My favorite take is about MegaMan Battle Network. Dr. Light went into robotics since he actually wanted a kid, the Battle Network universe came about since he actually got married and had a kid so he went into Network AI instead. The normal timeline has pretty much destroyed the world, while the BN timeline seems like almost a near-perfect utopia. So the fact that Dr. Light got laid is the difference between ruin and paradise..
Kind of funny how a world ruled by the Internet is far better than one ruled by robots... not to mention ironic considering what's happening right now in the real world.
Heck even Wily benefited from getting laid and adopting a kid. The fact that Cossack's the only one who didn't, and ended up with an estranged violent iphone son is hilariously sad.
@@izzy1356 Capcom messed him up because apparently they didn't want to retcon the 9 year old Kalinka as the possible waifu teenage daughter of Cossack whom Lan would definetly meet and probably develop feelings for due to how creepy it would have been to have an 8 year old little girl getting reinvented into a generic anime waifu character fitting of the cast of the Battle Network cast. Thus we got a daughterless, familyless, barely similar "counterpart" of OG Cossack who's nothing but a passing reminder of what once was a Megaman character back in the Classic timeline.
@@javiervasquez625 Well, it's an internet in the concept of Ultron(maybe minus the kill all humans after 5 minutes of interaction with them part), rather than our internet of idiots.
The patience to play them The patience to prepare The patience to present it The patience to watch it back The patience to edit The patience to upload it
I hope he ordered Bass to steal it back in Mega Man 7. Just awkwardly shuffling his way out of the destroyed lab juggling stolen parts and an entire fridge.
Oh, just wait until you hear about racism in gaming, comics and cosplay not to mention sooooooooooooo many other communities! You will be constantly surprised at the levels of pettiness that exist!
"The ZX series is a saturday morning cartoon version." Minutes later. "So that's how children die and elves get psychologically tortured for the benefit of the villains." Jesus.
@@pokesonav Yup. They even have the whole "The Good guys are using the power of evil for justice" bit, once you consider that the Biometals as a whole are all practically just modified pieces of the Model W.
A random fun fact about Robot Masters being designed by fans: Dust Man and Crystal Man were designed by Yuusuke Murata, now mostly known as the One Punch Man manga artist
Idk how long he's been a pro before Eyeshield 21, but I imagine that's a highlight in his life, given his love for Capcom. Would be cool to see him draw those robot masters again
I do really love that the timeline basically shows a gradual convergent evolution between humans and robots, until enough time passes that the Carbons in Legends are literally both human and robot simultaneously
The ZX thing with robo-skin being grafted onto humans still kind of wigs me out by the concept of it, let alone the practical implications behind it, so I'm just going to continue looking at their black appendages as skin tight clothing for the sake of my sanity.
i quite enjoy X's dynamic with dr light, its like if your dad said "ah well son, I want you to try and be the best person you can be. But, I did leave a Heavy Machine Gun, A bunch of claymore mines, A rocket launcher, And Provisions in the trunk of your car. Just in case things went bad you know."
Meanwhile Dr. Wily is like "Dammit Zero why are you friends with my most hated enemy's son? This was not the path I wanted for you." Zero is just like "Fuck you dad".
@@X_Gon_Give_It_To_Ya That's definitely something Zero would say to Wily. Basically Zero's whole story arc is becoming something that Wily did not intend him to be. Zero was supposed to be Wily's meal ticket to world domination, but instead, by the end of Mega Man Zero 4, Zero went out as a legendary hero even though he never called himself a hero, or even believed in justice, he just fought for the people that believed in him, X, Dr. Light, Ciel and the Resistance...
@@LightStreak567 and yet ironically, because of mega man 11, we now know that young dr.Wily reason for creating robots was because he desired robots like zero. zero fulfilled the dream of the young dr.wily before he lost himself to his own ego and envy of dr.Light.
It's kinda funny to me that aliens play a role in the Classic series, but from X onward, there's no alien activity or interference. Aliens are a part of Battle Network and play major roles in the Star Force games.
Just in case no-one has answered this; the reason Rock was given the ability to copy the Robot Masters weapons was because of his role as Light's lab assistant. He had the ability to copy the various tools in the lab to help Light with his work, and I believe this ability was modified by Light when he became Mega Man in order to copy the Robot Master's weapons.
@@cartoonking1789 Would have been cool if Archie Comics had been given the chance to explain some of the more obscure events of the franchise such as the "Elf Wars" with Omega and the creation of Elysium by the Master. It's always possible the reason why Capcom didn't allow them to do it was precisely because they don't want fans to know the details behind each major conflict in the timeline.
0:00:00 Introduction 0:25:52 Mega Man (NES) 0:34:09 Mega Man 2 (NES) 0:37:47 Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge (Gameboy) 0:41:48 Mega Man 3 (NES) 0:55:06 Mega Man (DOS) 0:55:50 Mega Man II (Gameboy) 1:01:36 Mega Man: The Wily Wars (Genesis) 1:02:36 Mega Man 4 (NES) 1:10:22 Mega Man III (Gameboy) 1:11:30 Wily & Right's Rockboard: That's Paradise (Famicom) 1:13:01 Mega Man 5 (NES) 1:21:44 Mega Man 6 (NES) 1:25:57 Mega Man IV (Gameboy) 1:29:00 Mega Man V (Gameboy) 1:33:58 Mega Man X (SNES) 1:49:34 Mega Man Soccer (SNES) 1:50:18 Mega Man X2 (SNES) 2:01:55 Mega Man Xtreme (Gameboy Color) 2:05:37 Mega Man X3 (SNES) 2:12:58 Mega Man: The Power Battle (Arcade) 2:19:20 Mega Man 7 (SNES) 2:30:00 Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters (Arcade) 2:32:51 Mega Man 8 (Playstation) 2:44:12 Mega Man: Battle & Chase (Playstation) 2:45:15 Mega Man Legends (Playstation) 2:57:57 Rockman DASH: Grand 5 Island Adventure (Mobile) 2:59:48 Mega Man Legends 2 (Playstation) 3:02:49 The Misadventures of Tron Bonne (Playstation) 3:05:38 Mega Man Legends 2 (Continued) 3:19:16 Mega Man & Bass (Gameboy Advance) 3:30:22 Rockman & Forte: Challenger From the Future (Wonderswan) 3:39:26 Rockman Gold Empire & IQ Challenges (PC) 3:41:37 Mega Man Xtreme 2 (Gameboy Color) 3:45:28 Mega Man X4 (Playstation) 4:09:26 Super Adventure Rockman (Playstation) 4:10:45 Mega Man X5 (Playstation) 4:26:48 Rockman Strategy (PC) 4:28:40 Mega Man X6 (Playstation) 4:42:44 Mega Man Battle Network (Gameboy Advance) 4:46:34 Mega Man Zero (Gameboy Advance) 5:13:56 Mega Man Zero 2 (Gameboy Advance) 5:31:11 Mega Man Zero 3 (Gameboy Advance) 6:02:46 Mega Man Zero 4 (Gameboy Advance) 6:18:55 Mega Man Zero (Miscellaneous Facts/Theories) 6:33:42 Mega Man X7 (Playstation 2) 6:41:59 Mega Man X8 (Playstation 2) 6:55:02 Mega Man ZX (Nintendo DS) 7:14:16 Mega Man ZX Advent (Nintendo DS) 7:36:00 Mega Man 9 (Download) 7:39:49 Mega Man 10 (Download) 7:46:55 Mega Man 11 (Playstation 4) 7:54:12 Conclusion
He also talks about Command Mission at about 5:13:00 CM is an odd timeline splitoff for some reason. Apparently in an interview when asked about it one of the people in charge said it was meant to serve as a "Movie" whereas the other X games were just "The episodes of a series". It is also confirmed in another interview to be part of a separate timeline from Zero. Given it deals with Force Metals and a meteor that hit the planet it's possible that this caused the timeline split. Right now I'm kind of wondering about just how often the timeline has split....
The visual design and style of the Zero games was so tops. In the art you can see that when Zero uses the Buster he picked up, he *plugs his Saber into it* as like, a power source. Cool. I think you can't charge the buster until you get the Z-saber, but it's been a long time, maybe not.
What I find weird is how Cain said "X could be the massive evolution for Reploid because of his "hesitant to take life" and Sigma just go "Oh so that means if I nuke this human city, killing everyone, X will break out of his resolve and be that evolution Reploid should head towards" Till this day I still don't get Sigma's logic.
@user-gr3yc3km1k I feel like we need to take into account that Sigma, by this point, has effectively been reprogrammed by Wily. Because when you do I kinda see where he's coming from, it seems to be a "If X is this powerful when he has little to no will to fight, think of how strong he'll be once he has something to fight for!" Plus he turned out to be right, had X not been as damaged as he was he probably would have fucked up Sigma pretty badly.
It's weird that Mega Man X and Zero are classified as being reploids and not being reploids. Dr.Cain was said to be the creator of reploids, but Mega Man X and Zero were created long before Dr.Cain was even born. Which of course means that they aren't reploids, but for some reason the games and even Zero has referred to them as being reploids. You'd think that Zero would know better than to call himself and Mega Man X reploids.
@@rnlansdownemobile Sigma's logic didn't make any sense, but that was in the non canon universe. In the main universe, Sigma got infected with a virus that came from Zero, and over time the virus took over Sigma's mind and body. Thus, turning him into a villain. Sigma never even chose to be evil.
I rewatched this as background noise when I fell asleep. I eventually had a dream I was at my childhood home and the audio from you talking about Megaman kept permeating every room. I tried to turn the volume down on every device I had, but you kept talking about Megaman X lore. It was impossible to block out with anything else, and I felt like I was going insane. Eventually I woke up in a cold sweat and my phone was still playing this video.
Someone get this man in the next protomen album writing room. Also zero's personality being the result of number flow is my favorite theory too. It's now official head Canon.
I click on videos that are 8 hours long. Then I watch them in their entirety. I accept responsibility for perpetuating this kind of content. And thank you, sir, for creating it. 😎👍
I didn't know about the Shadow Man alien thing, and since there are Stardroids that talk about how they were made to eliminate lesser beings it makes me think they're interconnected. And that there's a species out there, somewhere, who has beens ending out robots to wipe out sentience.
@@ArlanKels in the Archie comics, the stardroids served Ra-Moon, and fought against Duo and the space police force. Shadow man was originally one of many foot soldiers the stardroids used in their battles.
@napoleontheafromite I believe it was either GigaMix or MegaMix manga series where they introduced the Stardroids as alien robots and for the climatic battle, they summoned Ra Moon as a big "fuck you" to Earth ala Majora's Mask Moon style of destruction
Just get some good ad blockers, not your typical generic "RUclips adblock" stuff because RUclips will eventually try to circumvent that due to how easy to look it up. Or change your browser to Opera GX, that works too.
Having grown up with the character and having been the "Mega Man guy" in my circle of friends all my life, I appreciate how insane I must have sounded explaining the series whenever they asked me to now that I'm watching someone else do it. I also am relieved and thrilled that you're getting everything correct. Everyone always seems to get some fundamental piece of knowledge wrong, but you're nailing it. It's super refreshing.
One of my favorite parts of Mega Man lore is how well it all fits together even though it clearly was not planned that way. Like you can easily see how this rivalry between 2 scientists ended up with the extinction of humans and the birth of these weird machine human hybrids you see in legends games just by following the stories of the games.
@@princesscrystal6410 And even then, it is possible to connect the Battle Network timeline with the main one, once you start to consider that the ancient Mu from Star Force got a similar aesthetics to Legends' Elysium, along with the existence of beings and tech that Is functionally similar to Cyber Elves and the Mega Merge/Rock On. Could be easily assumed that sometime after Legends, the Carbon civilization successfully restored and improved upon the tech from the Zero/ZX era, only to then get hit with another reset with the return of humanity, leading to the new calendar of the Battle Network era.
I also love how it all connects up, but I wouldn't say it's "easy to see" 😂 It would be a lot of games and content to play/read though for anyone on their own, without a super handy video like this one. The lore is vague in some places and there are gaps filled with speculation and theories. I hope future games connect more dots.
@@Incables At a cursory glance it still makes sense. Because most subseries have started pretty early in the other series runtime and were made to stand on their own first and foremost, you don't have to have played much to fill the gaps. If you have only played MM1, you can still see how you can get from there to X1 or Legends, and you can still work in Z1 if you only played X1. Playing more only fill the gaps out further, but it still fits together well even without that and there rarely come about contradictions.
I don't understand the point of making Reploids to be more "human". Because isn't the reason we created robots in the first place is so they are replaceable, and able to not feel emotions means they can do more dangerous task without feeling fear of dying? A battalion of human soldiers can still break line and run if push comes to shove, but a legion of emotionless robots will just keep marching forward. Wasn't that the theme we're going with in irl robotics?
@@rnlansdownemobile it actually makes a lot of sense when you think of human nature, we humanize AI and robots and machines all the time, some ppl even believe that a few ai are truly sentient. Hell, Alexa and SIRI are results of this humanization(ppl even refer to them as a person most the time, like i did in this sentence lol). We are a highly Social Species, we want to have companions and we seek that out in all things, it's one the reasons we have our animal companions. And if we, a highly intelligent, very curious species, are capable of making companions that can keep up with us, then we will.(and in our image too, interestingly enough) it's simply how we are.
@@rnlansdownemobile Honestly even in real life all everyone seems to want to do is make AI more and more advanced and alot of people actually WANT to make AI humanlike. Personally I dont want that, but at this point I dont think it’s impossible. It could take 1000 years or 500 years but it could happen.
props to you for being able to not only record this whole lecture, but also have the patience to watch the whole thing through afterwards to add the corrections. i could never be this dedicated
The pregnant hesitation in his sentence when he was going to define Mavericks let me know that this guy knows his stuff and realizes what a complicated answer it really is. "Mavericks are a social construct" Fucking genious.
It seems like just being enough of an asshole is enough to label a few of them Maverick. That and insubordination even if they don't actually do anything
If you want get super technical it 𝙗𝙚𝙘𝙖𝙢𝙚 a social construct. As the first Mavericks were those afflicted by the original Maverick virus including Zero who technically isn't even a reploid. Lots of terminology evolve as the games go on. Which is fantastic because that's true to real life as well and great world-building whether it's intentional or not.
When he said "reverse pinochio'd" I was like "Ship of Theseus! Ship of Theseus! Ship of Theseus! Ship of Theseus! " when he said it I bursted laughing.
"His systems are so advanced there's no way he'd go maveri--Sigma goes maverick and he takes all the other irregular hunters with him" That killed me. Damn Edit: finished the video. Incredible summary. All that interconnectedness and wild speculation is why we love MegaMan!
@@Aaron-mj9ie And it somehow led to dropping nukes on human cities, robot genocide, and eventually torturing everyone before killing them in concentration camps to feed some eldritch horrors.
For Copy X, I would say it's not just the 30 year diagnostics test (which was extended to 100 years since no one found X in that first 30). You also have to consider that X also just h as his own lived experiences. He had however long he lived with Dr. Cain before the Maverick Wars, his time as a Maverick Hunter, and then also all his time in the span between the X series and Zero series. Copy X was also forced into a role he had no chance or opportunity of ever actually filling. He was basically like a kid being made President of the US, and told to fix it. Or everyone dies. Even if he was a perfect physical copy of X, no one with no experience could do that.
Omg there are so many comments that can thread into an entire discussion. But this is very true. Copy X may have even had a great run ruling over Neo Arcadia if not for this energy crisis. Plus how would anyone else have handled that in his place? What if Ciel couldn't solve the energy crisis til much later? What would that have meant for humans? ...The Zero series man. 🥲💕
@@BaphometGaming69 She still lied to everybody and had them all believing that Mega Man X had gone crazy. Her lie ruined Mega Man X's reputation and caused the deaths of countless innocent reploids. What might be worse is that Zero found out about all of that and still supported her. Zero is also an asshole, too.
3:04:04 "Give the Tron a Goon" has now become a hilarious title, thanks to the internet shifting around us once again. I finally got around to watching this and I'm already rewatching it again not even a day later. This is easily the best "lecture." Even beyond that, my favorite video essay. Thank you for treating it with so much love and care, Ben.
The idea of Zero being a reverse Nuclear Gandhi is the most hilarious thing I've ever heard. But also, seeing the entire Megaman timeline laid out like this paints a really interesting "character arc" for humanity and machinekind. We start with making machines to solely benefit ourselves and end with those machines becoming fully actualized people, complete with the joys and horrors that comes with it, and coming to the point where there is zero distinction between human and machine. That flashback scene in Legends 2 really works as the bookend to this arc with the last Pure Human realizing this point and passing away willingly, ending any attempts to "reinitialize humanity" and leaving Earth to their true successors.
