Mega Man. One of the most beloved gaming franchises of all time. Famous for its painfully difficult boss battles and, well, a guy with a canon on his arm. Some people like to complain about the fact that the series needs to legitimately take the jump to 3-D (excluding the crappy Playstation 2 games), but then again, a lot of people like to complain about anything. Mega Man really isn't a game that needs to, or should, be 3-D, and while all of these people have been waiting, it's been growing up under their noses.

After the second saga of Mega Man, the X series, ended, the franchise began to lose steam. The Battle Network EXE installments took a different direction, and then took that direction about five more times. Meanwhile, the tried-and-true formula came back with Mega Man Zero. It had the challenging 2D gameplay, with a few new twists, one of them being the protagonist, Zero. This time, the game used a mission-based overworld and nixed the stage select screen. The game still retained the blaster gameplay, but with a saber as well.



Capcom took another big step, this time to the Nintendo DS with the ZX series. For the first time ever, the game gave you the option to play as a girl named Aile. The game takes a much more anime-style approach, featuring some pretty cool anime cutscenes. Also, you could quickly switch between suits that had various functionalities. One suit in particular, the HX suit, practically gave Mega Man the power to fly. The game looked and played beautifully, and received positive reviews from critics.



The franchise is pretty healthy these days, and it doesn't look like Capcom is going to stop raising it anytime soon. They can have as many spin-offs as they want, as long as I get my fix. One track I'd like to see them take is to keep the game on a general storyline again, as opposed to starting over every few games. Change the gameplay every once in a while, but keep an involving narrative. That's what makes a series popular in this day and time.

And no more of this...