games industry. Capcom could have easily sold this story to a magazine like Nintendo Power, or a website like IGN or GameSpot, but I don't think he could have waited any longer to get out there and say, "Hey guys, it's finally happening!"

Legends isn't particularly one of my favorite series in the franchise, but it has always been a fun series to play through. Having never seen a 3DS in action, and seeing Inafune as fired up as he is, I think it's very possible that Inafune decided to release this game on the 3DS as soon as it was given the green light.

Let's keep in mind that the series was far from incredible though when it came out, so lets not hype the game out to its grave. If Inafune wants to make his Magum Opus here, he has to surpass everything he's done so far and pour it all into this. He's been green-lighted by the fans, and now finally Capcom itself is on board, so lets wish him luck, and hope Legends 3 will be the pinnacle of the entire Mega Man franchise.

The Universe is a Bit Calmer

As more details come out about Mega Man Universe, my fears are being eased, slowly. While I still think the trailer is incredibly disappointing to look at, just knowing that custom characters, levels, and the like are going to feature different styles of play has slightly picked my interests back up into the title.

I really hope Capcom pumps as much juice into this game as possible though, because they really have a chance to get lazy and rely on user generated content, which would be a huge mistake if you ask me. Aside from the fact that millions of fan made levels are pure shit (just try Little Big Planet, or even Mega Man Powered Up), they're usually limited to the tools the developers give us to play with.

I personally, also don't feel like making my own levels. I'm not looking at a set of Legos, I'm looking at playing a Mega Man game. So please Capcom, don't skimp out on the professional content here.

As more news for this game comes out, I have a feeling I'll personally be more pleased and interested in playing it. I really want to see some other Mega Man protagonists make the cut here, at the very least X. If Capcom is smart though, they're going to play this slow and make the fans anticipate whats coming next.