One thing I really liked about Zero 4's ending is that Zero finally chooses to disobey the first law of robotics and kill a human which I guess technically makes him a maverick for the greater good of humans and reploids. I do not think that was a step that X or any robot designed by Light could have taken but because Wiley explicitly designed Zero to be the "baddest robo" he had no problem killing a "maverick" human. There is a nice irony to Wiley designing Zero with so much malice and disregard for human life that it ended up saving the world.
technically, he started a maverick, but reformed and never became one again... Killing a human, with permission from the ruling authorities, doesn't violate the first law. Asimov covered that, very thoroughly. Not only that, Weil was clearly no longer human. He'd left behind any reasonable definition of humanity after becoming immortal, no longer being made flesh, losing the humanity from his mental state, and then going insane and fusing with a super weapon. In fact, if you are familiar with asimov's work, it could be argued that X, not zero, was the one who went maverick, by not killing weil and letting him be made what he was made into...
@goggles789 I have a lot of Mega Man had canon myself (I like to think the plans Wily stole in Mega Man 7 led to Zero's construction). One nitpick is that they have been hinting at Zero being a Wily bot since X2
Really loved this video. Great work. I lost the thread for a long time since I just skipped cutscenes in mega man zero and zx because I didn’t care about this wacky-ass plot with these “new” characters but it was fun going through it in your video so I think im gunna go back and re-experience them with the baseline knowledge.
To be fair, Zero was in a middle of a fight against a golem, squeezing Ciel, so Zero had his hands full at that point. But X does talk to Zero much more afterwards.
After all the shit Zero goes thru in the MMX, and especially in the MMZ series, I can see why he’s top tier in every fighting game he’s in. Poor fella deserves it
"Poor fella"? Zero is a scumbag. He started off as a maverick and was defeated and shown mercy by a maverick hunter. Now, Zero thinks that all mavericks should be killed without mercy. Then the maverick hunter that spared Zero's life got infected by a virus from Zero, but before he became a maverick, he taught Zero how to be a maverick hunter and he introduced Zero to his best friend Mega Man X. Then when that maverick hunter did become a maverick, Zero's 1st response was to kill him instead of just capturing him to see if he can turn good again, and Zero just always tried to kill him ever since. In the MMZ series, 1 of the 1st things that Ciel did was lie to Zero, and she lied on his best friend. But instead of getting angry with her, he supported her more than ever before. Zero is an asshole.
@@rockmenx8xx411 To be fair he says it himself. He's not a hero, he doesn't care about justice. He fights for the people he believes in, whether or not they're right and he'll kill anyone that shows up to oppose that.
@@ectothermic Well there we have it. I guess he didn't believe in X, or Sigma. And now it really makes it confusing as to how X and Zero are supposed to be best friends.
@@rockmenx8xx411 He believes in X, and he believed in Sigma, together with Axl they convince X to get back in the fight in X7. If they were to turn on him though, he'd logic his way into a fight. He's nothing if not consistent. If he didn't care for anyone he wouldn't have killed himself to save others every chance he could (He's very suicidal). I dunno, you're painting him in a weird frame without considering all these other events.
@@ectothermic It just didn't make any sense for him to support Ciel after he found out that she lied to him and lied about X, and it doesn't make sense for him to hate Sigma when he infected Sigma with a virus that turned Sigma evil. Sigma didn't choose to be evil and Zero knows that, but he still acts like all the evil that Sigma did was purely his fault.
In all honesty, Neo Arcadia is at least understandable in its existence. The games never really touch on anything from a human's perspective until Vent/Aile and Ashe in ZX, who are all distinctly preoccupied with just living well and doing their best, and only get swept up in conflicts bigger than them. This can likely apply to all humans, who were bystanders in the rise of robotics which eventually lead to wars and extinction level events. By the time the Zero series rolls around, it makes sense that a society of the majority of the planet's remaining humans would have a severe fear of autonomous, free-thinking, effectively-immortal robots after the trauma they and the planet have endured, leading them to take extreme measures when they find out a handful of reploids want to continue to do their own thing, because reploids doing their own thing lead to the apocalypse in the first place. From their point of view, unless robots are completely subservient to humans, the same inherent flaws that humanity has will only be supercharged by the immense power and capabilities of reploids and lead to larger conflicts than humans can ever hope to create.
I always thought it was a major failing of the playstation X games (and beyond) that, while they tried to expand the storytelling and add more dialogue and characters, they completely removed humans from the equation. They're mentioned a few times, but there isn't a single solitary human npc who voices an opinion about anything that's going on. Even Dr. Cain is gone for some reason. To me that immensely deflates the story because it makes it all feel like it's a conflict that suddenly only involves robots, and yet the majority of the population and the entirety of the government is human, and it's a series about the legacy of two human scientists. Even Command Mission doesn't have any humans in it for some reason. It's weird and I don't like it.
I think the only thing you missed is - and you can really see this during the Yellow Devil segment - is the "storytelling" of the visual styles. It looks a lot like the continual usage of the Yellow Devil's red core is what leads to the Legends red eye. Everything subterranean in the Halcyon Days may well be one giant devil!
I came to fanboy over Zero and ZX, but I lost it at 'Your sister, but don't worry, you're adopted!' I never played Legends, but I played Kiseki games, so I could smell the siscon coming from a mile away. Had me in stitches. Great video!
fun fact, not only is Battle and Chase is actually canon in the classic timeline, Napalm Man is also confirmed to be the winner of the race based off his CD info from Megaman & Bass that directly references his ending if you beat the game in story mode as him in Battle and Chase
Battle and Chase delights me because Quick Man built a normal race car, but all the other drivers put weapons on theirs. Imagine the level of salt that created. 🤣
The way I understood Zero and the sigma virus came from that one boss stage in X5 where you can see X and Zeros resting capsules and blueprints are how similar they are. It made me think that somehow, Wily got ahold of Lights plans for X and decided to make his own, as close as possible to Xs blueprints so that he'd be able to match and surpass him. However, Wily likely realized by seeing the blueprints that the source of Xs infinite potential was his completely free will, and just like how old Megaman had his sense of justice, he was never able to defeat Megaman with any of his creations, so if Zero was to ever match X he had to actually just give him free will too and go along with Lights original blueprint to achieve the same potential. However, the way he was able to circumvent his free will and force him to be evil was to implant the virus within his head crystal so that he'd keep his potential like X, but use for evil instead. That's why, once the virus mostly left him to stay inside Sigma, he sort of reversed down to being a guy just like X, whose free will made him fight for the right cause
Shoutouts to both Doctors Light and Wily for being such geniuses that they could create sentient robots so advanced they outperform any ones made hundreds of years later, even if those new robots were supposed to be based on one of them!
Yeah but also huge shout out to Dr. Wily, for pretending to be an alien, and also to my brain for never realizing how silly and insane that is until this guy said it out loud for us, thereby setting me up to laugh explosively and shoot beer out of my nose.
Dr. Light was so bonkers smart that his last creation took 200+ years to be copied by a genetically enhanced superchild, who was considered a prodigy among other genetically enhanced superchildren.
So many people miss this, and understandably so, but in X6 if you talk to the right Light capsule, Zero asks him if he's the one who rescued and repaired him, meaning that he told X he repaired himself to make him not worry because Zero was concerned about that himself.
by chance do u know which capsule? the only related one i see is zero asking light who saved him, and light says "i dont know, yours was a miraculous return" unless it was japanese only
@@Megalixir845 I think it's just, the first capsule you see. And I'm pretty sure it's clear by the way that Dr Light immediately changes the subject, and the fact that Zero even had to ask that question, that he is the one who repaired Zero.
@@saucemasterx911Obviously not, but it doesn't change the fact that Zero asks Light if he was repaired by him or not, because even Zero himself doesn't know how he came back.
I think one of the funny details in the ZX series is that in ZX, the main character that you don't choose doesnt exist (ie if you play Vent, Aile just doesn't exist) but in ZXA, both characters exist, but there's an implication that the character you don't choose dies. If I remember correctly, there's a line of dialogue in Ashe's story that says something about a lab being destroyed, which is implied is the one Grey was in, and in Grey's story, I think the line is something about how there was a failed bounty hunter raid with no survivors.
And then there are the anime trailers where Vent and Aile exist alongside each other as twins, and both sides of their stories are made up to be canon... Wonder how different ZXA would be if they went with that plot.
You missed something about the Resistance in Mega Man Zero 2. Elpizo and Ciel both led different resistance cells before merging together. So characters like operators Rouge and Jaune, twins Ethos and Pathos as well as the advanced "rank and file" resistence soldiers with the full helmets that you mentioned were part of his group first, and that's why a lot of them are more loyal to him, and Ciel's people are more loyal to her.
Also I'd say if Zero is indeed the followup of X5, as Inafune planned, the reason the Reploids including X gained a more human and streamlined form would be perhaps driven by X himself to try and make Reploids look more like humans so they could get along and in turn one day create Elysium. So if Zero was rebuilt after X5 and activated to help deal with the Elf Wars that would be why he had the new body design, as that would be the in style by that point.
3:59:33 So Iris and Colonel were at first part of the same Reploid AI created by researchers in an attempt to create a Reploid with a strong fighting spirit and a devotion to peace, a sort of X's replica. However, the project proved extremely challenging as the two directives start to clash with each other, so they were separated into 2 Reploids, Iris and Colonel, hence "siblings".
I watched this in a 3 day span. What an amazing watch. There is something so interesting about listening to someone explaining something for super prolonged hours. I'm sure this took you a lot of time and I really appreciate it.
I think what separates X from Copy-X in the Zero series is that when X woke up he had people around him to provide guidance and teach him how to be noble and brave. He was told he was special in some way but nobody at the time really knew what he could accomplish so they were learning alongside him as he figured out who he was going to be. Copy-X woke up and was immediately given power and influence being told he was the hero of the world which was bound to corrupt whatever goodness he had in common with the original X whose goodness was refined through persevering the struggles of the maverick wars.
And also decades of morality checks. X was constantly learning which behaviours are considered just and which are not, which is why he was able to grow so humble and empathetic. Ciel most likely did not know about this aspect of his development when creating Copy X and even if she did, a handful of years are not enough for a complex machine like him to form a nuanced moral compass - hence he ended up so prideful and childish.
This is why I dislike Ciel. She failed Copy X as a creator and had the audacity to make Zero clean up her mess by having him kill her creation. If she had any decency she would have taken responsibility for the situation and paid for her mistake with her life.
@@dangerousdays2052 wasn’t she commissioned to do that because X disappeared? And she was 5 years old when she created Copy X. Hardly her fault. If anything, it was X’s responsibility to make sure there was someone ready to take his place.
@@dangerousdays2052 okay so she dies. Now what? How does anything else get solved? All of the resistence also dies with her. The energy crisis is never solved. Neo Arcadia remains a dystopia. No one ever helps the original X and Zero. Ciel is infinitely better than Dr. Cain who knew X underwent diagnostic testing, and then still made all the Reploids anyway.
4:20:35 yeah this is a confusing plot point. so basically Dr. Wily meant for Zero to be this super badass, hardened, dedicated killing machine at first. Zero wasn't meant to be the laughing psychotic maniac he woke up as when he fought Sigma, that was a glitch that Wily intended for the Maverick Virus to cure. but instead the Maverick Virus made him just chill out into a normal guy. so Sigma's plan in X5 was to factory reset Zero so he's the super badass killing machine, rather than a normal guy or a psychotic maniac
I’m so glad that someone else understands my love for the Megaman Zero series. I remember playing 4 and thinking it was a masterpiece. 10+ years later - I still have such a strong attachment to that game
What a great, enlightening and joyful lecture! I only knew and played some of the platformer main games sporadically and mainly knew Mega Man through the Battle Network and Star Force series.(was more in the JRPG camp), so I completely slept on the X and Zero series for all the years. This video convinced me to finally give those series a try, because it sounds like they are going to be a ride. Thank you for all your dedicated work, it was really fun to listen and watch through all this!
Slight details on X6: -It directly follows up on specifically the good ending of X5, as it's intro uses exclusively good ending versions of artwork (eg: Zero shooting his buster rather than blocking a shot) and X5 does mention that even if you manage in succeeding at taking down the colony, if you do it with the Enigma Cannon, it will be said that they still need to rebuild the Earth and all that before the Zero Space suddenly appears. -In the Isoc speech cutscene, he is actually saying that the Maverick Hunters and the Repliforce are both in shambles and have been unable to do anything to stop the Nightmare Virus and as such they have failed, however, due to X6's translation problems, Repliforce magically became reploids in the US version and the meaning of the lines got mangled really badly. Same for his explanation of the Nightmare Virus' effects. -In Zero's version of Isoc's "erasure" scene, a character labeled as "??" speaks with Isoc's voice and tells Zero how much of a cool guy he is before disappearing. -Alia isn't particularly happy about Gate being dead -Most Investigators are assumed to be created by Gate, as far as I remember Ground Scaravich and Metal Shark Player are unknown. As far as stuff is considered, I don't think that they can be considered mavericks in the infected sense, as they all seem to be conscious and understanding what they're doing. -The thing with Investigators is that while some, like Blaze Heatnix, were questionable in terms of morality (Heatnix led to accidents due to his obsession with speed and challenge, Mijinion didn't even listen to Gate and while he was talented he refused to listen to anyone, etc), in the cutscene shown after you get 3000 souls, Alia directly says that none of them were actually dangerous enough to destroy them all, but due to Gate not following orders, their superiors have ordered several accidents to be staged. This is where it gets confusing with Gate and the Zero virus - in that same cutscene, Alia mentions that before retiring from his job as a researcher, Gate said that everyone who couldn't see the greatness of his work would submit to him, which is rather similar to what he says after getting infected, and since it can't happen at the same time, as Gate finds Zero's DNA on the colony wreckage site and Alia has quit being a researcher before the events of X5 even took place, I assume the Zero virus might have influenced Gate in some way, but he still stayed conscious throughout the whole thing and knew what he was doing. -The Metal Shark Player name comes from the complexity of translation: fan-translations prefer to translate it as "Prayer" or "Preyer", with the first being related to him resurrecting reploids and the second being related to that AND him being a shark. -The "I hid myself while I repaired myself" is caused by X6's translation being some of the worst translations in official gaming to ever exist, being full of typos and sentences so mistranslated they make old machine translation look sane. What was meant to be said is that he went into hiding while his auto-repair systems patched him up, however, if you access the Light capsules in Amazon Area and Weapon Center as Zero, he will have some dialogues with Dr.Light that X doesn't have where Zero admits to having no idea who actually resurrected him and asking Light if he knows anything. -The Zero saber thing is actually explained: Zero gets an entirely new spritesheet in X6, and along with some redrawn details to look better, he gets an entirely new set of saber combos and animations using a different saber that looks more like the Star Wars equivalent than what he had before, while X gets the X5 Zero saber slash. This causes an interesting detail where Zero Nightmare doesn't just reuse Zero's sprites, but instead uses the X5 ones to indicate that he's an apparition of Zero, as he uses the exact same saber slash as X when he first appears. Just like X2, it's possible that Wily has modified his body here too and gave him a new saber. -The X6 ending scene happening later is a retcon in of itself - not only do X7 and X8 both end on cliffhangers that don't lead to that scene at all, but what *does* lead to that scene is X6's ending where you don't find Zero, as it also directly implies that Zero has to do something and has unfinished business so he's gonna stay in hiding. The reason why it was retconned to be that is because otherwise X6 basically ends the series just like X5 did. On X5: -Volt Kraken at first doesn't even get angry because of Octopus' death - X apologizes for it, but Kraken just says that the reason he resigned is because he was tired of being a hunter and wanted a peaceful life or something. However, when the infection kicks in, he goes all I'LL KILL YOU JUST LIKE YOU DID TO OCTOPUS!!. -Necrobat isn't infected - he's a maverick created by Sigma a long time ago that he abandoned due to Necrobat being sort of insane, so Necrobat's just on his own and wants to kill everyone, but in one of the dialogues with Zero, he refers to Zero as a brother and doesn't even want to fight him because he thinks that they will kill everyone together, which means that somehow Necrobat knows about Zero's origins and maybe even Sigma's plans for awakening Zero in X5. -The Elysium/"Heaven" (in JP ver) from X5's bad end is referring to Legends specifically, the Neo Arcadia tie seems like a retcon On X7: -The 8 Red Alert members you fight in there are bounty hunters that worked with Red but got infected with the Sigma Virus due to Sigma offering "power ups" to them and driving them mad, as he basically blackmails Red with "either you go get Axl for me so I can copy X and Zero's DNA and become THE ULTIMATE or your pals are gonna be permamently brainwashed". When Red challenges the hunters, he's already carrying out Sigma's orders so that is why the stages are taken over by mavericks. -That also shows that X8 has no care for not just X1-X6, but also X7, as Axl, who was once a legendary amnesiac whatever that was hunted by Sigma as he was the only one that could be used to copy DNA data from X and Zero, to being just a prototype for a mass-produced series of DNA copying robots that can't do anything towards X and Zero. On X8: -The new generation reploids are basically all Sigma - they think like Sigma, they believe in Sigma and all that, as stated by Alia in one of the lines. -The "maverick at will" thing is said by Lumine, so it's likely just meant to be a misdirection or X8 writers don't care -The reason why it's Vile MkV is because X8 might have retconned the events of X5 and X6 to be entirely Sigma and Vile doing shenanigans. Apparently, that comes from an official X8 Japanese site, but the only source is the Japanese wikipedia page for the game. No idea if it's 100% true or not, but I did see a note on that page that stated so and if it's true, then it makes absolutely no sense, just like the rest of X8. -On Zero: -You messed up the order of things happening in Zero 3, first the missile thing happens, then 3 resurrected bosses, then Copy X, then Weil does a broadcast and frames the whole X bomb thing as "evil resistance killing cool guy X, now I will take over to destroy those terrorists trust me guys", then 4 more Weil numbers, then the whole Omega thing, then baby elves are defeated and only after that Omega fight.
