Unofficial Official Mega Man Thread

Look at X's new armor.

There are also other scans with show other challenge combos like Grizzly Slash with Slash Beast, Wheel Gator with Bubble Crab and Wire Sponge with Web Spider.

Wow that looks like that all X armor model kit from the 90s

Inafune's original plan for X in the Z-series was awful and would've killed the series. I'm kind of glad they didn't go with it.

As am I.

I mean, I get that Zero was supposed to be the original X (maybe that's why he's gets so much plot relevance in the original story), but that's no excuse to throw X under the bus like that.

Yeah, that'd just be a major disservice to X as a character. Instead he gets to have gone out on his own terms as a hero.

Fading away as a force ghost after being stabbed in the chest while he was defenseless because he was sealing a thing with his body because the big anti-Sigma thing led to a new war and we couldn't just launch it into space despite the proven capability to do just that

If you'd asked him I'm sure X would say that's exactly how he always wanted to die

His last words were basically, to paraphrase, "oh god just let me rest"

That may actually be sadder than X having become the villain, like some kind of character from a Batman film. Zero could have beat some sense into villain X

Can't do that for someone who has seen so much violence and lost so many friends that they basically welcome death

edited 23rd May '18 2:55:39 PM by Bocaj

I wonder if launching the Dark Elf into space would've even been a good idea considering all the secret death satellites humanity just LEFT up there.

Go on about making X evil ruining the series. I'm curious to hear the reasoning

I think it stems from X not only being the hero of the X series, but also Dr. Light's last creation and legacy, as well as making the X series seem even darker if that was where the character you played as ended up.

I think it might also be connected to Inafune's original plans for the X series, where Zero's design was X, and when X's design was made Zero became the second main character who gets all the cool scenes and focus.

But now the joke's on him because now that his name's been tainted after certain circumstances, Capcom or whoever's going to do Mega Man X9 (let's admit it, we all know it's coming) won't feel forced to focus on Zero and can let X be a badass.

Anyway, that new Armor X has?

There's more about it and X Challenge, courtesy of Famitsu.

edited 23rd May '18 4:47:57 PM by TargetmasterJoe

Finished Stream!

• I love that there's a character that's actually named Jackass, spelled out in English and everything. Plus he's actually kinda plot-relevant!
• While I did enjoy the two-parter where Megaman goes into the past overall once Shademan actually succeeds in changing the past and ushers in a post-apocalyptic future things get real messy since the show never bothers to fully lay out the time travel mechanics it's using. Are Lan and co. protected from the ripple effect due to their proximity to the Past Tunnel? I dunno, the post-apocalyptic future comes and goes by way too quickly and treated like too much of an afterthought for what should be a major, shocking turn of events.
• Huh, Dark has a line or two in the Dark Megaman episode that implies that he only obtained Shadowman recently, and all the times the Navi appeared in the earlier series' he was either under someone else's control or jut had no operator. Seems like a rather pointless change if so.
  • On the other hand, the animators finally stopped coloring his feet blue (even if it took them another episode to finally get it right)!
• The WWW members + Dex and Dingo stealing those Dimensional Converter trucks from Axess out of a museum to save the day and immediately pulling up to a gas station is my favorite visual joke in the anime so far.
• A lot I can talk about from episode 40, like holy cow, there's a freakin' space elevator all of a sudden! Sure, it's not portrayed in a manner that's scientifically accurate in the least and is never mentioned again after this episode, but still, it's a space elevator! Not even the more technologically-advanced Star Force setting was shown to have anything like that!
  • Also holy cow at Mayl one-shotting Desertman (just sucks the guy right down into a cyber-black hole)! Even Lan had to put in noticeably more effort to finally put down Flashman. Must be to make up for her getting shafted a few episodes prior in her fight with Asteroid Starman.
  • That they play the Alas, Poor Villain card with Rei and Sunayama when their Navis are finally destroyed for good makes me question why they barely got any screentime of their own. Sunayama had one episode to himself outside of his introduction, but Rei didn't have a single one.
• Even subtitled, the infamous Beach Episode is still complete "What the hell am I watching?" absurdist nonsense (and probably also the most perverse thing to come out of the franchise...). The "We're here for work." >presses single key on laptop< Running Gag and Mr. Famous gradually losing his mind were funny tho.
• I like how Asteroid Swordman robs "Bank", then "Mega Bank", then finally "Giga Bank". Would "Tera Bank" have been next?"
• I remember when the final episode originally aired we all had a good time making fun of Regal's bizarre transformation into some sort of snake monster. Fun times.
• So Bass officially got written out of the anime by deciding to transmit himself into space instead of just not showing up anymore, something I wasn't able to pick up on before. Had to be done though since if he'd gained enough power to delete Slur, no one else in the cast would've stood a prayer had he decided to go on a rampage.
• Hm, the Navis make their Humans Are Special speech at the end to Duo, but no wonder he still can't comprehend them since from what we've seen Slur mostly gave Asteroid Navis to criminals and others with loose morals. I remember the fandom speculating that she was deliberately sabotaging her master's trial, and while her Puny Earthlings attitude seems to support that theory the show never says anything on the matter one way or another.

