In exchange for missing last Wednesday's update, I plan on doing a week or so of more personal, important entries. Well, I actually had one of them set up for next Friday specifically anyway, and I wanted to do a big one last Wednesday and now just had to move it up a week, but when the cosmos thinks its onto something, I might as well indulge it. My review will be fairly simple this week still, though.
For now, though, it's time to discuss one of my favorite heroes in the video game world, at least among the actual characters, as opposed to the designers. This is a hero that caught my attention and held it for years. Hell, this is a hero that almost made me appreciate the greats like Mario less simply because there was someone else to root for. That never happens to me. I live in Chicago, home of two baseball teams that hate each other, or at least their fans do. I smirk when one team does well and the other team's fans are compelled to root against them, even hoping one of their own home teams fail as a result. But this hero, this series, this very concept makes me care.
This hero is Megaman.
And yes, as a result, the final roster for Smash Brothers Brawl really has depressed me, thank you very much.
I first learned of Megaman from my babysitter in grade school. To clarify, I was in grade school, the babysitter was not. That would be criminal. Anyway, he had an NES, and often we would play video games on it or, much more likely, watch him play it. (Sense a pattern here?) Once, he showed me Megaman 2, starting rather inscrutably with the game's final levels. With time, though, I saw them all, and I understood the connection between the levels and the bosses, the bosses and the powers they provided.
For those who haven't played the games, a brief description could be necessary. Megaman is a series of games about a humanoid robot. This man (or boy, as he tends to more resemble in later sources despite his name and the vague 8-bit graphics,) has to take down a typical mad scientist by the name of Dr. Wily. To start this mission, he has access to 8 (6, in the first game,) levels that are nonlinear; that is, he can explore them in any order. Each has a boss, as video game levels are wont to do, and each boss had a naming schema of a noun or adjective descriptor plus man. For example, enemies in the game series include Fireman, Quickman, and Magnetman. The level usually matched the boss's theme, as did the boss's attack. Best of all, after defeating a boss, Megaman earned one of its attacks, or a variant thereof, and this weapon was especially effective on at least one of the other bosses. Only after defeating all of the original bosses (dubbed Robot Masters in the series,) can Megaman go into the series of final levels, which tended to take place in Dr. Wily's fortress or that of an ally or patsy of his.
There was a lot to like about the games. There were the technical achievements the series managed, despite the limited prowess of the original NES. The music was astoundingly catching; I could still remember the music for every Robot Master's level years later, though admittedly buying the soundtracks helped. The graphics were crisp and well-animated, with some of the later games getting into multi-layer backgrounds and other tricks the NES seemed incapable of. The gameplay was usually challenging yet fair, requiring some memorization but mostly quick reflexes and pattern recognition skills. Every level, as a result of the boss theme elements, was by necessity unique from all the others. Given that games of this generation sometimes produces sewer and caves for a good third of the game, that remains remarkable to me. The boss fights, while often unbalanced by the power level of the attacks, were ultimately designed to be simple one-on-one duels. Both sides had no real allies and an identical, visible life bar. It felt less like a three-hit-wonder behemoth and more like an actual duel among equals. Small wonder that, a few years later, the same company would make Street Fighter 2 and turn fighting games into a phenomenon.
But I'll tell you the first reason for my love of the series; it was pure, distilled inspiration for designers. Like any hopeful designer, as a child, I thought about ways to do sequels for games that already existed. They were for the most part terrible. Every Mario game was little but an amalgam of earlier ideas. Who could blame me? The Mario games are famous for their innovations; the fantastic leaps of logic and rejection of gameplay assumptions that help make the series one of the primary drivers of the entire business. Megaman, on the other hand, was a perfect template. Toss a word in front of "man," and imagine the possibilities! There were billions of worlds to play with, ideas to ponder at all times, inspiration in every direction.
In some ways, this could practically be dubbed a weakness of the series. After all, almost every great series is known both for the individual stories and for the ongoing arc, the development of the heroes and its ongoing changes. Megaman, at least if you focus on the original model, barely changes at all throughout the series, save for some consistent new powers. Granted, the later spinoffs, like X, Legends, and Zero filled out the series' future in a way that created a much more elaborate, viable story arc, but individual games changed the plot little, especially for the original series that remains my favorite. Now, this is reasonably common in other artistic mediums. The most long-lasted scripted series of our times are things like CSI and Law and Order, which are notorious for focusing on a very strict focus on episode arcs and limited changes among the characters and overarching plot. But I never liked those shows; I prefer dramas that feature extended growth and changes, like Lost, Heroes, and Buffy.
It's the hardest thing about the Megaman mythos for me to explain, but let me give it a try. I already explained how easy the series was for designer fodder. I made plenty of complete games using the series' format; I even plan on devoting an "Ideas" blog to them some day. Maybe the simple story combined with the ease of design to imprint on me the idea to take the simple idea, and make it more so. For example, the earliest of my Megaman ideas copied the concept precisely. The later ones, though, actually started to implement a plot. It went from a simple rise to a new villain other than Wily to the final classic game, which ended with the destruction of the planet, the realization and discovery of Wily's real ambitions, and a climax to the entire series, putting things to a definite end. It wasn't a very good end, but 20 years later, you still haven't seen Capcom do any better, have you?
So what I'm saying is that Megaman not only was one of my first and most tenacious inspirations to be a designer, it made me want to become a better one. After all, the world of Megaman enchanted me; I had to try to improve on them! It's the rules! That I made up.
Sadly, that's still as far as I went on this series. I moved on from making sequels of others' ideas to making my own; another advancement I can thank Megaman personally for. But the best ideas not only were salvaged for the new games, some of them served as the starting archetypes for entire games themselves. So, that little part of Megaman will always be with my designs, and thus always with me. But, in a perfect world, I would still jump at the chance to make my own Megaman game or level. Though seeing the little Blue Bomber in a Smash Brothers would be nice too.
That does bring up the single thing that most annoys me about the character, though. The nickname Blue Bomber is an awful nickname for Megaman. He. Doesn't. Use. Bombs! At least not regularly. Blue Blaster or something would be so much more appropriate.
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