Megaman: The Shift

[Dracos]

So, today I was trying out Megaman Zero, or more specifically the entire MMZ series.  Neat games, really, but they got me thinking about what happened to the series, what was the difference between the early Megamans, the Xs, this, the zeroes, and such.  It got me thinking specifically on the nature of the stories being told, the core of them.  Some of this might be a bit rose-colored as it has been a while since I've played some of these and well, I'm not replaying a thirty game series for an article.

   The early Megaman games were simple, by necessity.  They didn't have much to work with hardware wise, didn't have tons of room for text, and made fairly good use of what they did have.  They had Dr. Wily.  They had Dr. Light.  They had Megaman and his dog.  They had Protoman and his whistle.  Their stories were generally simple.  Dr. Wily did something bad, created, stole, manipulated, kidnapped, whatever and got eight robot masters and a skull fortress built.  From here the world was left helpless before his forces, forced to rely on Megaman.  Megaman proceeds to save the day.  Sometimes there's a twist.  He might be put against Protoman.  It might not be Dr. Wily who is the real villain.  There might be an infiltration by Bass.  But the general start tends to be the same and more importantly, the end keeps the same type of atmosphere: The good guy wins and the world is saved.  The good guys live on and the world treats them with a hero's homecoming or some such. You know there might be a city block here and there that got savaged, but mostly things were left intact.  The threat was destroyed and things went back to normal.  This is notably a pretty simple story scheme.  It's not deep.  The heroes aren't made to openly struggle with internal strife over right and wrong.  We, the players, are given a sense that what they do is right, backed by a lack of negative feedback to the whole deal.  Dr. Wily never even died over the courses of it, providing for easier excuses on why he was around for the next game in the series.   Life was good.

   Megaman X started a change from this pattern.  It was on a more powerful system.  There was greater room for depth of story and character, not that anyone would ever accuse Megaman of presenting truly deep characterization.  Here we've got similar players.  Instead of Megaman, the hero, we've got Megaman X, the peace loving legacy of Dr. Light forced to take up arms to save the world from Mavericks.  Instead of Proto, we've got Zero, the 'mysterious' heroic combat warrior who helps you.  Instead of Dr. Light, we've got Dr. Cain and Dr. Light's capsules.  Taking Dr. Wily's role, we've got Sigma and his squad of eight maverick reploids.  Then we've got Vile, who doesn't really fit well into any of the previous roles.  He's sort of Boba Fett as a robot, just a plain bad guy who hangs around and provides an unmatchable rival in the first game.  He is, notably, a pretty neat character.  Anyhow, Megaman X plays out, for the most part, like a story from the previous ones.  There's a bit more story definition and feeling to it, which is nice, but it seems to offer the same general story theme.  Then you get to Zero's death at the hands of Vile.  I admit, at the time, I found this thing pretty cool.  I still think it is a neat way of passing the torch to Megaman X, the hero falling in the line of fire, passing it on to the main character to take up the torch and save the day.   That said, it doesn't fit well in the previous archetype.  Suddenly you have a martyr behind, someone who died for the war and doesn't come back by the end of the game.  There's no smoke and mirrors about it.  Sure, at the end, there's a sense of the same old style heroism at the end still as you look out over Sigma's exploding base, but I think here is where we get the definitive change that really marked the series.  The game ended, the hero did everything right and yet things weren't right at the end.  You kill sigma here, for the first time.  Far different from the Dr. Wily of the past, there's nothing holding back slaying him.

   Megaman X2 offers an opportunity to reverse this.  You bring Zero back to life.  For a while, everything is good again.  I thought that was neat too, in the vein of the old games pretty much, a chance to set everything right if you made the right choices.  Sure, there was the backdrop of the Reploid versus Human relations and all, but generally it was still hinted that things hadn't changed.  That you still had that sort of good versus evil atmosphere in it.  The X games sort of danced about this for a bit, X3 having you kill Sigma, which can be a pretty dramatic fight all told, complete with burying the hatchet with Vile once and for all.  It's as if they were turning back the clock and saying "This is still a game about good versus evil".