I appreciate the amount of time and level of obsession (I wrote a grad paper about MMX I share your love for the series) in this and there’s some nifty bits in there
On the stuff about Vile-Mk 5: Capcom probably made that to imply Vile got resurrected 2 times after X3 and before X8 which were simply left unnaccounted for to add ambiguous Lore surrounding him and so entertain players with the chance to make theories about his past incarnations. Regarding what you said about X8 "making no sense": Excuse me what...? It's just a sequel to X7 which follows along the story of that game with a new crisis involving Lumine and Sigma using the Next Generation Reploids to use the Jakob Elevator and take over the World. I can't see from where exactly are you getting that the plot doesn't make sense when the narrative is as clear as the rain and doesn't leave any plotthreads behind besides the Axl cliffhanger which Capcom has yet bothered to address with Megaman X9. Wether you think the game either sucks or doesn't have a coherent narrative is on YOU as far as i'm concerned. I've played the game a million times and i can confidently say it's one of my favourite games in the entire Megaman franchise.
@@javiervasquez625 On the first, "Vは『5番目の~』を意味しているが、これは今作において『X5』『X6』の事件はシグマとVAVAが引き起こしたという設定となっており、最後に登場した『X3』の『VAVA mk-II』から更に数えて5番目となっているため" Clearly mentions X5 and X6. Unless the machine translation was extremely faulty or the Japanese Wikipedia page for X8 got the details wrong, or... The narrative doesn't make sense with the rest of the games, not with itself. "Why was everyone obsessed with Axl in X7, including Sigma, and trying to get him just to have his copy powers when he's just a prototype of a large project that is ready to go mass-production and already be integrated almost everywhere in the next game?" is one of the questions I've had. It works as a standalone story, I never said it didn't unless I worded it badly. I personally don't enjoy it as a game but it's good that you do.
You know that may have been written intentionally by Inafune and the dev team as a hint for all the mess X's existence would cause once Cain replicated Light's work to create the Reploids. Ultimately Light was real "douchie" for thinking X would create a good future for Humanity...
I mean he did also kinda give Wily a bunch of shit and basically shut his idea down back in college. Like bro just be nicer about it and maybe use both with fixes
@@javiervasquez625 To be fair, if Light never made X then there wouldn't have been any Sigma to stop the rampaging Zero. So although the reploid conflicts were only made possible cause of X, things would have actually been worse if he didn't exist.
6:11:45 The scream I scrempt on hearing the number in this correction, thank god I was still alone in a car. Also these videos have been an incredible companion on long, long drives so thank you for your time and work, I wish I would have been able to read the nites on screen but I guess I'll have to dedicate another full day one day to lookin them over. Also also, the full Zero collection is $20 on Switch. Think I'll l have to pick it up.
You know, Dr. Wily seems to interact a LOT with aliens, and I have to wonder if he's tricked them into trusting him using that 'alien projector' from the second classic Mega Man game... 4:48:20 *THIS* is interesting- So if I recall, X was sealed by Light for like 30 years to do diagnostic research on him and make sure he was operating ok as a full sentient synthetic human, the first 'Replicoid'; now we have Zero suggesting scientists seal him away for a hundred years to do diagnostics on him. I know the canon said the 'virus' Wily made was somehow SEPARATE from Zero and just managed to infect him, but I wonder if there was some kind of robotic-'genetic' predisposition in Reploids like Zero that WASN'T in X, but WAS in those initials Reploids created by Dr. Kane who went maverick, some neural issue that was fixed when X was sealed away. Hm... - Edit: Ok well 5:04:00 Gotta love how Zero mirrors Protoman, except instead of being the basis for X like Protoman was for Mega Man, he's the basis of *an entire virus that devastates the world* . And unlike Protoman, who's defect is that he could die if not reprogrammed, Zero's defect, is, again, *an entire virus that devastates the world* . Fun. You mentioned Brian David Gilbert's Unraveled 'Mega Man' videos, but I also want you to know that leaving this menacing section called ' *The Elf Wars* ' to be only explained at AROUND HOUR FIVE is giving me big "The Time Break" energy oh my god i just realized Doctor Weil sounds like Dr. Wily I'm *gonna RIOT*
So funny thing about ZX for those that haven't played it: I remembered an interview in a magazine where someone that worked on ZX was interviewed. He talked about Vent and Aile having two different storylines, so I went through both characters. Aile is told about what is going on. Vent is told very little of what's going on. That's it. Also Omega is in a cavern for some reason.
@@KingOfFools784 One month late but... yeah, pretty much. Vent is more brash, so it makes some sense that no one tells him anything. While Aile is more chill so the characters actually explain stuff to her. For example, Giro tells her that he's been a Guardian behind the scenes while with Vent he pretends he doesn't know about them. Heck, in Aile's story we even get a brief mention of the Game of Destiny. As for Omega, I believe Area-N is either the remnants of that lab from the last battle of Zero 3 or the remains of Omega's spaceship from the very start of Zero 3; which houses Omega's data in the Cyberworld. Omega has the ability to cause the Cyberworld to manifest in the physical world (it's a gameplay feature in Zero 3) so his data sort of automatically manifested into a battle simulation and then became a Biometal, or something close enough to a Biometal, on its own.
Let’s not forget the cliffhanger advent left us on ☠️☠️. It’s crazy to think because the plan was to flood the world . And come megaman legends that plan came to fruition just never explained or shown how or what went wrong . And outside of this video and other dedicated fans . Archie comics is the only source that shows a put together timeline through small panels . It was cool to see x and zero in their upgraded suits going into the elf wars pre mmz they even showed axel in that panel Edit : megaman issue #55 by archie comics time man has a little accident and long story short dr light has a glimpse into the future but more then just one era , he sees the events of the maverick wars , elf wars , mmz , zx/advent . With the last panel shown being megaman legends with gang staring off into the sea
most of what I got in a nutshell in a funny way was this: megaman series: “why won’t wily just die” megaman X series: “why won’t sigma just die” megaman Zero series: “why won’t you let me die”
One thing about the Classic series that messed me up was that Wily having a prior professional relationship with Light turned out to be an invention of the North American manuals until 11 finally made it canon (and even then they just went to the same university instead of working together as professional roboticists. Every other adaptation just went with it, so I never questioned it until recently.
Seems similar to how in Sonic, "Eggman" is a nickname for Doctor Robotnik, when originally, those were just the Japanese and American names in the first manual.
@@calemr For the movie, I thought it would be neat if he was known as an eccentric doctor of Robotics, combining the names by calling him something like "Dr. Robot-Nick" Eggman.
¿Didn't the concept art from Megaman 1 showing them working on robots kind of confirm such prior professional relationship though? I always saw that as confirmation of a long collaboration between both robots which then was expanded in the 1997 manga "Mega Man Megamix" which outright shows a young Light and Wily been friends during their college days.
i am honestly so upset that ZX Advent ended on such a cliffhanger. I would honestly have loved a third game in the series, especially with Inti at the helm considering the masterwork they pulled with Blaster Master. Hell, who knows? With the scattering of MM content we’ve been getting we might just get our game someday. a man can hope…
I find it funny how Zero starts off as the first maverick, becomes good, then sacrifices himself by techically going maverick. Also no mention of Zero's last words: "I never cared about justice, and I don't recall ever calling myself a hero. I have always only fought for the people I believe in. I won't hesitate. If an enemy appears in front of me. I will destroy it!"
I never played the 2D play forming Megaman games. I first played BN and loved it, and then I played the 2D zero games and those slapped. Tried playing megaman 11 or whatever that was released on the switch and it feels so ducking lame. Can only shoot in one direction, slow, and the bosses were eh.
Finally made my way through the entire thing. This was a lot of fun! No line from Cossack to Tundra Man? That hurts more than no Wily to Zero line. As far as the MMZero design is concerned, taking X8 into consideration really helps lead to the idea that the designs are slowly becoming more and more human-like since the X8 designs are really slimmed down. But I loved this, it was a lot of fun and the jokes were on point. It'd be fun to have you on our show, Ramblin' Reploids for a fun Mega Chat. Also, 10/10 explosion ending.
I believe this was the first time I unironically listen to a guy talk about Megaman 8 hours straight. I absolutely do not regret a single minute of this. This has been my go-to while doing chores for the past week and I cannot stress enough how thankful I am for the fact that you allowed me to rekindle the joy of being a Megaman fan, something I have moved on from long ago Subscribed off of this alone. Zero regrets
Does this mean that, at some point, you ironically listened to someone talk about Megaman for 8 hours straight? Because that's a lot of effort for the sake of irony and I can respect that.
4:20:50 So basically, when Zero was first awakened, he was completely nuts, the only thing he got on his mind was killing, he won't listen to anyone, which is the reason why Wily sealed him away and created the Virus to complete his programming in the first place. Awakened Zero, on the other hand, was sane, evil and obedient to Dr. Wily's will of destroying X and conquering the world (X4 Zero's flashback).
yeah basically, I also like to think of "awakened zero" as the first incarnation of omega because Omega/awakened zero is who zero is supposed to be, but the Zero X knows only came to be by accident. But, by a twist of faith, he became the embodiment of Dr.Wily original dreams of what he wanted robots to become. machines of unmatched power and speed, Wily wanted robots to be seen as heroes by making them stronger than humans. This was shown in mega man 11 and the echoes of these desires exists in the zero we know.
I loved all the PCP lectures and it's the main reason I helped support Radcon kickstarters back in the day. Yours, Nates, and Tom Oliver's were some top tier content. Appreciate you reviving the format.
@Elonyx Bit of column A and B, I jumped into it well after it was all crumbling away, so I can't speak with utmost certainty as to the exact reasons. PCP originally had both Mumkey Jones and Jeff from Mother's Basement. The most recent fracturing came from diverging personality and beliefs and ensuing arguments because of such.
The old pcp lectures were the first instance of this kind of long form content I remember watching, and seeing the format gain popularity recently has brought me great joy, as is now seeing your take on it. Love the video.
Thank you for making this. I've always been peripherally fascinated by the Mega Man franchise for years due to owning copies of Legends and Legends 2 in my early youth many years ago, but never had the drive to fully dive in due to the story and lore always being described as obscure and convoluted and increasingly difficult to follow as more games were added over time and my interest in the franchise had waned almost to the point of apathy after hearing of basically every future project being cancelled back in 2011/2012. Now after watching this across 3 sittings and finally gaining some baseline understanding of what's happening in the games' universe spoken with such raw enthusiasm, I'm now eyeing that 30th anniversary collection and the Zero/ZX legacy collection and will probably end up playing every game in the franchise that I am able to get my hands on (and probably watching playthroughs of the Legends games since I no longer own them nor do I own a ps1 to play them on.) Thank you so much for rekindling an interest of mine that had been dormant for decades.❤
I'm pretty sure at the end of Mega Man 3 when Protoman's face is in the clouds you can see Wily's capsule floating over the trees suggesting that he did in fact escape and the Wily in future games is not a robot.
I’m only 3 hours in but I’m loving this video. A lot of Megaman lore videos skip the fun details or bring too much outside canon into the discussion, so this video is pretty much perfect.
Coming down from the biblical events of the ZX/Legends timeline into the Saturday Morning antics of MM9 and MM10 was the wildest mood shift I’ve felt in years. It was cool to see the implications of Sigma-Virus being Roboenza form. Also, the reveal that humans and robots became One And The Same being followed by the exploration of a time when robots were slaves with built in death sentences was disturbing.
@@moltengarnet I still can't wrap my head at the prospect of "robots and humans becoming a single race" considering the obvious scientific implausability that such a scenario entails. No wonder Megaman Legends doesn't even bother in explaining anything when the very concept behind the "Carbon's" abbility to switch bodyparts with weapons and external limbs has a clearly fantasy approach than any real life plausability which would fit the basic sci-fi narrative of the earlier games. To me all this stuff was more laughable and comedic than "dark" when the Humanity presented in the Megaman games not only comes off as incompetent in handling their many problems but also totally inhuman when it comes to how they treat robots in moments of crisis (concentration camps in Neo Arcadia?) and one another when they commit genocide (trapping an oldman in a robot suit instead of just locking him up?). It's like Capcom wanted the later Megaman games to be as detached from reality as posible to justify the loudest of premises without any sound logic and reason other than "because it's cool".
@@moltengarnet Wonder if "Future Wily" was any different from Classic Wily in the creation of Zero. For all we know the future from which Quint came from may have been "splintered" from the main timeline Dragon Ball style the second Classic Wily brought Future Megaman to the past to take him down. OMG maybe the X Saga and beyond take place in the splintered timeline where Megaman became Quint?? That could explain the lack of Classic Megaman by the time of X's awakening having been caused by his transformation into Quint...
This video was amazing, and also way funnier than I was expecting! There were many times I had to pause the video for a second until I could stop laughing and continue xD
The level of commitment you put into this video is utterly awe inspiring. I, personally, am only well versed in the Legends games, so being able to learn about the connections between all of these series has been a real treat. I honestly just don't know how to convey my appreciation for all of the time and care you put into the research, filming, editing, and whatever else. I guess all I can say is, "I wish I could have heard of you sooner, but at least I'm here now." Thank you, Ben Saint, from the bottom of my nerdy heart.
One of my favorite theories about the MM to MMX thing is that Wily activated Zero without doing the 30+ years of diagnostics, due to being arrogant, and Zero ended up being completely insane and wiped out everyone and the MM family had to sacrifice themselves in order to stop him.
1:57:35 While technically being part of a different continuity, according to the Mega Man X PSP remake Sigma is the one that rebuilds them, although when you face Launch Octopus he acts in a completely emotionless and robotic way. So maybe the argument could be made that you can rebuild a reploid, but you can't reproduce their personality or maybe Sigma just couldn't be bothered to actually give one back to them.
Gospel was almost certainly changed to Treble because of Nintendo of America's no religion policy. After that changing Forte to Bass to match as a musical counterpart to Treble was actually a really clever move.
I've never really played anything besides the BN games(really fun jrpg games), so all of this was new to me essentially. I've been hacking away at this lecture for couple days now and just coming up on 5 hours, I'm so hooked. I love this so much. Your passion, your edits, your pacing. It's Just wanted to say thanks for the awesome video!
I _highly_ recommend The Protomen. They do Mega Man rock operas which are just incredible. Their album Act II: Father of Death could easily be a Broadway musical
@@casteanpreswyn7528they came out with a song "The Fight" last year. Sounds like MegaMan and maybe Roll talking, and like it's gonna be on the third album, whenever that's gonna be..
@@casteanpreswyn7528 yea I gave up hope for a third album a while ago but hearing that song reignited that faith lol. The wait is excruciating they take forever. Killer albums though
@casteanpreswyn7528 they are still very active and tour every year. They have stated continuously that act 3 is coming. But they make other songs to. Do covers and music with some other bands also. They are near constantly doing stuff lol. I just wish they'd take the time to finish act 3 then keep doing what they are doing lol
I started this video knowing virtually nothing about Megaman/Rockman. Why did I watch? I have no idea. Do I regret it? Absolutely not. This deserves way more likes and views than it got, especially given the length and amount of time that must've been spent.