Unlike all the other seasons this was actually the first time I've watched Stream in English since it wasn't fully subbed until last year. Did that raise my opinion of it any? Somewhat. Some of the one-shot episodes were more entertaining now that I understood the plots and jokes fully, and I did enjoy the deeper dive into more traditional sci-fi territory, but overall it remains a flawed series. I guess it was an inevitability given the Loads And Loads Of Characters, but the pacing should've been a lot tighter. Less inane Neo WWW schemes and banal Asteroid Navi Monsters of the Week, more focus on the Crest-holders becoming a team, and yes, Cross Fusion. I say that because of the idea of transhumanism that sorta crept in there towards the very end, and I would've like the idea of the writers exploring that angle more via Cross Fusion than just dipping a toe in the water like they did. Also, while I would've preferred the Neo WWW more if they had more schemes like the Dark Chip smuggling and satellite crashing instead of Narcy trying to flood an island with curry or Inukai making cars go feral, they did at least have some personality compared to Dark Megaman and Battle Network 5 Nebula Navis + Larkman. Regal and Dark Megaman himself were okay, but Blizzardman, Cloudman, Larkman, and Cosmoman had next to no personality compared to the Axess Darkloids and ended up being defeated without any ceremony. And I still don't understand what the point was of introducing time travel was; it didn't serve the story in any way other than adding an extra layer to it that was more confusing than helpful.

So I'm glad I was finally able to get some closure with Stream, especially since it was the first anime I started following as it came out, back in the days when we couldn't take shows getting subtitled like we largely can now. I think in the hands of better writers it could've been really good even with some filler here and there, but as it stands it was too ambitious for the show's regular writing staff. It's understandable why they dialed things back a bit for Beast, and that season was better for it from what I remember. We'll see if that perception remains true though.

"Capcom or whoever's going to do Mega Man X9 (let's admit it, we all know it's coming) won't feel forced to focus on Zero and can let X be a badass."

Inafune's last X game focuses a lot on X.

And are we sure that Capcom wouldn't bank on Zero's popularity? After all, X6 and X7 still manage to make Zero more important than X.

I think that an X who is a villain from the perspective of uncontrolled reploids, but held up as a hero and protector by the planet's remaining humans would have been interesting, especially if Zero successfully beat some sense into him. I have no problem with Light's final creation and legacy being flawed, even disastrously so - but X as a character should have a chance to come back from it.

The thing that hacks me off about the Zero series as it stands is that it felt the need to end by killing however many billion people.

...Well. I feel silly.

(Then again, that's a remake of Mega Man X1. Does it really count?)

It has a redone story, so as a character focus, I count it.

Okay, fair point. I'll allow it.

