Topic: Would you consider Megaman to be the "Madonna" of video games?

[Sigma Zero X]

My inner Megaman and Madonna fanboyism made me make a topic like this.

If anyone does not know who Madonna is, she is a singer who reinvents herself, gains different fans through her various albums, and does not really care about what people think about her. I feel that the Megaman games portray similar characteristics.

Does anyone feel the same way or think differently?

[Hypershell]

I'd say he WAS, back during the PS1, PS2, and GBA games.

During the last console generation, though, Mega Man's become more of a symbol of Capcom's lack of ambition.  ZX was the last worthwhile "evolution" that Mega Man really saw, IMHO.  Advent corrected a few technical flaws (not to mention localization) and added a nice gameplay gimmick, but it also steered the emphasis a bit in the wrong direction (getting bogged down with sub-quests that have VERY FEW worthwhile rewards, and the secret post-game power-ups are pretty much negligible).

Pretty much every other Mega Man platformer to see release since 2006 survives only by dry-humping the past rather than trying to expand on it, and Capcom can only even get that right about half the time.  Evolving a series does not mean discarding the general feel and aesthetic, and this is something that Capcom just doesn't seem to "get" without restricting themselves to the NES format (which exposes the fact that their level design is not up to the same standards it was 20-25 years ago).  THE ONE THING they ought to have learned by returning to the NES format was properly tight control, and then Universe, their very next game to at least update its visuals, has you walking off the edges of platforms due to imprecise movement.

I also think that Universe's attempt to "americanize" its visuals was a badly misguided over-focus on "what people think about him".  There this attitude in Japan that Japanese stuff doesn't sell to the rest of the world; I realize that Inafune wants to shed the image of Japan having lost their edge in game development, and I can certainly understand why, given that Mega Man has become a textbook example of his criticisms of the industry.  But he really, really went about it the wrong way.  For the veteran fans the "anime" aesthetic has been part of Mega Man since before we knew what anime was.  It's part of his identity.  It also happens to dominate the U.S.'s current Saturday morning cartoons, and it's pretty much the ONLY way you get children in this neck of the world to read comics anymore, so yeah, HORRIBLE timing there.