It took me about 10 days, but I just finished all 8 hours of this video. I originally was only interested in how the classic series connected to the X series, but boy did I get a satisfying amount of mind-blowing material beyond that! I absolutely am fascinated by how many threads are continuous through the entire series even across multiple subseries. I see many others have commented the same, but I am so impressed by the amount of dedication and work this video must have taken. You're almost at 1M views here, so I'm glad to see your work is being appreciated.
One thing you didn't mention about the evil energy is the maverick virus theory is that they both share the exact same visual cues, made most obvious with maverick zero in 5. I think it's also pretty safe to say that since the virus makes zero stronger, wily designed him to run on the stuff.
Wily learned a LOT from his relatively short time spent studying the Evil Energy, it would seem... Either that, or he located more of it that Duo somehow missed/didn't "take into custody" during his time on Earth and that energy would serve as the basis for the Zero/Sigma/Maverick Virus and later the Nightmare.
Regarding the New Generation Reploids' ability to go Maverick at will, we kinda need to establish something that isn't brought up in the video itself, maybe because the source of it most people would point to is Maverick Hunter X, though I believe it also gets broad in other sourcebooks. In the beginning, before Sigma's rebellion, Mavericks are primarily defined as Reploids and Mechaniloids that go haywire due to program errors, hardware malfunction or what could be described as a sort of psychic breakdown due to not being able to, literally, compute what is happening around them (Iris fits this, somewhat, as she goes crazy from grief other the loss of her brother). As an example, it is stated that Vile, who is a Maverick Hunter initially, gets declared a Maverick and locked up because he causes too much collateral damage while exercising his duties as a Hunter. The source of this taste for violence and destruction is attributed to a short-circuiting in his electronic brain or some other form of physical defect. Whether this is something that is correctable is never brought up in any media that I'm aware of. Later on, we start focussing more on all the different types of viruses that can affect a Reploid or Mechaniloid by either making them go berserk or rendering them more susceptible to suggestion or bringing out hidden tendencies of their psyche and turning them violent. Magma Dragoon betrays the Maverick Hunters in X4 because he wanted to test his mettle against X and Zero, something that he likely got encouraged to via manipulation by the Maverick / Sigma Virus. As for Lumine and New Generation Reploids, the main issue that Lumine is threatening X with is the fact that all of them have the potential and ability to go Maverick of their own accord. Not because of a viral infection, not because of corrupted DNA or some flawed circuitry, but because they may *choose* to do so. It's like saying that every self-driving car that exists today may at any point *willingly* decide to just steer into oncoming traffic because it felt like it. Yes, everyone with free will has the capacity for good and evil and yes there are already Reploid criminals in the world of X, but the point here is that there is an entire line of much more powerful Reploids that are pre-disposed to start rebelling from the get-go. You could also consider Lumine is taunting X with the fact that as long as there are Reploids who exercise free will, there will always be those who will rise up against humans for a myriad of reasons, so the fight will never stop. This also ties into the Motherelf and Project Elpis/Elpizo. The Motherelf was designed to cure Reploids of a rampant-running Sigma Virus and cure them of the reason so many went Maverick, but to Weil, this wasn't good enough. Reploids couldn't be trusted, so his ultimate weapon was to just take control of all Reploids on the planet and ensure they wouldn't do anything but obey their human masters. This is why the epilogue / post-credits scene of X8 mentions how the production of NGRs was eventually halted, although it is also stated that it was quietly started back up later at some point for some reason. Since you are not going to cover it, the main villain of Command Mission eventually turns out to be another NGR (Sigma isn't in Command Mission, he doesn't even get so much as a mention) who wants to further the evolutionary potential of Reploids (something that Gate is obsessed with and Sigma specifically states that he is interested in this as well, particularly X' potential, in Maverick Hunter X). Regarding Ciel and ZX, according to an interview with Takeshi Horinouchi, the producer at Capcom for Zero 4, ZX and ZXA, ZX takes place 200 years after the fall of Ragnarok. Considering how the line between human and Reploid is so blurred in ZX that they are only really distinguishable by that forehead triangle, it is quite plausible that Ciel artificially extended her lifespan by adopting a Reploid body herself. Nobody really has a flesh and blood body anymore in the ZX era, which is probably aluding to Legends where carbons can just replace pieces of themselves at will. It is also not clear if Ciel is dead. It always struck me as a plot point that was to be addressed in ZX3, but Capcom never greenlit that game. The last thing we know of Ciel is that she instructed Giro to take in survivors of Maverick raids, in hopes of finding more chosen ones for the Biometals / Live Metals.
I believe it's stated in extra material to the games that Ciel is basically a cyborg. Not nearly to the point that Weil is, but she is a "test tube" baby, heavily implied to be made from Alia's DNA, and augmented to be super smart. The reason being that they needed super intelligent people to help rebuild after the elf wars. I'm sure that Ciel could already live longer than normal humans, though it is possible that she further augmented herself.
Now that you mention it, Lumine's kind of Lucifer, but not really. I don't think it's clarified that *he* was the one who gave reploids the capability to go maverick at will. But laying it out that the reploids pretty much have begun to adopt free will and since maverick just means going against the usual programming sometimes instead of a virus, that seems like an equivalent to the tree of knowledge with the apple that lets you know which is good and bad.
Took a few days to watch the whole thing. Truly amazing work. 7:46:06 This speculation can be taken further. Consider: - We know that Proto Man's energy system has a flaw that that causes him pain and will result in a shorter lifespan. For whatever reason, apparently Mega Man Powered Up says Wily replaced it with a Nuclear generator but it was unstable or something, idk this seems to be non-canon. - Wily discovered Bassnium (a type of energy, called Fortenium in JP) by accident and used it for Bass' energy device. Part of his long running goal to make more powerful robots that could destroy Mega Man (followed by King and the foiled plans for King II). - In Mega Man 8 they introduce "evil energy" which is a very powerful alien energy that reproduces by harnessing hatred and uses that to replicate and infect others. Mega Man is briefly infected and Bass purposely infects himself. - In Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters, all three of these plotlines are touched on. Light discovers the "energy from that time" on Earth, attempts to study it (but finds it impossible to analyze) and develops parts for it, Wily steals them, everyone recovers it. in the endings, Wily discusses that Bassnium will no longer being the most powerful energy on Earth and shows off the plans for Zero, Duo points out that the "energy from that time" resembles his and comes from space and detects "justice energy" inside Mega Man and Bass (but not Proto Man) and returns home with both of these energies, and Light tries to convince Proto Man to let him fix his energy system and Proto Man refuses. Clearly Zero is somehow related to an energy from space. Either he's built using said energy or he's built using a new energy developed by Wily based on his knowledge gained from stealing said energy/parts. So, speculations: - Zero's energy system uses "evil energy" or another related alien energy. It's possible this is why he is impossible to analyze. It's also possible X's energy system uses "justice energy" or another related energy from that time. - Zero is an overhauled Proto Man. - The Maverick Virus is the "evil energy" (or some variant). This is why Zero reacts strangely to exposure. - X is immune to the Maverick Virus because he carries "justice energy". - Mega Man and Bass either converted residual "evil energy" into "justice energy" (by imprinting on it or something), or the "justice energy" was what was left after Duo removed the "evil energy" and then it multiplied thanks to Mega Man and Base's emotions, or it could be an immune reaction of sorts. - Wily imprinted on the "evil energy" and this is how he has survived. - It's not super clear to me exactly how the mother elf was developed from Zero. It seems it wasn't just developed as a countermeasure to the maverick virus, but was actually developed from the maverick virus itself. Based on the content in the MMZ Official Complete Works, it sounds like Inti Creates didn't intend this (given what it says about X being the origin of the virus) but if one accepts the speculation that the maverick virus is such energy then, one may wonder whether a cyber elf is actually the result of such energy being imprinted on by an individual. We know that Cyber-Elves die when they use up their energy so there's that too.
I'd heard a theory that the MM7 confrontation with Willy was kind of hinting at something going strange with Rock's programing and leading up to the development and deep diagnostics with X.
Definitely wanted to highlight in X5 the Wily connections, namely Sigma seems to heavily hint towards Wilys involvement and more importantly: Sigma W seems to literally be Sigma in Gamma's body
I believe one unofficial name for Final Sigma W is "Gamma Sigma", as much as a Greek mouthful that designation tends to be. Also, the fight uses a remix of Gamma's boss theme, in keeping with the blatant "W" imagery flashing everywhere.
I was 9 when MMZero came out, and I remember seeing a one page ad in a gaming magazine that proclaimed it was "the hardest(or was it most challenging) Megaman game yet!". Growing up with the X games and thinking they were hard got me all sorts of excited - not to mention my love for Zero as a charchter already, a series focused on him?! Got it for Xmas that year and loved how ball bustingly hard it was for me - like you, Phantoms suicide bomb caught me completely off guard and I was so pissed when I had to restart the level due to that, but god damn even then I had to admit that was good on the devs part... And my brother in Mother Elf, I got teary eyed when you started talking about Zeros end - you arent the only one holding it back!
Mega Man Zero games ARE hard. Even for a guy like me who plays hard Mega Man X games. I tried playing the game via MMLC. I just can't get going. I love Mega Man, but Zero was hard. You thought the original Mega Man was hard? Psh, Mega Man Zero said "hold my beer."
Not only do you have to beat Phantom in a pretty tough boss fight for early game, you have to dodge the explosion. And THEN, you have to go and defuse all the bombs he left for you across the factory. I had to come back as a grown ass man in the ZX Collection and beat it there. Kid me could never.
Can you make this a series? Lore explained in obsessive detail? This is the first thing I've seen on your channel and I feel like it sets a standard for what I want to come back to. Great job!
I mean, it kind of is an insane commitment in terms of time and effort. These kinds of videos need a sponsor and AT LEAST 1 million views to be worth the effort, I think
My favorite take is about MegaMan Battle Network. Dr. Light went into robotics since he actually wanted a kid, the Battle Network universe came about since he actually got married and had a kid so he went into Network AI instead. The normal timeline has pretty much destroyed the world, while the BN timeline seems like almost a near-perfect utopia. So the fact that Dr. Light got laid is the difference between ruin and paradise..
Kind of funny how a world ruled by the Internet is far better than one ruled by robots... not to mention ironic considering what's happening right now in the real world.
Man this is even more fucked up if you ever listen to Act II: The Father of Death.
Heck even Wily benefited from getting laid and adopting a kid.
The fact that Cossack's the only one who didn't, and ended up with an estranged violent iphone son is hilariously sad.
@@izzy1356 Capcom messed him up because apparently they didn't want to retcon the 9 year old Kalinka as the possible waifu teenage daughter of Cossack whom Lan would definetly meet and probably develop feelings for due to how creepy it would have been to have an 8 year old little girl getting reinvented into a generic anime waifu character fitting of the cast of the Battle Network cast. Thus we got a daughterless, familyless, barely similar "counterpart" of OG Cossack who's nothing but a passing reminder of what once was a Megaman character back in the Classic timeline.
@@javiervasquez625 Well, it's an internet in the concept of Ultron(maybe minus the kill all humans after 5 minutes of interaction with them part), rather than our internet of idiots.
The patience to play them
The patience to prepare
The patience to present it
The patience to watch it back
The patience to edit
The patience to upload it
The patience to have patience
The patience to exist
@@goggles789 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕡𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕥𝕠
He's a man of commitment, focus, and sheer patience.
Dear God
Stealing someone's fridge and making it into a robot just to fight them is the most petty thing in the world and I love it
It's like Willy got one of those prank calls about checking out fridge and went "Yes, this gave me a great idea!"
I hope he ordered Bass to steal it back in Mega Man 7. Just awkwardly shuffling his way out of the destroyed lab juggling stolen parts and an entire fridge.
@@affsteak3530 Or Bass stole it just to be asshat to his creator and Wily just rolled with it lol
Oh, just wait until you hear about racism in gaming, comics and cosplay not to mention sooooooooooooo many other communities! You will be constantly surprised at the levels of pettiness that exist!
"Is your refrigerator running? BECAUSE I TURNED IT INTO A COMBAT ROBOT TO DESTROY YOU!"
*hangs up and snickers* got'em
-Dr. Wiley
I had to deal with the worst pain I've felt in my life and watching this video was the only thing that kept me sane.
Hope you're in a better place now.
My experience would probably be best described as the exact opposite of yours ^^
Hope you're better now.
@@Azazel226 Feeling much better now. Was stuck waiting for a much needed emergency dental appointment.
@@WondrousnameI thought you were talking about emotional pain.
@@Jetaniumheartbreak is the worst pain in the world… behind tooth and back pain
Revealing a pointer two hours into the eight hour lecture is an iconic move
I wish yt had spoiler filters
I came here to find your comment.
"The ZX series is a saturday morning cartoon version."
Minutes later.
"So that's how children die and elves get psychologically tortured for the benefit of the villains."
Jesus.
Well yeah....buuuuut everyone's a super sentai action robot gajinka hero who monologues, so it all evens out in the end.
So Kamen Rider pretty much
@@pokesonav
Yup. They even have the whole "The Good guys are using the power of evil for justice" bit, once you consider that the Biometals as a whole are all practically just modified pieces of the Model W.
@@pokesonav we need a japanese live-action ZX series so much
that sounds like my Saturday mornings back in the 80s
A random fun fact about Robot Masters being designed by fans: Dust Man and Crystal Man were designed by Yuusuke Murata, now mostly known as the One Punch Man manga artist
No wonder, they look like they would fit in the manga
Wow I didn’t know that, thanks for telling me :)
Crystal man is straight up just prototype genos
Honestly sick lore. I'd never recover from that high regardless of the popularity of OPM.
Idk how long he's been a pro before Eyeshield 21, but I imagine that's a highlight in his life, given his love for Capcom. Would be cool to see him draw those robot masters again
I do really love that the timeline basically shows a gradual convergent evolution between humans and robots, until enough time passes that the Carbons in Legends are literally both human and robot simultaneously
Funny enough, Transformers has tried the idea of organic and synthetic merging a few times as well. I think the term is Techno-Organic?
@@johnnygyro2295 yep! Techno-organic, best example is in Transformers Animated
The ZX thing with robo-skin being grafted onto humans still kind of wigs me out by the concept of it, let alone the practical implications behind it, so I'm just going to continue looking at their black appendages as skin tight clothing for the sake of my sanity.
i quite enjoy X's dynamic with dr light, its like if your dad said "ah well son, I want you to try and be the best person you can be. But, I did leave a Heavy Machine Gun, A bunch of claymore mines, A rocket launcher, And Provisions in the trunk of your car. Just in case things went bad you know."
lol hell yeah
Meanwhile Dr. Wily is like "Dammit Zero why are you friends with my most hated enemy's son? This was not the path I wanted for you." Zero is just like "Fuck you dad".
@@X_Gon_Give_It_To_Ya That is accurate.
@@X_Gon_Give_It_To_Ya That's definitely something Zero would say to Wily. Basically Zero's whole story arc is becoming something that Wily did not intend him to be. Zero was supposed to be Wily's meal ticket to world domination, but instead, by the end of Mega Man Zero 4, Zero went out as a legendary hero even though he never called himself a hero, or even believed in justice, he just fought for the people that believed in him, X, Dr. Light, Ciel and the Resistance...
@@LightStreak567 and yet ironically, because of mega man 11, we now know that young dr.Wily reason for creating robots was because he desired robots like zero. zero fulfilled the dream of the young dr.wily before he lost himself to his own ego and envy of dr.Light.
That one Reploid modifying his body so he can age with his human wife is so romantic I'm going to cry 😢
Old Andrew, I love the story. Could be part of a cherished movie, but fits in here perfectly.
Are ya winning son?
bicentennial man
@@runningoncylinders3829 COULD be
it already is, Robin Williams plays Andrew
The dude creates organic parts for android and even gets blood injected just so he can grow old with his wife 😢.
One of my favorite things about the MegaMan series is how they go "By the way, there are aliens. . . . No, we will not elaborate."
Heck maybe Axl was built by aliens. Makes as much sense as anything
It's kinda funny to me that aliens play a role in the Classic series, but from X onward, there's no alien activity or interference. Aliens are a part of Battle Network and play major roles in the Star Force games.
"Oh yes and time travel... we did that? We don't elaborate on it either."
"Yes, the entire plot of Mega Man 8 comes from space. (Duo & Evil Energy robot) No further questions."
@@izzy1356
We totally could have a Classic meets X game, yet it has yet become a thing in the games
I have don't think I have ever been so excited to see a video from a creator I don't know.
