YMMV / Mega Man

• Archive Panic: Eight series across two timelines means you're going to be at it for quite awhile. The classic series alone has over 30 titles. Add in all of the sequel series, and you're up to around 70. Including all of the ports, remakes and mobile games, and you have well over 100 titles to cover. Good luck!
• Awesome Music: So much that it has its own page. It would almost be easier to list the music that ISN'T awesome, to be honest.
• Base-Breaking Character: The Devil, across its many appearances, starting with the Yellow Devil in Mega Man. It's one of the most iconic designs in the franchise, and its general pattern and character is incredibly distinct, and it's almost always one of the hardest fights in its respective game (barring the Green Devil, anyway). It's also often reviled for many of its fights also being incredibly monotonous, due to its general design of "long period of dodging little pieces, then a weak spot appears for about one second to ensure you can get maybe one hit on him, then go back to dodging." It certainly doesn't help the debate that the boss's variants shows up in a lot of games.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • Classic: Dr. Wily is sometimes treated as the real hero and superior scientist who would've fixed everything if Dr. Light hadn't shut him down out of jealousy. Mega Man 11 bumped it up significantly when we saw Wily had altruistic motives with his Double Gear system. It doesn't change that he's still a spiteful, petty man whose decision was turned down out of safety and decided taking over the world was the better career choice.
  • X:
    • Vile. Fans like to pair him with X, forgetting that he loathes X in canon and tried to kill him. Repeatedly. Later though, Mega Man: Maverick Hunter X made Vile a playable character and changed the story to accommodate him as a Nominal Hero instead of completely evil (though he still hates X).
    • Dynamo, who admittedly has a cool design, a double-sided beam saber, and awesome boss music. Too bad fans forget that he tried to drop a colony on the planet, was creepily subservient to Sigma, tried to stop the heroes from saving the planet, and had a cheerily fun time doing it. Yet people like to write him as a lovable goofy prankster who joins the Hunters.
  • Legends: The Bonnes. Granted, Capcom treats them as anti-heroes more than anything (Tron in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is a great example) and they do have their standards (they don't steal toilet paper nor appreciate wanton murder), but they're pirates, deep down. They invade random islands and destroy buildings, all for profit. And yet they're still the most well-liked villains in any Mega Man game.
• Estrogen Brigade: Surprisingly, the Mega Man franchise had a large female fanbase, probably because of how cute and charming Rock Light aka Classic Mega Man is and as well as some of the other Mega Men other than X. Yaoi Fangirls are also drawn in by the sheer volume of shippable male characters.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The Blue Bomber, used for every incarnation with the sole exception of Zero, who is sometimes called the Crimson Red Reploid (some artbooks and fanfics dub him the Red Ripper). Also Mr. Clean for Sigma, and the Wily Eyebrow Thing for Dr. Wily's unusual taunt. Zero's weird green chest lights are also called the Booblights.
  • The Blue Bomber title was actually used in commercials and Star Force 2. It's also used as one of the achievements in 9.
  • The earliest mentions of the "Blue Bomber" nickname come from Nintendo Power back when it was still published directly by Nintendo (specifically, the seventh issue, with 2 on the cover). Thus, it's one of the very few instances where the Fan Nickname was created by a company instead of the fandom.
  • And he's called the Blue Bomber because he's blue!
  • In the same issue which introduced the Blue Bomber nickname, Nintendo Power tried another nickname as well: the Indigo Invader. That one hasn't stood the test of time as well.
  • OVER-1 received many nicknames (most common being "Xover") before and after his official name was revealed; he's a bit of an odd case (by Mega Man standards) in that quite a few fans outright refuse to refer to him as OVER-1, for various reasons.
• Fanwork-Only Fans: Even those who haven't played a single canon Mega Man game have most likely run into a fan game, fan comic, webcomic, animation, fanfiction, and/or ROM hack of the franchise.