Mega Man 8....'nam flashbacks.

What the X series needs to somehow tie into Zero....somehow.

My understanding was that the link to the Zero series is the ending of X5, which keeps getting pushed back in the X timeline.

Putting aside whether evil X for reals would have been an interesting idea or a ruinous one, making the villain an evil clone of X basically enabled the stories of each of the sequels

The evil clone raises the question of where the real X is

And he's a cyber elf/force ghost

Why? He's sealing the Dark Elf

Why? Because of Omega and Weil

So game 2 is "what happened to the real X?", game 3 is "okay Dark Elf but what does that lead to?" and game 4 is "oh shit we forgot to deal with Weil!"

I can't really imagine what the Zero series would have been without Copy X. Would Dark Elf, Omega, and Weil have even come up?

The first game suggested it followed immediately from X 5 what with the battle damage

Having to include Omega et al makes the timeline a confused noodle

So where does a series go from killing/smacking some sense into a fallen X?

Does it even? Well, if the first sold well of course but what would that look like?

edited 23rd May '18 6:24:09 PM by Bocaj

It was quite the Crowning Moment Of Awesome for her wasn't it? I mean, I remember when the episode where she saw the asteroid ended and some people were wondering if she could just magically see it because they didn't show her having the Crest. The answer to that became clear eventually, but Mayl was kinda on the edge there: they made her more important than she was in Battle Network 5 at this point, but it still kinda felt like she was less important than the other Cross Fusion Members (rather than her own Synchro Chip, they forced Rush to do it; her Cross Fusion Sequence was just the dream sequence from Axess...with the exception of this very episode; and she always came off as weaker than every other member, being the one who Regal conveniently grabbed when he went Snake head on everyone). But yeah, you can't take this one from her. Desertman, owned.

Really? I didn't catch that. I clearly wasn't paying attention. But hey, it's not like Bass was all that important after the second and third games either. That being said, him putting his arm through Slur and then using that hand to cover his / her (was Slur's gender ever really confirmed) mouth was a pretty nice capstone to his run. That's how you punk a bitch.

Yeah, we never get any confirmation, but considering that if the person using the Asteroid Navi isn't straight up evil, said Navi just goes berserk all on its own, and how things went with Napalman and Nenji, I'm inclined to believe it was very much a set up on her part and she was deliberately only giving said Asteroid Navis to humans who'd misuse them. But I suppose we'll never know for sure. It just seemed odd that the only people who got them were people who were selfish in one way or another.

edited 23rd May '18 7:23:24 PM by HandsomeRob

There are a few ways to handle that. I think that it probably would have taken a different course, but if we wanted to still have the Dark Elf and Weil, there could have been another Guardian-type elf character doing the sealing, or villain!X could have been positioned as a kind of Lord Ruler/Lord Genome-type figure.

I don't blame you for missing that line about Bass's fate since it goes by so quickly. When he reveals that he's absorbed Nebula Gray and other bugs he says he's strong enough now to enter "the outer space Cyber World", which I guess means EM waves like Star Force since that's what Navis use to jack-in-and-out-of devices, but first he's going to get his revenge on Slur. After he deletes her he says he'll meet Megaman again if Earth doesn't get destroyed and logs out from the Past Tunnel, never to be seen again.

No, nothing officially confirms Slur's gender one way or another (the Battle Network art book uses "this character" in the blurb in place of a pronoun) but I use female pronouns out of habit since her design is less androgynous than, say, Serenade, who was explicitly designed to be genderless.

edited 23rd May '18 7:25:49 PM by ComicX6

I really wished that Stream used the other Souls introduced in Battle Network 5 apart from just the Gyro Soul, and also the Chaos Unisons.

edited 23rd May '18 8:26:55 PM by dood9780

At this rate, the Zero series feels like it's being a splinter timeline thing, like how the DragonBall Xenoverse games treat DragonBall GT.

You mean like how exe and Star Force come from splintering off before the beginning of the Classic series.