I am fully in for this whole video
Just in case no-one has answered this; the reason Rock was given the ability to copy the Robot Masters weapons was because of his role as Light's lab assistant. He had the ability to copy the various tools in the lab to help Light with his work, and I believe this ability was modified by Light when he became Mega Man in order to copy the Robot Master's weapons.
@@MrHomelessHobos wait, rock is not as dumb as a kid, y'know despite his mm8 voice. Also, whats disgusting about rock copying tools?
Oh yeah and murder is bad
@@MrHomelessHobos do you know what game calles him a child?
@@MrHomelessHobos he doesn't have only the mental capacity of a child, he just has the *personality* of a child. He's literally called megaMAN.
@@8LiterallyJustTheNumber8 again, where is the proof that he has qualities comparible to a child?
The best part about the classic part of this video is that it shows just how much the archie comic writers did their homework.
It’s a shame we didn’t get the rest of the games adapted in Archie.
@@cartoonking1789 honestly, still crossing my fingers capcom sees idw sonic's success and goes "hey... mega maybe..?"
@@immahere I would a Love that, especially with how good of job Ian Flynn is doing with IDW Sonic and how well he did with Sonic Frontiers
@@cartoonking1789 Would have been cool if Archie Comics had been given the chance to explain some of the more obscure events of the franchise such as the "Elf Wars" with Omega and the creation of Elysium by the Master. It's always possible the reason why Capcom didn't allow them to do it was precisely because they don't want fans to know the details behind each major conflict in the timeline.
@@javiervasquez625 true I mean we still don’t know what happened to the original Megaman and robot masters by the time we reach X’s era.
0:00:00 Introduction
0:25:52 Mega Man (NES)
0:34:09 Mega Man 2 (NES)
0:37:47 Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge (Gameboy)
0:41:48 Mega Man 3 (NES)
0:55:06 Mega Man (DOS)
0:55:50 Mega Man II (Gameboy)
1:01:36 Mega Man: The Wily Wars (Genesis)
1:02:36 Mega Man 4 (NES)
1:10:22 Mega Man III (Gameboy)
1:11:30 Wily & Right's Rockboard: That's Paradise (Famicom)
1:13:01 Mega Man 5 (NES)
1:21:44 Mega Man 6 (NES)
1:25:57 Mega Man IV (Gameboy)
1:29:00 Mega Man V (Gameboy)
1:33:58 Mega Man X (SNES)
1:49:34 Mega Man Soccer (SNES)
1:50:18 Mega Man X2 (SNES)
2:01:55 Mega Man Xtreme (Gameboy Color)
2:05:37 Mega Man X3 (SNES)
2:12:58 Mega Man: The Power Battle (Arcade)
2:19:20 Mega Man 7 (SNES)
2:30:00 Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters (Arcade)
2:32:51 Mega Man 8 (Playstation)
2:44:12 Mega Man: Battle & Chase (Playstation)
2:45:15 Mega Man Legends (Playstation)
2:57:57 Rockman DASH: Grand 5 Island Adventure (Mobile)
2:59:48 Mega Man Legends 2 (Playstation)
3:02:49 The Misadventures of Tron Bonne (Playstation)
3:05:38 Mega Man Legends 2 (Continued)
3:19:16 Mega Man & Bass (Gameboy Advance)
3:30:22 Rockman & Forte: Challenger From the Future (Wonderswan)
3:39:26 Rockman Gold Empire & IQ Challenges (PC)
3:41:37 Mega Man Xtreme 2 (Gameboy Color)
3:45:28 Mega Man X4 (Playstation)
4:09:26 Super Adventure Rockman (Playstation)
4:10:45 Mega Man X5 (Playstation)
4:26:48 Rockman Strategy (PC)
4:28:40 Mega Man X6 (Playstation)
4:42:44 Mega Man Battle Network (Gameboy Advance)
4:46:34 Mega Man Zero (Gameboy Advance)
5:13:56 Mega Man Zero 2 (Gameboy Advance)
5:31:11 Mega Man Zero 3 (Gameboy Advance)
6:02:46 Mega Man Zero 4 (Gameboy Advance)
6:18:55 Mega Man Zero (Miscellaneous Facts/Theories)
6:33:42 Mega Man X7 (Playstation 2)
6:41:59 Mega Man X8 (Playstation 2)
6:55:02 Mega Man ZX (Nintendo DS)
7:14:16 Mega Man ZX Advent (Nintendo DS)
7:36:00 Mega Man 9 (Download)
7:39:49 Mega Man 10 (Download)
7:46:55 Mega Man 11 (Playstation 4)
7:54:12 Conclusion
You know the video already have timestamps, right? Why are commenting every single one of them?
He also talks about Command Mission at about 5:13:00
CM is an odd timeline splitoff for some reason. Apparently in an interview when asked about it one of the people in charge said it was meant to serve as a "Movie" whereas the other X games were just "The episodes of a series". It is also confirmed in another interview to be part of a separate timeline from Zero.
Given it deals with Force Metals and a meteor that hit the planet it's possible that this caused the timeline split.
Right now I'm kind of wondering about just how often the timeline has split....
@@invertebrado it's nice to just click on the time established rather than scrubbing through a timeline.
@@invertebrado no, they weren't there when I commented them. & it looks like he might've just tweaked mine
wait... he didn't talked about Megaman.EXE/Megaman Battle Network?!
The visual design and style of the Zero games was so tops. In the art you can see that when Zero uses the Buster he picked up, he *plugs his Saber into it* as like, a power source. Cool. I think you can't charge the buster until you get the Z-saber, but it's been a long time, maybe not.
Genuinely the worst part for me about the great pcp civil war was knowing we wouldn’t get more lectures. Ben, you truly are a saint after all.
PCP civil war?
I can’t find any information on what happened. Any way you could point us in the right direction?
Please elaborate for us plebs out of the loop 🥺
Ayo what's with this war? I haven't watched much even from before digi became no longer digi or something
I used to watch all of the pcp stuff years ago but kinda fell out a few years ago, wtf happened I'm so curious?
In Dr. Cain's defense, i think he's an archeologist. He had no business reverse engineering X.
What I find weird is how Cain said "X could be the massive evolution for Reploid because of his "hesitant to take life" and Sigma just go "Oh so that means if I nuke this human city, killing everyone, X will break out of his resolve and be that evolution Reploid should head towards"
Till this day I still don't get Sigma's logic.
@user-gr3yc3km1k I feel like we need to take into account that Sigma, by this point, has effectively been reprogrammed by Wily. Because when you do I kinda see where he's coming from, it seems to be a "If X is this powerful when he has little to no will to fight, think of how strong he'll be once he has something to fight for!" Plus he turned out to be right, had X not been as damaged as he was he probably would have fucked up Sigma pretty badly.
It's weird that Mega Man X and Zero are classified as being reploids and not being reploids. Dr.Cain was said to be the creator of reploids, but Mega Man X and Zero were created long before Dr.Cain was even born. Which of course means that they aren't reploids, but for some reason the games and even Zero has referred to them as being reploids. You'd think that Zero would know better than to call himself and Mega Man X reploids.
@@rnlansdownemobile Sigma's logic didn't make any sense, but that was in the non canon universe. In the main universe, Sigma got infected with a virus that came from Zero, and over time the virus took over Sigma's mind and body. Thus, turning him into a villain. Sigma never even chose to be evil.
OK but in that case why the fuck did he think he knew enough about reploids to make an entire species?
I rewatched this as background noise when I fell asleep. I eventually had a dream I was at my childhood home and the audio from you talking about Megaman kept permeating every room. I tried to turn the volume down on every device I had, but you kept talking about Megaman X lore. It was impossible to block out with anything else, and I felt like I was going insane.
Eventually I woke up in a cold sweat and my phone was still playing this video.
That’s actually hilarious but I hope you’re okay 😭
Now I want to try this lol
I had this with my alarmclock once. I genuely felt like I was going mad in my dream because the infernal noise wouldn't stop.
Autistic thing to share publicly
@@eliandabilitieslol yeah it’s like audio book helps people sleep listening to lore
Someone get this man in the next protomen album writing room.
Also zero's personality being the result of number flow is my favorite theory too. It's now official head Canon.
I click on videos that are 8 hours long. Then I watch them in their entirety. I accept responsibility for perpetuating this kind of content. And thank you, sir, for creating it. 😎👍
There are dozens of us!
Nay, scores of us!
3X speed helps
You definitely need to research Lasagna cat and all that stuff
@@Drag0zard there's a 3x speed??!!? i can barely do 2 LOL, 1.5 is a comfy spot for me
I initially clicked on this video to get inspiration for my own story about robots, but now I too have feelings for these sad metal men
I didn't know about the Shadow Man alien thing, and since there are Stardroids that talk about how they were made to eliminate lesser beings it makes me think they're interconnected.
And that there's a species out there, somewhere, who has beens ending out robots to wipe out sentience.
@@ArlanKels in the Archie comics, the stardroids served Ra-Moon, and fought against Duo and the space police force. Shadow man was originally one of many foot soldiers the stardroids used in their battles.
@napoleontheafromite I believe it was either GigaMix or MegaMix manga series where they introduced the Stardroids as alien robots and for the climatic battle, they summoned Ra Moon as a big "fuck you" to Earth ala Majora's Mask Moon style of destruction
Bro,how did you know I'm obsessed with 5+ hour long retrospectives?!
because so am i
Me too
babe wake up apparently there's an 8-hour BOMBERMAN lore video released in 2022, which i just, COMPLETELY missed...
5+ hr long retrospectives give me life while working
@@OhNoBohNoOK I'm going to check his channel and I better not be disappointed
RUclips: you can watch 3 videos before deactivating your adblocker.
Me: _say no more._
uBlock Origin is usually ahead of RUclips on blocking those pop-ups, so you may want to switch to that!
Just get some good ad blockers, not your typical generic "RUclips adblock" stuff because RUclips will eventually try to circumvent that due to how easy to look it up. Or change your browser to Opera GX, that works too.
Get a better ad block, and not the generic ones
Big spoon moment
Having grown up with the character and having been the "Mega Man guy" in my circle of friends all my life, I appreciate how insane I must have sounded explaining the series whenever they asked me to now that I'm watching someone else do it. I also am relieved and thrilled that you're getting everything correct. Everyone always seems to get some fundamental piece of knowledge wrong, but you're nailing it. It's super refreshing.
Thank you for being you :)
One of my favorite parts of Mega Man lore is how well it all fits together even though it clearly was not planned that way. Like you can easily see how this rivalry between 2 scientists ended up with the extinction of humans and the birth of these weird machine human hybrids you see in legends games just by following the stories of the games.
Deprecation with dignity
Well everything in Network and Starforce are separate universes
@@princesscrystal6410
And even then, it is possible to connect the Battle Network timeline with the main one, once you start to consider that the ancient Mu from Star Force got a similar aesthetics to Legends' Elysium, along with the existence of beings and tech that Is functionally similar to Cyber Elves and the Mega Merge/Rock On.
Could be easily assumed that sometime after Legends, the Carbon civilization successfully restored and improved upon the tech from the Zero/ZX era, only to then get hit with another reset with the return of humanity, leading to the new calendar of the Battle Network era.
I also love how it all connects up, but I wouldn't say it's "easy to see" 😂 It would be a lot of games and content to play/read though for anyone on their own, without a super handy video like this one. The lore is vague in some places and there are gaps filled with speculation and theories. I hope future games connect more dots.
@@Incables At a cursory glance it still makes sense. Because most subseries have started pretty early in the other series runtime and were made to stand on their own first and foremost, you don't have to have played much to fill the gaps. If you have only played MM1, you can still see how you can get from there to X1 or Legends, and you can still work in Z1 if you only played X1. Playing more only fill the gaps out further, but it still fits together well even without that and there rarely come about contradictions.
In the end...all of humanity reverse-Pinocchio-erized itself... And Megaman was the blue fairy the whole time.
I don't understand the point of making Reploids to be more "human". Because isn't the reason we created robots in the first place is so they are replaceable, and able to not feel emotions means they can do more dangerous task without feeling fear of dying? A battalion of human soldiers can still break line and run if push comes to shove, but a legion of emotionless robots will just keep marching forward. Wasn't that the theme we're going with in irl robotics?
@@rnlansdownemobile it actually makes a lot of sense when you think of human nature, we humanize AI and robots and machines all the time, some ppl even believe that a few ai are truly sentient. Hell, Alexa and SIRI are results of this humanization(ppl even refer to them as a person most the time, like i did in this sentence lol).
We are a highly Social Species, we want to have companions and we seek that out in all things, it's one the reasons we have our animal companions. And if we, a highly intelligent, very curious species, are capable of making companions that can keep up with us, then we will.(and in our image too, interestingly enough)
it's simply how we are.
@@rnlansdownemobile
Honestly even in real life all everyone seems to want to do is make AI more and more advanced and alot of people actually WANT to make AI humanlike. Personally I dont want that, but at this point I dont think it’s impossible. It could take 1000 years or 500 years but it could happen.
@@rnlansdownemobileI think it’s mostly to make them more adaptable
@@revolvingworld2676ngl I would like actual sapient robots like lilims from va11halla
The PCP lectures are some of my most rewatched videos on this site; I am so fucking hyped for this
props to you for being able to not only record this whole lecture, but also have the patience to watch the whole thing through afterwards to add the corrections. i could never be this dedicated
The pregnant hesitation in his sentence when he was going to define Mavericks let me know that this guy knows his stuff and realizes what a complicated answer it really is. "Mavericks are a social construct" Fucking genious.
I think the Japanese chose their words quite well when they called them "irregulars"
It seems like just being enough of an asshole is enough to label a few of them Maverick. That and insubordination even if they don't actually do anything
@@M_Alexander That basically describes my day job
If you want get super technical it 𝙗𝙚𝙘𝙖𝙢𝙚 a social construct. As the first Mavericks were those afflicted by the original Maverick virus including Zero who technically isn't even a reploid. Lots of terminology evolve as the games go on. Which is fantastic because that's true to real life as well and great world-building whether it's intentional or not.
@@goldman77700 well there were Maverick Hunters before Sigma ever encountered Zero
I’m a big Megaman fan & only played 17 of the games but not in order. You did a great job explaining the lore.
ive played 17 aswell they were x1-8, mm1-7, and zero 1 & 2
“Dr Light had Ship of Theseus’d some kid” has me rolling, I really needed that laugh.
"reverse pinnochio'd" is another great one
When he said "reverse pinochio'd" I was like "Ship of Theseus! Ship of Theseus! Ship of Theseus! Ship of Theseus! " when he said it I bursted laughing.
"His systems are so advanced there's no way he'd go maveri--Sigma goes maverick and he takes all the other irregular hunters with him" That killed me. Damn
Edit: finished the video. Incredible summary. All that interconnectedness and wild speculation is why we love MegaMan!
So, you know, he....starts...to do terrorism! lmao
This also had me fucking dying lolololol
This whole time I just thought MegaMan was a game about a little blue man go pew!
@@Aaron-mj9ie And it somehow led to dropping nukes on human cities, robot genocide, and eventually torturing everyone before killing them in concentration camps to feed some eldritch horrors.
For Copy X, I would say it's not just the 30 year diagnostics test (which was extended to 100 years since no one found X in that first 30). You also have to consider that X also just h as his own lived experiences. He had however long he lived with Dr. Cain before the Maverick Wars, his time as a Maverick Hunter, and then also all his time in the span between the X series and Zero series.
Copy X was also forced into a role he had no chance or opportunity of ever actually filling. He was basically like a kid being made President of the US, and told to fix it. Or everyone dies. Even if he was a perfect physical copy of X, no one with no experience could do that.
Omg there are so many comments that can thread into an entire discussion. But this is very true. Copy X may have even had a great run ruling over Neo Arcadia if not for this energy crisis. Plus how would anyone else have handled that in his place? What if Ciel couldn't solve the energy crisis til much later? What would that have meant for humans? ...The Zero series man. 🥲💕
Hey man, do you have a source on the hundred year thing? Not that I doubt you I just want to learn more
Ciel was wrong for what she did. I'm glad she got killed.
@@rockmenx8xx411 Apparently Ciel was like, 6 years old when she made Copy X
@@BaphometGaming69 She still lied to everybody and had them all believing that Mega Man X had gone crazy. Her lie ruined Mega Man X's reputation and caused the deaths of countless innocent reploids. What might be worse is that Zero found out about all of that and still supported her. Zero is also an asshole, too.
3:04:04
"Give the Tron a Goon" has now become a hilarious title, thanks to the internet shifting around us once again.