• First Installment Wins: All of the different series have more than their fair share of fans, but when people think Mega Man, it's usually the Classic series that instantly comes to mind, and is the most iconic of them all. The X series follows shortly after.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • The Mega Man and Nintendo Fanbases in general are on really friendly terms with each other, with the majority of Nintendo fans seeing Mega Man as an honorary Nintendo franchise thanks to the latter making its grand debut on the Nintendo Entertainment System and mostly being synonymous with Nintendo consoles ever since. It even got to the point where Mega Man had been confirmed as the first third-party newcomer of Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U and had been acclaimed by both Nintendo and Mega Man fans alike! In terms of specific Nintendo fanbases, however, the Kirby and Super Mario Bros. fanbases quite arguably have the biggest camaraderie with the Mega Man fanbase; aside from the numerous fanart between Mega Man and Kirby/Mario, the friendship between the Kirby and Mega Man fanbases is due to the respective protagonists of said video game franchises being Badass Adorable Kid Heroes with Power Copying abilities, and the friendship between the Mario and Mega Man fanbases can even be traced to having Mega Man characters prominent in some of the Club Nintendo comics that star Super Mario Bros. characters (and for that matter, the presence of a Mega Man costume in Mario Kart 8 and even Mega Man himself in Super Mario Maker via the Mystery Mushroom).
  • The Mega Man fans also tend to get along well with fans of Sonic the Hedgehog. Some of the earliest examples of the Mega Man-Sonic alliance are the scores of crossover sprite comics and animations between the two in the early 2000s, thanks to the popularity of the Mega Man sprite-sharing website Sprites Inc. The most popular crossovers included Final Fantasy Sonic X, Sonic's Quest for Power, and even Super Mario Bros. Z to some extent. This alliance finally made its way into official material in the Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) in the "Worlds Collide" crossover arc.
  • There's a surprising amount of overlap between the Mega Man fandom and Touhou Project's fandom. The most plausible explanation is that it's because of Mega Mari. (It may also be because both games are frequented by challenge-seekers.)
  • The Mega Man series (mainly the classic era) also overlaps with fans of Astro Boy created by Osamu Tezuka due to sharing some similarities with each other. It's not uncommon to see fanart of the titular protagonist interacting with each other. Some fans even decided to ship them together.
  • A more niche overlap in fandoms comes in the form of Mega Man and Pokémon, which primarily stems from the fact that a large number of artists who originally did work for Mega Man (of note being Hitoshi Ariga and Hideki Ishikawa, who mostly did work for the Classic series and Legends) went on to become freelance artists for both the Pokémon video games and TCG. Looking at the art styles side-by-side◊ make the similarities present, and fans from both franchises have banded together to appreciate the overlap and enjoy what each one brings to the table.
  • There's some overlap with My Life as a Teenage Robot since that show has quite a few parallels with the Mega Man series.
• Goddamned Bats: Many, many, many enemies, including Mets.
• Retroactive Recognition: Out of all the fan-submitted Robot Master designs, one name in particular stands out: Yusuke Murata, creator of Eyeshield 21 and artist for the One-Punch Man manga, who created Dust Man◊ and Crystal Man◊.
• Ron the Death Eater:
  • Classic: Dr. Light gets treatment as the real monster for pushing AI research and turning down Dr. Wily's Double Gear idea out of safety concerns. 11 didn't help matters when Light himself admits he should've been more accepting of Wily's ideas. The worst treat him as if everything in the series was his fault even though it relied on a variety of factors Light could never have predicted.
  • X: X himself is treated as a total wimp just because he's actually vocal about not liking to fight bad guys and wanting to live in peace with his temporary retirement in X7 being a Never Live It Down bit in particular. This ignores the fact that X will get back up and fight to his last no matter what and remains The Hero throughout the entire series.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: It's practically tradition for the second game in a series to be leaps and bounds better than the first, and successively improves. The exceptions to this rule are Mega Man Star Force, which took until the third game for this to take effect, Mega Man X, where the first is often considered better with the second game being considered on par with or slightly worse than it, and the Mega Man Gameboy games, where the second game is considered the weakest game in the whole Classic era while the fifth one is most well-remembered for not entirely retreading old ground and is one of the few Gameboy titles that can actually stand alongside the NES titles.

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