Being a Snob Makes You a Bad Fan

So, some of you might already know that I'm a huge Mega Man nerd (if not, now you do); I've got physical copies of MOST of the games, I collect the comics... Hell, my very talented sister-in-law designed me a Mega Man tattoo, which now occupies most of the inside of my left forearm!

If you're not familiar with the franchise, lemme bring you up to speed with a lore tl;dr: At some point in a distant future, sentient humanoid and non-humonoid robots are commonplace and two rival scientists, Drs. Thaddeus Light and Albert W. Wily are more or less responsible for this brave new robotic world. Their robots are benevolent, subservient, and helpful to humanity...until Wily and about half-a-dozen of his most powerful creations go rogue and start making a mess of everything. In response, one of Dr. Light's most intelligent, most capable robots, Rock, volunteers to convert himself into a battle ready robot, so that he can take Wily to task and bring his marauding creations to heel. Rock becomes Mega Man, and gets to platforming his way through six-to-eight whimsically-themed levels containing even more whimsical-looking robot enemies until he meets with and defeats, the similarly themed "Robot Master" boss of the level. Upon defeating the boss, he clones their (also whimsically-themed) special attack, and uses it to give him an advantage in the ensuing levels.

It's fun, if formulaic, but it's far more challenging than it sounds (in fact some folks would tell you it's easily one of the most challenging game franchises in history), and the soundtracks in these games are nothing short of iconic. My brother and I basically grew up on these games. In saying that, another bit of relevant lore here: The Mega Man franchise has been around since the mid-80s, with the first game appearing on the NES. And from those days all the way to today, it rarely ever deviates from its formula, and the times where it did were either not well received by the fandom, they were objectively less-than-stellar attempts to further the franchise via clumsy attempts at injecting unwanted novelty into a franchise that KNOWS what it is, and KNOWS what its fan base wants.

That said, there's always been a blind spot in my experience with the franchise, and that's the Battle Network games.

Again, a bit of a lore primer here, the Megaman Battle Network series of games came late in the franchise. Some time around the early 2000s with the advent of Nintendo's Game Boy Advance. It was one of those aforementioned instances where the franchise zigged instead of zagging. Rather than a platformer, what you got was a Tactical RPG which quite obviously had taken some of its influence from Pokémon. And that would be fine, if that's where the divergence ended. But for whatever reason they went further, turning Mega Man from a robot into ostensibly Tron with an arm cannon, stuffing the game full of awkward, corny references to real-world Y2K-era tech terms, seemingly in an attempt to staple and duct tape cultural zeitgeist relevance into a franchise that never needed it.

At the risk of sounding cringe myself, as someone who's not only worked in tech for over two decades, but has actively surrounded himself with tech most of his life, stuff like this can come off like nails on a chalkboard.

Buuuuut... Recently thanks to Humble Bundle, I snagged all the Mega Man Legacy collections on Steam. INCLUDING the Battle Network games. I rolled my eyes at first, but eventually, I realized that maybe, just maybe, I was being a bit of an insufferable snob. Turns out, despite the cringe, it's actually an incredibly engaging and very fun game. I'm glad I gave my head a shake and actually gave it a try.

The moral here is obvious: First impressions ain't everything. It's a trap I've fallen prey to far too many times in the past, whether it's a video game, or music, or TV, or any kind of art. Give it a second look. More often than not you'll be surprised. And if you're a fan of some franchise somewhere and you've turned your nose up at one entry or another in the franchise because it looked different, without even giving it a chance, you're doing yourself, and the fandom, a huge disservice and honestly, you're being one of the fans we all roll our eyes at. Don't do that shit. You're better than that.