   Four, while I enjoyed it, destroys that really.  The maverick versus human conflict starts to come to head.  In a way, they didn't leave themselves much choice.  They had no Wily anymore, at least that they could pull off naturally since Sigma had been killed, cornered, his network cut off and his virus beaten.  They needed to do something though to continue the series, so they focused a bit on that: the Maverick hunters complete with their own organization, the reploid nation and their fate in this new world.  The characters didn't map cleanly at all anymore to the old good versus evil conflict.  Yes, in a way, this is a good thing, pushing for story growth.  In another, the shift was now in heavy motion.  This wasn't the same kind of stories as before, for better or worse.  There was no clear bad guy to set things right.  You were participating in war.  Folks were dying.  Friends didn't survive until the end, even if you tried your best.  People died for doing their job.  It was a very different type of game.  In a way, it is kind of fitting that this was the first one to start augmenting its story with cartoon cutscenes.

   X5, I think, was the step that couldn't go back.  It was them trying to be different in a rather clear vein.  The creator, I hear, has mentioned that this was the intent to set the stage for the Zero series and end the X series.  We had the Zero versus X conflict coming to a head here.  The hints that had been through the series thus far started to come out alongside this race against time to stop a madman.  Here though, you're introduced to something that really didn't even get touched in 4, which was destruction happening on a massive scale.  Here at the end, we have a world torn apart, millions killed, whatnot.  There's no real sense of a happy ending.  You survived.  Congrats.  Welcome to New Gunsmoke, hope you like living there.  Humans and Reploids live battling for resources and such and you don't even get the beauty of vengeance for it all as the virus continues to survive for a fair bit longer in the series, providing this implacable, unstoppable enemy that you 'defeat' by killing what is supposed to be talented rising stars in the reploid world.  It's offered from here on out that you're playing a pyrrhic victory at the best.

   MMZ left you fighting in the same sort of environment, only now it returns with a character whom, as much as he states that the bad guys are naïve, holds a pretty strong naïve belief: He will save everyone.  The bad guys are easy to be the evil ones for the most part, but at the same time hold that sort of war theme that's been there since the X series started.  The bad guys are the defenders of humanity.  You're the defender of reploid-kind.  The bad guys aren't really 'evil' for the most part (I haven't finished 3, though and it's hinting that it finally has an evil bad guy), just following orders from a higher bad guy and enjoying the rivalry against a great warrior.  It still doesn't really get back though to the sense of the earlier games, somewhat from the atmosphere of fighting over a barren wasteland versus the defenders of humanity and somewhat from the fact that you're not really fighting bad guys so much as very misguided reploids.  It just doesn't have the same flare to it.  The folks aren't evil in any traditional sense due to the context given the events.  I think something is lost in that in the nature of the game.  The shift is still there for these games.

   Legends though is different.  It's supposed to happen well after Zero or some such.  There's no real placement gamewise and I think that's a good thing.  It's got something that's been missing from the series for a long time and in not placing it directly in context, there's the sense that it doesn't have to wipe the slate clean to tell a tale, but instead simply can start from a fresh blank one.  Here we've got Megaman Trigger, the naïve, happy go lucky adventuring Megaman who isn't burdened by guilt, exhausted from battle, left with scars from friends left behind.  We've got Roll who is a much a modern take on the original, while simultaneously fulfilling Dr. Light's role in a way, constantly providing a sense that the character isn't alone and a positive spin on the whole events.  We've got Dr. Barrel, who provides the wise old mentor, another part of Dr. Light's role.  The enemies provide both a comical rivalry and a sense of being people while clearly being 'the bad guys'.  The real bad guys are clearly 'evil' in the context of the game (Sure, there's more depth to it, but really the game doesn't bother you with any moral qualms about it, generally making it aggressively clear black and white).  The robots you fight generally aren't conscious, or if they're piloted by something conscious, that guy or girl survives, much in the way of Wily of old, providing a reoccurring rival who doesn't open the "Didn't I kill him?" question.  Most importantly I feel is that the game doesn't offer a sense of attrition.  There's no 'you did the right thing, but these five million people are going to die anyway'.  You aren't left carrying on after the death of several actual characters.  In the end, if the bad guys aren't really wicked, you save them rather than kill them.  Each game ends on a positive high note, the world living on and the sense of attrition to the world's population spared.  I think in a critical way that the legends series provides the actual spiritually successor to the early games, not in gameplay, but in general game plot.  Mmm, at least, that's my thoughts on it at the moment while stranded in this blasted airport.