I finally got around to watching this and I'm already rewatching it again not even a day later. This is easily the best "lecture." Even beyond that, my favorite video essay. Thank you for treating it with so much love and care, Ben.
#rejectinternetslang
Megaman & Bass on the GBA is one of my favorite games. My parents bought it thinking it had Megaman and a bass fishing game.
"Megaman with a Zelda minigame? The lad'll love this!"
Ok but now we need a Mega Man fishing game
The idea of Zero being a reverse Nuclear Gandhi is the most hilarious thing I've ever heard.
But also, seeing the entire Megaman timeline laid out like this paints a really interesting "character arc" for humanity and machinekind. We start with making machines to solely benefit ourselves and end with those machines becoming fully actualized people, complete with the joys and horrors that comes with it, and coming to the point where there is zero distinction between human and machine. That flashback scene in Legends 2 really works as the bookend to this arc with the last Pure Human realizing this point and passing away willingly, ending any attempts to "reinitialize humanity" and leaving Earth to their true successors.
Like Wily is supposed to be this genius but he missed that he defined his evil-level variable as a signed integer?
Its like the stone age all over again
Homo carbonilis? Androidolis? replicalis?
Fuck that, if I was a scientist I’d create EMPs everywhere to fucking nuke as many robots as I could. Destroy all the processing plants.
What an excellent explanation of Mega Man and proof Legends being the end is so bittersweet.
@@vicenzogames5535 Homo Machina is what I think it’d be called
One thing I really liked about Zero 4's ending is that Zero finally chooses to disobey the first law of robotics and kill a human which I guess technically makes him a maverick for the greater good of humans and reploids. I do not think that was a step that X or any robot designed by Light could have taken but because Wiley explicitly designed Zero to be the "baddest robo" he had no problem killing a "maverick" human. There is a nice irony to Wiley designing Zero with so much malice and disregard for human life that it ended up saving the world.
Killing a human definitely makes you a Maverick in society, but that was hardly an issue considering Reploids have no robot laws to follow whatsoever.
"The day I become a Maverick, it's the day I'm going to day" Zero MMX5 (it's not exactly what he said but it's basically what he said)
technically, he started a maverick, but reformed and never became one again... Killing a human, with permission from the ruling authorities, doesn't violate the first law. Asimov covered that, very thoroughly. Not only that, Weil was clearly no longer human. He'd left behind any reasonable definition of humanity after becoming immortal, no longer being made flesh, losing the humanity from his mental state, and then going insane and fusing with a super weapon. In fact, if you are familiar with asimov's work, it could be argued that X, not zero, was the one who went maverick, by not killing weil and letting him be made what he was made into...
@goggles789 I have a lot of Mega Man had canon myself (I like to think the plans Wily stole in Mega Man 7 led to Zero's construction). One nitpick is that they have been hinting at Zero being a Wily bot since X2
@@DasLinks
The plans that Wily stole were for the Super Adaptor if I remember right, which is why Bass can combine with Treble.
Really loved this video. Great work. I lost the thread for a long time since I just skipped cutscenes in mega man zero and zx because I didn’t care about this wacky-ass plot with these “new” characters but it was fun going through it in your video so I think im gunna go back and re-experience them with the baseline knowledge.
Do it on gamegrump
When’s girlchan?
Tron Bonne best girl
Holy shit it's the racist guy
@@theghostcreator776 The Racist.
> gives Zero his saber after not talking to his best friend for over 100+ years
> refuses to elaborate furter
> leaves
To be fair, Zero was in a middle of a fight against a golem, squeezing Ciel, so Zero had his hands full at that point. But X does talk to Zero much more afterwards.
X was saving his energy as Cyber Elves can't exist in the real world for a long time.
X was energymaxxing
@@yohhh6715X: bye bye 🤫🗿
@@SilverHunterN There are better times for catching up, though there are also worse.
After all the shit Zero goes thru in the MMX, and especially in the MMZ series, I can see why he’s top tier in every fighting game he’s in. Poor fella deserves it
"Poor fella"? Zero is a scumbag. He started off as a maverick and was defeated and shown mercy by a maverick hunter. Now, Zero thinks that all mavericks should be killed without mercy. Then the maverick hunter that spared Zero's life got infected by a virus from Zero, but before he became a maverick, he taught Zero how to be a maverick hunter and he introduced Zero to his best friend Mega Man X. Then when that maverick hunter did become a maverick, Zero's 1st response was to kill him instead of just capturing him to see if he can turn good again, and Zero just always tried to kill him ever since. In the MMZ series, 1 of the 1st things that Ciel did was lie to Zero, and she lied on his best friend. But instead of getting angry with her, he supported her more than ever before. Zero is an asshole.
@@rockmenx8xx411 To be fair he says it himself. He's not a hero, he doesn't care about justice.
He fights for the people he believes in, whether or not they're right and he'll kill anyone that shows up to oppose that.
@@ectothermic Well there we have it. I guess he didn't believe in X, or Sigma. And now it really makes it confusing as to how X and Zero are supposed to be best friends.
@@rockmenx8xx411 He believes in X, and he believed in Sigma, together with Axl they convince X to get back in the fight in X7. If they were to turn on him though, he'd logic his way into a fight. He's nothing if not consistent. If he didn't care for anyone he wouldn't have killed himself to save others every chance he could (He's very suicidal). I dunno, you're painting him in a weird frame without considering all these other events.
@@ectothermic It just didn't make any sense for him to support Ciel after he found out that she lied to him and lied about X, and it doesn't make sense for him to hate Sigma when he infected Sigma with a virus that turned Sigma evil. Sigma didn't choose to be evil and Zero knows that, but he still acts like all the evil that Sigma did was purely his fault.
In all honesty, Neo Arcadia is at least understandable in its existence. The games never really touch on anything from a human's perspective until Vent/Aile and Ashe in ZX, who are all distinctly preoccupied with just living well and doing their best, and only get swept up in conflicts bigger than them. This can likely apply to all humans, who were bystanders in the rise of robotics which eventually lead to wars and extinction level events.
By the time the Zero series rolls around, it makes sense that a society of the majority of the planet's remaining humans would have a severe fear of autonomous, free-thinking, effectively-immortal robots after the trauma they and the planet have endured, leading them to take extreme measures when they find out a handful of reploids want to continue to do their own thing, because reploids doing their own thing lead to the apocalypse in the first place.
From their point of view, unless robots are completely subservient to humans, the same inherent flaws that humanity has will only be supercharged by the immense power and capabilities of reploids and lead to larger conflicts than humans can ever hope to create.
I always thought it was a major failing of the playstation X games (and beyond) that, while they tried to expand the storytelling and add more dialogue and characters, they completely removed humans from the equation. They're mentioned a few times, but there isn't a single solitary human npc who voices an opinion about anything that's going on. Even Dr. Cain is gone for some reason. To me that immensely deflates the story because it makes it all feel like it's a conflict that suddenly only involves robots, and yet the majority of the population and the entirety of the government is human, and it's a series about the legacy of two human scientists. Even Command Mission doesn't have any humans in it for some reason. It's weird and I don't like it.
I think the only thing you missed is - and you can really see this during the Yellow Devil segment - is the "storytelling" of the visual styles. It looks a lot like the continual usage of the Yellow Devil's red core is what leads to the Legends red eye. Everything subterranean in the Halcyon Days may well be one giant devil!
I came to fanboy over Zero and ZX, but I lost it at
'Your sister, but don't worry, you're adopted!'
I never played Legends, but I played Kiseki games, so I could smell the siscon coming from a mile away. Had me in stitches. Great video!
fun fact, not only is Battle and Chase is actually canon in the classic timeline, Napalm Man is also confirmed to be the winner of the race based off his CD info from Megaman & Bass that directly references his ending if you beat the game in story mode as him in Battle and Chase
Huh. Did not know that.
I gotta ask...what did he win? What was the prize? Battle & Chase is a shitpile I'd rather not play again, not gonna lie.
So you're saying this guy didn't include that info in the video? God, what a sloppy, poorly researched video. He needs to completely remake it.
@@Magus12000BC He got the money, and made his underperforming weapons museum
Battle and Chase delights me because Quick Man built a normal race car, but all the other drivers put weapons on theirs. Imagine the level of salt that created. 🤣
Okay, so Mega Man Legends has an extremely chill vibe along with what amounts to the plot of a NieR game. That's terrifying.
dont forget the spinoff where you rob banks, blow up civilian houses, and fight the police!
It’s tragic more people don’t know this. They’re the best Megaman games to me. The world-building is just awesome. Love the Evangelion influence.
The way I understood Zero and the sigma virus came from that one boss stage in X5 where you can see X and Zeros resting capsules and blueprints are how similar they are. It made me think that somehow, Wily got ahold of Lights plans for X and decided to make his own, as close as possible to Xs blueprints so that he'd be able to match and surpass him. However, Wily likely realized by seeing the blueprints that the source of Xs infinite potential was his completely free will, and just like how old Megaman had his sense of justice, he was never able to defeat Megaman with any of his creations, so if Zero was to ever match X he had to actually just give him free will too and go along with Lights original blueprint to achieve the same potential. However, the way he was able to circumvent his free will and force him to be evil was to implant the virus within his head crystal so that he'd keep his potential like X, but use for evil instead. That's why, once the virus mostly left him to stay inside Sigma, he sort of reversed down to being a guy just like X, whose free will made him fight for the right cause
Shoutouts to both Doctors Light and Wily for being such geniuses that they could create sentient robots so advanced they outperform any ones made hundreds of years later, even if those new robots were supposed to be based on one of them!
Yeah but also huge shout out to Dr. Wily, for pretending to be an alien, and also to my brain for never realizing how silly and insane that is until this guy said it out loud for us, thereby setting me up to laugh explosively and shoot beer out of my nose.
Dr. Light was so bonkers smart that his last creation took 200+ years to be copied by a genetically enhanced superchild, who was considered a prodigy among other genetically enhanced superchildren.
So many people miss this, and understandably so, but in X6 if you talk to the right Light capsule, Zero asks him if he's the one who rescued and repaired him, meaning that he told X he repaired himself to make him not worry because Zero was concerned about that himself.
by chance do u know which capsule? the only related one i see is zero asking light who saved him, and light says "i dont know, yours was a miraculous return" unless it was japanese only
@@Megalixir845It's the capsule at commander yammark's stage
@@Megalixir845 I think it's just, the first capsule you see. And I'm pretty sure it's clear by the way that Dr Light immediately changes the subject, and the fact that Zero even had to ask that question, that he is the one who repaired Zero.
Dr light didn’t fix zero… wtf are you guys talking about
@@saucemasterx911Obviously not, but it doesn't change the fact that Zero asks Light if he was repaired by him or not, because even Zero himself doesn't know how he came back.
5 hours in, and “you trans your way into Neo Arcadia” was the point that finally broke me
Your coverage of Legends made me so happy. Those games are near to my heart and don't get enough love.
I think one of the funny details in the ZX series is that in ZX, the main character that you don't choose doesnt exist (ie if you play Vent, Aile just doesn't exist) but in ZXA, both characters exist, but there's an implication that the character you don't choose dies. If I remember correctly, there's a line of dialogue in Ashe's story that says something about a lab being destroyed, which is implied is the one Grey was in, and in Grey's story, I think the line is something about how there was a failed bounty hunter raid with no survivors.
And then there are the anime trailers where Vent and Aile exist alongside each other as twins, and both sides of their stories are made up to be canon...
Wonder how different ZXA would be if they went with that plot.
@Zanfitto yeah equivalent of abortion I guess
You missed something about the Resistance in Mega Man Zero 2. Elpizo and Ciel both led different resistance cells before merging together. So characters like operators Rouge and Jaune, twins Ethos and Pathos as well as the advanced "rank and file" resistence soldiers with the full helmets that you mentioned were part of his group first, and that's why a lot of them are more loyal to him, and Ciel's people are more loyal to her.
Also I'd say if Zero is indeed the followup of X5, as Inafune planned, the reason the Reploids including X gained a more human and streamlined form would be perhaps driven by X himself to try and make Reploids look more like humans so they could get along and in turn one day create Elysium.
So if Zero was rebuilt after X5 and activated to help deal with the Elf Wars that would be why he had the new body design, as that would be the in style by that point.
Wait, im doing some work on an MMZ lore guide, do you have a source on this? Or somewhere you heard it from? Ive never heard this before!
3:59:33 So Iris and Colonel were at first part of the same Reploid AI created by researchers in an attempt to create a Reploid with a strong fighting spirit and a devotion to peace, a sort of X's replica. However, the project proved extremely challenging as the two directives start to clash with each other, so they were separated into 2 Reploids, Iris and Colonel, hence "siblings".
I watched this in a 3 day span. What an amazing watch. There is something so interesting about listening to someone explaining something for super prolonged hours. I'm sure this took you a lot of time and I really appreciate it.
I think what separates X from Copy-X in the Zero series is that when X woke up he had people around him to provide guidance and teach him how to be noble and brave. He was told he was special in some way but nobody at the time really knew what he could accomplish so they were learning alongside him as he figured out who he was going to be. Copy-X woke up and was immediately given power and influence being told he was the hero of the world which was bound to corrupt whatever goodness he had in common with the original X whose goodness was refined through persevering the struggles of the maverick wars.
And also decades of morality checks. X was constantly learning which behaviours are considered just and which are not, which is why he was able to grow so humble and empathetic. Ciel most likely did not know about this aspect of his development when creating Copy X and even if she did, a handful of years are not enough for a complex machine like him to form a nuanced moral compass - hence he ended up so prideful and childish.
This is why I dislike Ciel. She failed Copy X as a creator and had the audacity to make Zero clean up her mess by having him kill her creation. If she had any decency she would have taken responsibility for the situation and paid for her mistake with her life.
@@dangerousdays2052 wasn’t she commissioned to do that because X disappeared? And she was 5 years old when she created Copy X. Hardly her fault. If anything, it was X’s responsibility to make sure there was someone ready to take his place.
@@dangerousdays2052 okay so she dies. Now what? How does anything else get solved? All of the resistence also dies with her. The energy crisis is never solved. Neo Arcadia remains a dystopia. No one ever helps the original X and Zero. Ciel is infinitely better than Dr. Cain who knew X underwent diagnostic testing, and then still made all the Reploids anyway.
@@ZeldaboyOG Her death would be symbolic. Like seppuku.
4:20:35 yeah this is a confusing plot point. so basically Dr. Wily meant for Zero to be this super badass, hardened, dedicated killing machine at first. Zero wasn't meant to be the laughing psychotic maniac he woke up as when he fought Sigma, that was a glitch that Wily intended for the Maverick Virus to cure. but instead the Maverick Virus made him just chill out into a normal guy. so Sigma's plan in X5 was to factory reset Zero so he's the super badass killing machine, rather than a normal guy or a psychotic maniac
not quite, the maverick virus passed on to sigma when he destroyed zero's head crystal.
Y😢😢
@@justiceiria869 I don't think there's any official confirmation of that. It just says that Sigma got the Virus because he fought Zero
Roboenza evolved in zero making the maverick virus?
I’m so glad that someone else understands my love for the Megaman Zero series. I remember playing 4 and thinking it was a masterpiece. 10+ years later - I still have such a strong attachment to that game
The games were fun to play, but the story sucked.
What a great, enlightening and joyful lecture! I only knew and played some of the platformer main games sporadically and mainly knew Mega Man through the Battle Network and Star Force series.(was more in the JRPG camp), so I completely slept on the X and Zero series for all the years. This video convinced me to finally give those series a try, because it sounds like they are going to be a ride. Thank you for all your dedicated work, it was really fun to listen and watch through all this!
Slight details on X6:
-It directly follows up on specifically the good ending of X5, as it's intro uses exclusively good ending versions of artwork (eg: Zero shooting his buster rather than blocking a shot) and X5 does mention that even if you manage in succeeding at taking down the colony, if you do it with the Enigma Cannon, it will be said that they still need to rebuild the Earth and all that before the Zero Space suddenly appears.
-In the Isoc speech cutscene, he is actually saying that the Maverick Hunters and the Repliforce are both in shambles and have been unable to do anything to stop the Nightmare Virus and as such they have failed, however, due to X6's translation problems, Repliforce magically became reploids in the US version and the meaning of the lines got mangled really badly. Same for his explanation of the Nightmare Virus' effects.
-In Zero's version of Isoc's "erasure" scene, a character labeled as "??" speaks with Isoc's voice and tells Zero how much of a cool guy he is before disappearing.
-Alia isn't particularly happy about Gate being dead
-Most Investigators are assumed to be created by Gate, as far as I remember Ground Scaravich and Metal Shark Player are unknown. As far as stuff is considered, I don't think that they can be considered mavericks in the infected sense, as they all seem to be conscious and understanding what they're doing.
