As a kid, I skipped the NES generation. My family bought the 2600 at the tail end of its life and my parents were not that excited about spending more money on a new system. Lots of my friends had NES systems and tried to convince me to get one but Baseball did not impress me and Super Mario annoyed me. At the time, I sucked at platformers since I had spent most of my time playing shooters and more twitchy games. And then Street Fighter II hit the arcades. I was instantly addicted to SFII since it was all over the campus of the college I attended. Since I had a job, I knew it was time to get a system. The SNES was the system of choice because SFII was an SNES exclusive.



Shortly after getting an SNES, I was at a friend's apartment and he showed me Mega Man X. At first I shied away due to its platforming nature. But the music and graphics were very impressive and the Capcom logo did pique my interest. He handed me the controller and a few minutes later I was hooked. I loved that X could scale walls a, making jumps a bit less intimidating since the player could recover from a flubbed jump. But, most of all, I loved X's heart.



X was such an interesting character. He wasn't the best maverick hunter; in fact, this is driven home during the final battle of the intro stage. Zero saves X after he is beaten by the first formidable foe he experiences. Despite that, X gets up, dusts himself off and begins a mission that he knows he cannot complete. Through the course of the game, we watch as this second stringer rises up to overcome any obstacle that gets in his way; sometimes on his own, sometimes with a bit of help from Dr. L.

Mega Man X is the sort of character that has become commonplace in anime; the hero that has all of the odds stacked against him yet manages to overcome adversity through sheer guts. At the time, this wasn't so common and that created a special place in my heart for the tenacious little blue guy.