I’m sure this isn’t anything remotely approaching an original thought but I’ve never played Mega Man before or been exposed to it really through cultural osmosis so please forgive my rote observations when I say that Mega Man’s backstory was already weird but I truly did not expect it to become just like, exactly Blade Runner, but with “deckard’s a replicant” just being overtly canon instead of an asinine nerd theory.
X1 gives you very little to work with narratively but the aesthetic upgrade doesn’t do anybody any favors here. Going from charming Tezuka-inspired Saturday Morning superhero vibes to something closer to genuinely cool looking action just makes it all the clearer that X is a cop who is hunting down his fellows for, what, wanting to live free? Sure, Sigma and Vile are cardboard cutout evil cartoon villains, but the limitations of the early SNES mean there’s precious little actual dialogue to go around here, so the motivations of the rest of the cast remain a mystery. How were they convinced to turn, ALL of them? They were the cops who killed off robots who elected to use their free will, and suddenly all of them see the light at once? There aren’t a lot of reads I can think of that are generous towards the humans who own them. There aren’t a lot of versions of this world I can imagine based on what little we’re given that suggest this society is worth protecting. Gotta wonder what X sees in it, whether he’s thought about this stuff. Doesn’t seem like he has.
The portrayal of these robots is fucked, dude. It’s colder than Blade Runner even. There, at least Deckard has enough empathy to hesitate. At least he’s punished for what he does, for his participation. At least when he kills that woman in the middle of the film and the crowd moves on and he shakes it off and goes off to kill the rest of her friends it can be read as something of an indictment.
X is, ironically, a killing machine. The first robot capable of choice, the first one truly able to say no, said to be the progenitor of all these others, and he never once considers any other course of action but murder. He doesn’t talk to any of them. He doesn’t even try. He’s a gun. What a waste.
X1 gives you very little to work with narratively but the aesthetic upgrade doesn’t do anybody any favors here. Going from charming Tezuka-inspired Saturday Morning superhero vibes to something closer to genuinely cool looking action just makes it all the clearer that X is a cop who is hunting down his fellows for, what, wanting to live free? Sure, Sigma and Vile are cardboard cutout evil cartoon villains, but the limitations of the early SNES mean there’s precious little actual dialogue to go around here, so the motivations of the rest of the cast remain a mystery. How were they convinced to turn, ALL of them? They were the cops who killed off robots who elected to use their free will, and suddenly all of them see the light at once? There aren’t a lot of reads I can think of that are generous towards the humans who own them. There aren’t a lot of versions of this world I can imagine based on what little we’re given that suggest this society is worth protecting. Gotta wonder what X sees in it, whether he’s thought about this stuff. Doesn’t seem like he has.
The portrayal of these robots is fucked, dude. It’s colder than Blade Runner even. There, at least Deckard has enough empathy to hesitate. At least he’s punished for what he does, for his participation. At least when he kills that woman in the middle of the film and the crowd moves on and he shakes it off and goes off to kill the rest of her friends it can be read as something of an indictment.
X is, ironically, a killing machine. The first robot capable of choice, the first one truly able to say no, said to be the progenitor of all these others, and he never once considers any other course of action but murder. He doesn’t talk to any of them. He doesn’t even try. He’s a gun. What a waste.
8 Comments
lmao WHY IS THIS VIRUS NOT IN THE GAME but yes just summarily executing the mentally I’ll is not necessarily a better look. I am def looking forward to these games getting to a point where they have actual plots in the games haha
Yeah, it's no exaggeration to say that you put more thought into this review than Capcom put into the entire Mega Man X series' writing.
You could say that part of MMX's story is dealing with the sad realities of war, having to kill those that don't deserve it, but that's definitely giving the writers far too much credit. You'll have to wait until the Zero series to find any semblance of cohesive thought.
You could say that part of MMX's story is dealing with the sad realities of war, having to kill those that don't deserve it, but that's definitely giving the writers far too much credit. You'll have to wait until the Zero series to find any semblance of cohesive thought.
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i am not going to read this because i can see it deals with a lot of stuff from future games and outside sources and I'm trying to keep myself blind because it's been fun to do it cold so far, so I'll just say all my reads have been and will continue to be based purely on the content of the games and what little text they have in them (so far at least, i understand they get p chatty eventually). I'm going through all the mega mans in order of the years they came out so maybe in a few months I'll loop back around and be able to actually respond to this haha
Take your time, sorry for the tldr then. I just felt it was worth considering things like instruction manuals and Japanese originals since games of this age tended to address their stories via supplementary material and have pretty shoddy localizations lol
this makes sense! it's definitely something I hadn't considered. I'll have to do a deep dive at some point
Sick, hope you enjoy X2 btw!
oh hell yeah I didn't mention it in the review lol but i did love the actual play part of X, keeping the movement tech basically identical to classic and then adding the walljump and the dash jump really opens everything up in a way that makes everything feel so fast and fluid. The game felt really difficult at first but once i had a handle on it I loved zipping around, I'm really excited to get into 2 soon
MagneticBurn
2 years ago
MMX's story is really poorly thought out in that regard especially when you get to x4
its almost hilarious how the zero series goes the exact opposite direction