-The thing with Investigators is that while some, like Blaze Heatnix, were questionable in terms of morality (Heatnix led to accidents due to his obsession with speed and challenge, Mijinion didn't even listen to Gate and while he was talented he refused to listen to anyone, etc), in the cutscene shown after you get 3000 souls, Alia directly says that none of them were actually dangerous enough to destroy them all, but due to Gate not following orders, their superiors have ordered several accidents to be staged. This is where it gets confusing with Gate and the Zero virus - in that same cutscene, Alia mentions that before retiring from his job as a researcher, Gate said that everyone who couldn't see the greatness of his work would submit to him, which is rather similar to what he says after getting infected, and since it can't happen at the same time, as Gate finds Zero's DNA on the colony wreckage site and Alia has quit being a researcher before the events of X5 even took place, I assume the Zero virus might have influenced Gate in some way, but he still stayed conscious throughout the whole thing and knew what he was doing.
-The Metal Shark Player name comes from the complexity of translation: fan-translations prefer to translate it as "Prayer" or "Preyer", with the first being related to him resurrecting reploids and the second being related to that AND him being a shark.
-The "I hid myself while I repaired myself" is caused by X6's translation being some of the worst translations in official gaming to ever exist, being full of typos and sentences so mistranslated they make old machine translation look sane. What was meant to be said is that he went into hiding while his auto-repair systems patched him up, however, if you access the Light capsules in Amazon Area and Weapon Center as Zero, he will have some dialogues with Dr.Light that X doesn't have where Zero admits to having no idea who actually resurrected him and asking Light if he knows anything.
-The Zero saber thing is actually explained: Zero gets an entirely new spritesheet in X6, and along with some redrawn details to look better, he gets an entirely new set of saber combos and animations using a different saber that looks more like the Star Wars equivalent than what he had before, while X gets the X5 Zero saber slash. This causes an interesting detail where Zero Nightmare doesn't just reuse Zero's sprites, but instead uses the X5 ones to indicate that he's an apparition of Zero, as he uses the exact same saber slash as X when he first appears. Just like X2, it's possible that Wily has modified his body here too and gave him a new saber.
-The X6 ending scene happening later is a retcon in of itself - not only do X7 and X8 both end on cliffhangers that don't lead to that scene at all, but what *does* lead to that scene is X6's ending where you don't find Zero, as it also directly implies that Zero has to do something and has unfinished business so he's gonna stay in hiding. The reason why it was retconned to be that is because otherwise X6 basically ends the series just like X5 did.
On X5:
-Volt Kraken at first doesn't even get angry because of Octopus' death - X apologizes for it, but Kraken just says that the reason he resigned is because he was tired of being a hunter and wanted a peaceful life or something. However, when the infection kicks in, he goes all I'LL KILL YOU JUST LIKE YOU DID TO OCTOPUS!!.
-Necrobat isn't infected - he's a maverick created by Sigma a long time ago that he abandoned due to Necrobat being sort of insane, so Necrobat's just on his own and wants to kill everyone, but in one of the dialogues with Zero, he refers to Zero as a brother and doesn't even want to fight him because he thinks that they will kill everyone together, which means that somehow Necrobat knows about Zero's origins and maybe even Sigma's plans for awakening Zero in X5.
-The Elysium/"Heaven" (in JP ver) from X5's bad end is referring to Legends specifically, the Neo Arcadia tie seems like a retcon
On X7:
-The 8 Red Alert members you fight in there are bounty hunters that worked with Red but got infected with the Sigma Virus due to Sigma offering "power ups" to them and driving them mad, as he basically blackmails Red with "either you go get Axl for me so I can copy X and Zero's DNA and become THE ULTIMATE or your pals are gonna be permamently brainwashed". When Red challenges the hunters, he's already carrying out Sigma's orders so that is why the stages are taken over by mavericks.
-That also shows that X8 has no care for not just X1-X6, but also X7, as Axl, who was once a legendary amnesiac whatever that was hunted by Sigma as he was the only one that could be used to copy DNA data from X and Zero, to being just a prototype for a mass-produced series of DNA copying robots that can't do anything towards X and Zero.
On X8:
-The new generation reploids are basically all Sigma - they think like Sigma, they believe in Sigma and all that, as stated by Alia in one of the lines.
-The "maverick at will" thing is said by Lumine, so it's likely just meant to be a misdirection or X8 writers don't care
-The reason why it's Vile MkV is because X8 might have retconned the events of X5 and X6 to be entirely Sigma and Vile doing shenanigans. Apparently, that comes from an official X8 Japanese site, but the only source is the Japanese wikipedia page for the game. No idea if it's 100% true or not, but I did see a note on that page that stated so and if it's true, then it makes absolutely no sense, just like the rest of X8.
-On Zero:
-You messed up the order of things happening in Zero 3, first the missile thing happens, then 3 resurrected bosses, then Copy X, then Weil does a broadcast and frames the whole X bomb thing as "evil resistance killing cool guy X, now I will take over to destroy those terrorists trust me guys", then 4 more Weil numbers, then the whole Omega thing, then baby elves are defeated and only after that Omega fight.
So x8 is the game with the most retcons.
I appreciate the amount of time and level of obsession (I wrote a grad paper about MMX I share your love for the series) in this and there’s some nifty bits in there
On the stuff about Vile-Mk 5:
Capcom probably made that to imply Vile got resurrected 2 times after X3 and before X8 which were simply left unnaccounted for to add ambiguous Lore surrounding him and so entertain players with the chance to make theories about his past incarnations.
Regarding what you said about X8 "making no sense":
Excuse me what...? It's just a sequel to X7 which follows along the story of that game with a new crisis involving Lumine and Sigma using the Next Generation Reploids to use the Jakob Elevator and take over the World. I can't see from where exactly are you getting that the plot doesn't make sense when the narrative is as clear as the rain and doesn't leave any plotthreads behind besides the Axl cliffhanger which Capcom has yet bothered to address with Megaman X9. Wether you think the game either sucks or doesn't have a coherent narrative is on YOU as far as i'm concerned. I've played the game a million times and i can confidently say it's one of my favourite games in the entire Megaman franchise.
@@javiervasquez625
On the first,
"Vは『5番目の~』を意味しているが、これは今作において『X5』『X6』の事件はシグマとVAVAが引き起こしたという設定となっており、最後に登場した『X3』の『VAVA mk-II』から更に数えて5番目となっているため"
Clearly mentions X5 and X6. Unless the machine translation was extremely faulty or the Japanese Wikipedia page for X8 got the details wrong, or...
The narrative doesn't make sense with the rest of the games, not with itself. "Why was everyone obsessed with Axl in X7, including Sigma, and trying to get him just to have his copy powers when he's just a prototype of a large project that is ready to go mass-production and already be integrated almost everywhere in the next game?" is one of the questions I've had. It works as a standalone story, I never said it didn't unless I worded it badly. I personally don't enjoy it as a game but it's good that you do.
Mucho texto
Dr. Light's entry listing him as "douchie" is truly amazing
You know that may have been written intentionally by Inafune and the dev team as a hint for all the mess X's existence would cause once Cain replicated Light's work to create the Reploids. Ultimately Light was real "douchie" for thinking X would create a good future for Humanity...
I mean he did also kinda give Wily a bunch of shit and basically shut his idea down back in college. Like bro just be nicer about it and maybe use both with fixes
@@eckitronix the sad part is this is kinda fitting of academia in several circles, minus the making robots to take over the world part
@@qtips1719 why are you crying
@@javiervasquez625
To be fair, if Light never made X then there wouldn't have been any Sigma to stop the rampaging Zero. So although the reploid conflicts were only made possible cause of X, things would have actually been worse if he didn't exist.
This man must really love our boys in blue
And he calls himself a cop killer
Lmfao ur pfp
Thnx hitler
blue boys good
Mega Man is a blue life that matters
6:11:45 The scream I scrempt on hearing the number in this correction, thank god I was still alone in a car. Also these videos have been an incredible companion on long, long drives so thank you for your time and work, I wish I would have been able to read the nites on screen but I guess I'll have to dedicate another full day one day to lookin them over. Also also, the full Zero collection is $20 on Switch. Think I'll l have to pick it up.
You know, Dr. Wily seems to interact a LOT with aliens, and I have to wonder if he's tricked them into trusting him using that 'alien projector' from the second classic Mega Man game...
4:48:20 *THIS* is interesting- So if I recall, X was sealed by Light for like 30 years to do diagnostic research on him and make sure he was operating ok as a full sentient synthetic human, the first 'Replicoid'; now we have Zero suggesting scientists seal him away for a hundred years to do diagnostics on him. I know the canon said the 'virus' Wily made was somehow SEPARATE from Zero and just managed to infect him, but I wonder if there was some kind of robotic-'genetic' predisposition in Reploids like Zero that WASN'T in X, but WAS in those initials Reploids created by Dr. Kane who went maverick, some neural issue that was fixed when X was sealed away. Hm...
- Edit: Ok well 5:04:00
Gotta love how Zero mirrors Protoman, except instead of being the basis for X like Protoman was for Mega Man, he's the basis of *an entire virus that devastates the world* . And unlike Protoman, who's defect is that he could die if not reprogrammed, Zero's defect, is, again, *an entire virus that devastates the world* .
Fun.
You mentioned Brian David Gilbert's Unraveled 'Mega Man' videos, but I also want you to know that leaving this menacing section called ' *The Elf Wars* ' to be only explained at AROUND HOUR FIVE is giving me big "The Time Break" energy
oh my god i just realized Doctor Weil sounds like Dr. Wily I'm *gonna RIOT*
So funny thing about ZX for those that haven't played it: I remembered an interview in a magazine where someone that worked on ZX was interviewed. He talked about Vent and Aile having two different storylines, so I went through both characters.
Aile is told about what is going on.
Vent is told very little of what's going on.
That's it.
Also Omega is in a cavern for some reason.
So is Vent’s story just like: “I’m just gonna kill you now” while nearly everyone explains why Aile survived the Maverick attacks?
@@KingOfFools784 One month late but... yeah, pretty much. Vent is more brash, so it makes some sense that no one tells him anything. While Aile is more chill so the characters actually explain stuff to her. For example, Giro tells her that he's been a Guardian behind the scenes while with Vent he pretends he doesn't know about them. Heck, in Aile's story we even get a brief mention of the Game of Destiny.
As for Omega, I believe Area-N is either the remnants of that lab from the last battle of Zero 3 or the remains of Omega's spaceship from the very start of Zero 3; which houses Omega's data in the Cyberworld. Omega has the ability to cause the Cyberworld to manifest in the physical world (it's a gameplay feature in Zero 3) so his data sort of automatically manifested into a battle simulation and then became a Biometal, or something close enough to a Biometal, on its own.
Let’s not forget the cliffhanger advent left us on ☠️☠️. It’s crazy to think because the plan was to flood the world . And come megaman legends that plan came to fruition just never explained or shown how or what went wrong . And outside of this video and other dedicated fans . Archie comics is the only source that shows a put together timeline through small panels . It was cool to see x and zero in their upgraded suits going into the elf wars pre mmz they even showed axel in that panel
Edit : megaman issue #55 by archie comics time man has a little accident and long story short dr light has a glimpse into the future but more then just one era , he sees the events of the maverick wars , elf wars , mmz , zx/advent . With the last panel shown being megaman legends with gang staring off into the sea
You're not the only one holding it back, at the part with the helmet. Zero, man... I cried every time.
It's a shame that Zero died like an idiot.
@@rockmenx8xx411Nobody's perfect.
@@rockmenx8xx411 wait what, can you elaborate on that
most of what I got in a nutshell in a funny way was this:
megaman series: “why won’t wily just die”
megaman X series: “why won’t sigma just die”
megaman Zero series: “why won’t you let me die”
One thing about the Classic series that messed me up was that Wily having a prior professional relationship with Light turned out to be an invention of the North American manuals until 11 finally made it canon (and even then they just went to the same university instead of working together as professional roboticists. Every other adaptation just went with it, so I never questioned it until recently.
Seems similar to how in Sonic, "Eggman" is a nickname for Doctor Robotnik, when originally, those were just the Japanese and American names in the first manual.
@@calemr For the movie, I thought it would be neat if he was known as an eccentric doctor of Robotics, combining the names by calling him something like "Dr. Robot-Nick" Eggman.
¿Didn't the concept art from Megaman 1 showing them working on robots kind of confirm such prior professional relationship though? I always saw that as confirmation of a long collaboration between both robots which then was expanded in the 1997 manga "Mega Man Megamix" which outright shows a young Light and Wily been friends during their college days.
i am honestly so upset that ZX Advent ended on such a cliffhanger. I would honestly have loved a third game in the series, especially with Inti at the helm considering the masterwork they pulled with Blaster Master. Hell, who knows? With the scattering of MM content we’ve been getting we might just get our game someday. a man can hope…
MM legends community laughs at your optimism.
Hell. They were actually making the seauel. It was called megaman ZxC. But capcom cancelled it in favor of mm9 in 2009...
@@rocoX1234 painge
@@rocoX1234 wait really
Cries in Legends.
I find it funny how Zero starts off as the first maverick, becomes good, then sacrifices himself by techically going maverick.
Also no mention of Zero's last words:
"I never cared about justice, and I don't recall ever calling myself a hero. I have always only fought for the people I believe in. I won't hesitate. If an enemy appears in front of me. I will destroy it!"
Chills
Zero is just so fucking cool
I never played the 2D play forming Megaman games. I first played BN and loved it, and then I played the 2D zero games and those slapped. Tried playing megaman 11 or whatever that was released on the switch and it feels so ducking lame. Can only shoot in one direction, slow, and the bosses were eh.
zero's always been my preferred megaman character to play as because energy sword and hes red and badass
@@jaimeruiz7837I always liked the more simplistic gameplay of the classic games, even if they addmitedly do look kinda lame in comparison.
The fact I already knew all of this somehow did not make the video less interesting. Excellent presentation and format.
Finally made my way through the entire thing. This was a lot of fun!
No line from Cossack to Tundra Man? That hurts more than no Wily to Zero line.
As far as the MMZero design is concerned, taking X8 into consideration really helps lead to the idea that the designs are slowly becoming more and more human-like since the X8 designs are really slimmed down.
But I loved this, it was a lot of fun and the jokes were on point. It'd be fun to have you on our show, Ramblin' Reploids for a fun Mega Chat.
Also, 10/10 explosion ending.
oh no youre right! there shoulda been a line!! at least i showed the diagram. That's true about the X8 designs being slimmer, too. HMMMM
about changing body too..
Megaman 11 also change classic megaman body design into X era
I believe this was the first time I unironically listen to a guy talk about Megaman 8 hours straight. I absolutely do not regret a single minute of this. This has been my go-to while doing chores for the past week and I cannot stress enough how thankful I am for the fact that you allowed me to rekindle the joy of being a Megaman fan, something I have moved on from long ago
Subscribed off of this alone. Zero regrets
Does this mean that, at some point, you ironically listened to someone talk about Megaman for 8 hours straight? Because that's a lot of effort for the sake of irony and I can respect that.
@@paulodanteneto1645 Pfft. If I had the opportunity, I would
Worryingly, this was not the first time I unironically listened to a guy talk about Megaman for 8 straight hours.
Zero had no regrets.
I came for laughs and finished crying for metal men, thank you for your work. One of the most amazing Mega Man related videos ever made!
Diosmio, es el mismísimo Champ
El mismísimo Champ... Te amamos.
It's my sleepover, and I get to choose the movie.
You forgot there's "sleep" in "sleepover"
A sleepover where we don't talk about boys, we talk about (Mega) Men
4:20:50 So basically, when Zero was first awakened, he was completely nuts, the only thing he got on his mind was killing, he won't listen to anyone, which is the reason why Wily sealed him away and created the Virus to complete his programming in the first place. Awakened Zero, on the other hand, was sane, evil and obedient to Dr. Wily's will of destroying X and conquering the world (X4 Zero's flashback).
yeah basically, I also like to think of "awakened zero" as the first incarnation of omega because Omega/awakened zero is who zero is supposed to be, but the Zero X knows only came to be by accident.
But, by a twist of faith, he became the embodiment of Dr.Wily original dreams of what he wanted robots to become. machines of unmatched power and speed, Wily wanted robots to be seen as heroes by making them stronger than humans. This was shown in mega man 11 and the echoes of these desires exists in the zero we know.
I loved all the PCP lectures and it's the main reason I helped support Radcon kickstarters back in the day. Yours, Nates, and Tom Oliver's were some top tier content. Appreciate you reviving the format.
What specifically happened to the PCP crew? Did some drama happen that cause them to disband or did everyone just slowly drift away to the four winds?
@Elonyx Bit of column A and B, I jumped into it well after it was all crumbling away, so I can't speak with utmost certainty as to the exact reasons. PCP originally had both Mumkey Jones and Jeff from Mother's Basement. The most recent fracturing came from diverging personality and beliefs and ensuing arguments because of such.
The old pcp lectures were the first instance of this kind of long form content I remember watching, and seeing the format gain popularity recently has brought me great joy, as is now seeing your take on it. Love the video.
Thank you for making this. I've always been peripherally fascinated by the Mega Man franchise for years due to owning copies of Legends and Legends 2 in my early youth many years ago, but never had the drive to fully dive in due to the story and lore always being described as obscure and convoluted and increasingly difficult to follow as more games were added over time and my interest in the franchise had waned almost to the point of apathy after hearing of basically every future project being cancelled back in 2011/2012. Now after watching this across 3 sittings and finally gaining some baseline understanding of what's happening in the games' universe spoken with such raw enthusiasm, I'm now eyeing that 30th anniversary collection and the Zero/ZX legacy collection and will probably end up playing every game in the franchise that I am able to get my hands on (and probably watching playthroughs of the Legends games since I no longer own them nor do I own a ps1 to play them on.)
Thank you so much for rekindling an interest of mine that had been dormant for decades.❤
I'm pretty sure at the end of Mega Man 3 when Protoman's face is in the clouds you can see Wily's capsule floating over the trees suggesting that he did in fact escape and the Wily in future games is not a robot.
Thanks for doing justice to my childhood. I really appreciated.
Megaman gameplay: good game
Megaman lore: WARS CRIMES
I’m only 3 hours in but I’m loving this video. A lot of Megaman lore videos skip the fun details or bring too much outside canon into the discussion, so this video is pretty much perfect.
I need a Zero death-counter
Coming down from the biblical events of the ZX/Legends timeline into the Saturday Morning antics of MM9 and MM10 was the wildest mood shift I’ve felt in years.
It was cool to see the implications of Sigma-Virus being Roboenza form. Also, the reveal that humans and robots became One And The Same being followed by the exploration of a time when robots were slaves with built in death sentences was disturbing.
I suppose whatever Future Wily and Classic Wily did to Quint was some form of the Sigma Virus as well.
@@moltengarnet I still can't wrap my head at the prospect of "robots and humans becoming a single race" considering the obvious scientific implausability that such a scenario entails. No wonder Megaman Legends doesn't even bother in explaining anything when the very concept behind the "Carbon's" abbility to switch bodyparts with weapons and external limbs has a clearly fantasy approach than any real life plausability which would fit the basic sci-fi narrative of the earlier games. To me all this stuff was more laughable and comedic than "dark" when the Humanity presented in the Megaman games not only comes off as incompetent in handling their many problems but also totally inhuman when it comes to how they treat robots in moments of crisis (concentration camps in Neo Arcadia?) and one another when they commit genocide (trapping an oldman in a robot suit instead of just locking him up?).
It's like Capcom wanted the later Megaman games to be as detached from reality as posible to justify the loudest of premises without any sound logic and reason other than "because it's cool".
@@moltengarnet Wonder if "Future Wily" was any different from Classic Wily in the creation of Zero. For all we know the future from which Quint came from may have been "splintered" from the main timeline Dragon Ball style the second Classic Wily brought Future Megaman to the past to take him down. OMG maybe the X Saga and beyond take place in the splintered timeline where Megaman became Quint?? That could explain the lack of Classic Megaman by the time of X's awakening having been caused by his transformation into Quint...
This video was amazing, and also way funnier than I was expecting! There were many times I had to pause the video for a second until I could stop laughing and continue xD
The level of commitment you put into this video is utterly awe inspiring. I, personally, am only well versed in the Legends games, so being able to learn about the connections between all of these series has been a real treat. I honestly just don't know how to convey my appreciation for all of the time and care you put into the research, filming, editing, and whatever else. I guess all I can say is, "I wish I could have heard of you sooner, but at least I'm here now." Thank you, Ben Saint, from the bottom of my nerdy heart.
One of my favorite theories about the MM to MMX thing is that Wily activated Zero without doing the 30+ years of diagnostics, due to being arrogant, and Zero ended up being completely insane and wiped out everyone and the MM family had to sacrifice themselves in order to stop him.
1:57:35 While technically being part of a different continuity, according to the Mega Man X PSP remake Sigma is the one that rebuilds them, although when you face Launch Octopus he acts in a completely emotionless and robotic way. So maybe the argument could be made that you can rebuild a reploid, but you can't reproduce their personality or maybe Sigma just couldn't be bothered to actually give one back to them.
Gospel was almost certainly changed to Treble because of Nintendo of America's no religion policy. After that changing Forte to Bass to match as a musical counterpart to Treble was actually a really clever move.
That makes so much sense, what a great point, hadn’t thought of that.
I've never really played anything besides the BN games(really fun jrpg games), so all of this was new to me essentially.
I've been hacking away at this lecture for couple days now and just coming up on 5 hours, I'm so hooked. I love this so much. Your passion, your edits, your pacing. It's Just wanted to say thanks for the awesome video!
I _highly_ recommend The Protomen. They do Mega Man rock operas which are just incredible. Their album Act II: Father of Death could easily be a Broadway musical
Are they even still active?
@@casteanpreswyn7528they came out with a song "The Fight" last year. Sounds like MegaMan and maybe Roll talking, and like it's gonna be on the third album, whenever that's gonna be..
@eddymartinez7961 interesting, I had thought they completely stopped making music a few years ago. Then again, been out of that scene for year so meh.
@@casteanpreswyn7528 yea I gave up hope for a third album a while ago but hearing that song reignited that faith lol. The wait is excruciating they take forever. Killer albums though
@casteanpreswyn7528 they are still very active and tour every year. They have stated continuously that act 3 is coming. But they make other songs to. Do covers and music with some other bands also. They are near constantly doing stuff lol. I just wish they'd take the time to finish act 3 then keep doing what they are doing lol
I'm happy that this video got popular despite being 8 hours long. More people deserve to know mega man lore
I don't know if deserve is the right word but point taken.
I started this video knowing virtually nothing about Megaman/Rockman. Why did I watch? I have no idea. Do I regret it? Absolutely not. This deserves way more likes and views than it got, especially given the length and amount of time that must've been spent.
It took me about 10 days, but I just finished all 8 hours of this video. I originally was only interested in how the classic series connected to the X series, but boy did I get a satisfying amount of mind-blowing material beyond that! I absolutely am fascinated by how many threads are continuous through the entire series even across multiple subseries.
I see many others have commented the same, but I am so impressed by the amount of dedication and work this video must have taken. You're almost at 1M views here, so I'm glad to see your work is being appreciated.
One thing you didn't mention about the evil energy is the maverick virus theory is that they both share the exact same visual cues, made most obvious with maverick zero in 5. I think it's also pretty safe to say that since the virus makes zero stronger, wily designed him to run on the stuff.
Wily learned a LOT from his relatively short time spent studying the Evil Energy, it would seem... Either that, or he located more of it that Duo somehow missed/didn't "take into custody" during his time on Earth and that energy would serve as the basis for the Zero/Sigma/Maverick Virus and later the Nightmare.
Regarding the New Generation Reploids' ability to go Maverick at will, we kinda need to establish something that isn't brought up in the video itself, maybe because the source of it most people would point to is Maverick Hunter X, though I believe it also gets broad in other sourcebooks. In the beginning, before Sigma's rebellion, Mavericks are primarily defined as Reploids and Mechaniloids that go haywire due to program errors, hardware malfunction or what could be described as a sort of psychic breakdown due to not being able to, literally, compute what is happening around them (Iris fits this, somewhat, as she goes crazy from grief other the loss of her brother).
As an example, it is stated that Vile, who is a Maverick Hunter initially, gets declared a Maverick and locked up because he causes too much collateral damage while exercising his duties as a Hunter. The source of this taste for violence and destruction is attributed to a short-circuiting in his electronic brain or some other form of physical defect. Whether this is something that is correctable is never brought up in any media that I'm aware of. Later on, we start focussing more on all the different types of viruses that can affect a Reploid or Mechaniloid by either making them go berserk or rendering them more susceptible to suggestion or bringing out hidden tendencies of their psyche and turning them violent. Magma Dragoon betrays the Maverick Hunters in X4 because he wanted to test his mettle against X and Zero, something that he likely got encouraged to via manipulation by the Maverick / Sigma Virus.
As for Lumine and New Generation Reploids, the main issue that Lumine is threatening X with is the fact that all of them have the potential and ability to go Maverick of their own accord. Not because of a viral infection, not because of corrupted DNA or some flawed circuitry, but because they may *choose* to do so. It's like saying that every self-driving car that exists today may at any point *willingly* decide to just steer into oncoming traffic because it felt like it. Yes, everyone with free will has the capacity for good and evil and yes there are already Reploid criminals in the world of X, but the point here is that there is an entire line of much more powerful Reploids that are pre-disposed to start rebelling from the get-go. You could also consider Lumine is taunting X with the fact that as long as there are Reploids who exercise free will, there will always be those who will rise up against humans for a myriad of reasons, so the fight will never stop. This also ties into the Motherelf and Project Elpis/Elpizo. The Motherelf was designed to cure Reploids of a rampant-running Sigma Virus and cure them of the reason so many went Maverick, but to Weil, this wasn't good enough. Reploids couldn't be trusted, so his ultimate weapon was to just take control of all Reploids on the planet and ensure they wouldn't do anything but obey their human masters.
This is why the epilogue / post-credits scene of X8 mentions how the production of NGRs was eventually halted, although it is also stated that it was quietly started back up later at some point for some reason. Since you are not going to cover it, the main villain of Command Mission eventually turns out to be another NGR (Sigma isn't in Command Mission, he doesn't even get so much as a mention) who wants to further the evolutionary potential of Reploids (something that Gate is obsessed with and Sigma specifically states that he is interested in this as well, particularly X' potential, in Maverick Hunter X).
Regarding Ciel and ZX, according to an interview with Takeshi Horinouchi, the producer at Capcom for Zero 4, ZX and ZXA, ZX takes place 200 years after the fall of Ragnarok. Considering how the line between human and Reploid is so blurred in ZX that they are only really distinguishable by that forehead triangle, it is quite plausible that Ciel artificially extended her lifespan by adopting a Reploid body herself. Nobody really has a flesh and blood body anymore in the ZX era, which is probably aluding to Legends where carbons can just replace pieces of themselves at will.
It is also not clear if Ciel is dead. It always struck me as a plot point that was to be addressed in ZX3, but Capcom never greenlit that game. The last thing we know of Ciel is that she instructed Giro to take in survivors of Maverick raids, in hopes of finding more chosen ones for the Biometals / Live Metals.
I believe it's stated in extra material to the games that Ciel is basically a cyborg. Not nearly to the point that Weil is, but she is a "test tube" baby, heavily implied to be made from Alia's DNA, and augmented to be super smart. The reason being that they needed super intelligent people to help rebuild after the elf wars. I'm sure that Ciel could already live longer than normal humans, though it is possible that she further augmented herself.
I wonder if the C in ZXC was meant to be Ciel
@@TheFluBugZ the original idea was she was a cyborg
But master Albert exists
@@erikaatayde8919 i think it could be for ciel
Now that you mention it, Lumine's kind of Lucifer, but not really. I don't think it's clarified that *he* was the one who gave reploids the capability to go maverick at will. But laying it out that the reploids pretty much have begun to adopt free will and since maverick just means going against the usual programming sometimes instead of a virus, that seems like an equivalent to the tree of knowledge with the apple that lets you know which is good and bad.
Forget 10 minute videos, THIS is what I need. 8 hours of pure story. Thank you so much.🎉
EXACTLY!
Took a few days to watch the whole thing. Truly amazing work.
7:46:06 This speculation can be taken further. Consider:
- We know that Proto Man's energy system has a flaw that that causes him pain and will result in a shorter lifespan. For whatever reason, apparently Mega Man Powered Up says Wily replaced it with a Nuclear generator but it was unstable or something, idk this seems to be non-canon.
- Wily discovered Bassnium (a type of energy, called Fortenium in JP) by accident and used it for Bass' energy device. Part of his long running goal to make more powerful robots that could destroy Mega Man (followed by King and the foiled plans for King II).
- In Mega Man 8 they introduce "evil energy" which is a very powerful alien energy that reproduces by harnessing hatred and uses that to replicate and infect others. Mega Man is briefly infected and Bass purposely infects himself.
- In Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters, all three of these plotlines are touched on. Light discovers the "energy from that time" on Earth, attempts to study it (but finds it impossible to analyze) and develops parts for it, Wily steals them, everyone recovers it. in the endings, Wily discusses that Bassnium will no longer being the most powerful energy on Earth and shows off the plans for Zero, Duo points out that the "energy from that time" resembles his and comes from space and detects "justice energy" inside Mega Man and Bass (but not Proto Man) and returns home with both of these energies, and Light tries to convince Proto Man to let him fix his energy system and Proto Man refuses.
Clearly Zero is somehow related to an energy from space. Either he's built using said energy or he's built using a new energy developed by Wily based on his knowledge gained from stealing said energy/parts.
So, speculations:
- Zero's energy system uses "evil energy" or another related alien energy. It's possible this is why he is impossible to analyze. It's also possible X's energy system uses "justice energy" or another related energy from that time.
- Zero is an overhauled Proto Man.
- The Maverick Virus is the "evil energy" (or some variant). This is why Zero reacts strangely to exposure.
- X is immune to the Maverick Virus because he carries "justice energy".
- Mega Man and Bass either converted residual "evil energy" into "justice energy" (by imprinting on it or something), or the "justice energy" was what was left after Duo removed the "evil energy" and then it multiplied thanks to Mega Man and Base's emotions, or it could be an immune reaction of sorts.
- Wily imprinted on the "evil energy" and this is how he has survived.
- It's not super clear to me exactly how the mother elf was developed from Zero. It seems it wasn't just developed as a countermeasure to the maverick virus, but was actually developed from the maverick virus itself. Based on the content in the MMZ Official Complete Works, it sounds like Inti Creates didn't intend this (given what it says about X being the origin of the virus) but if one accepts the speculation that the maverick virus is such energy then, one may wonder whether a cyber elf is actually the result of such energy being imprinted on by an individual. We know that Cyber-Elves die when they use up their energy so there's that too.
I'd heard a theory that the MM7 confrontation with Willy was kind of hinting at something going strange with Rock's programing and leading up to the development and deep diagnostics with X.
Definitely wanted to highlight in X5 the Wily connections, namely Sigma seems to heavily hint towards Wilys involvement and more importantly: Sigma W seems to literally be Sigma in Gamma's body
I believe one unofficial name for Final Sigma W is "Gamma Sigma", as much as a Greek mouthful that designation tends to be. Also, the fight uses a remix of Gamma's boss theme, in keeping with the blatant "W" imagery flashing everywhere.
I was 9 when MMZero came out, and I remember seeing a one page ad in a gaming magazine that proclaimed it was "the hardest(or was it most challenging) Megaman game yet!". Growing up with the X games and thinking they were hard got me all sorts of excited - not to mention my love for Zero as a charchter already, a series focused on him?!
Got it for Xmas that year and loved how ball bustingly hard it was for me - like you, Phantoms suicide bomb caught me completely off guard and I was so pissed when I had to restart the level due to that, but god damn even then I had to admit that was good on the devs part...
And my brother in Mother Elf, I got teary eyed when you started talking about Zeros end - you arent the only one holding it back!
Mega Man Zero games ARE hard. Even for a guy like me who plays hard Mega Man X games.
I tried playing the game via MMLC. I just can't get going. I love Mega Man, but Zero was hard. You thought the original Mega Man was hard? Psh, Mega Man Zero said "hold my beer."
Not only do you have to beat Phantom in a pretty tough boss fight for early game, you have to dodge the explosion. And THEN, you have to go and defuse all the bombs he left for you across the factory. I had to come back as a grown ass man in the ZX Collection and beat it there. Kid me could never.
Can you make this a series? Lore explained in obsessive detail? This is the first thing I've seen on your channel and I feel like it sets a standard for what I want to come back to. Great job!
I mean, it kind of is an insane commitment in terms of time and effort. These kinds of videos need a sponsor and AT LEAST 1 million views to be worth the effort, I think
@@zangbang9886 I agree this totally deserves a million views.