The guy himself

The guy himself

Why do I do this

Thinking about playing a video game and telling myself “no, I should play all of them” is a thing that has happened a couple of times already.

In the past I’ve gone on marathons where I play most Mario games in release order to celebrate Mario’s 35th anniversary, or play all the Castlevania games just because I want to, or replay all the Metroid games in preparation for Metroid Dread’s release.

These are the kind of marathons I’ve done most of the time; games that aren’t too long, and for a specific reason. Where this fell apart recently is when I decided to replay all the Souls games in preparation for Elden Ring’s DLC. I only managed to replay the Demon’s Souls remake in the time I gave myself before the DLC released. Oops.

In ancient times (2017-2018 maybe) I gave myself a goal of playing all the Final Fantasy games. I had more free time back then and somehow actually managed to (mostly) do it. In about a year and a half I managed to get through Final Fantasies 1 through 12 (not counting 11 of course). It was a hell of a ride but it taught me a lot about Final Fantasy as a franchise. A fun adventure overall. I will certainly talk about it again here someday.

The quest begins

So here we are now with this current goal of playing through all the Mega Man games. I set out to do this for no specific reason other than loving the series and possibly also wanting to use my great emulation setup I have on my Steam Deck. I put a lot of time and effort into setting up a huge comprehensive library of retro games in the past two years, alongside emulators and frontends and shaders, and now that I have it mostly finished and functional I want to use it.

I have played a lot of these games before, but not all of them, at least not all to completion. I will be doing my best to finish all of them, including the not so great ones. Thankfully, Mega Man games tend to be short. I’ll be updating this article, checking off the games as I beat them.

The games

Below is the actual list of games I intend to try getting to. The Battle Network/Star Force series are mostly unknown to me, so we’ll see about those when I get there.

Some games might get added along the way, like how I didn’t know I wanted to play Mega Man Powered Up after I played Mega Man 1 or how I didn’t initially know I wanted to play the Wily Wars versions of 2, 3 and 4.

Notable absences here are:

  • Mega Man (DOS): no thanks. no need to do this to myself.
  • Mega Man X Command Mission: not that it’s bad or anything but I don’t want to get into this kind of spinoff here.
  • Mega Man Network Transmission: I’ve played this one on gamecube when it was new and I remember it is dogshit so. no thanks. I might change my mind unfortunately.

Also of note is that I do not intend to play more than one version per game in the case of the Battle Network/Star Force games, as they have a sort of Pokemon-like thing going on.

Mega Man

Mega Man X

  • Mega Man X (SNES)
  • Mega Man Maverick Hunter X (PSP)
  • Mega Man X2 (SNES)
  • Mega Man X3 (SNES)
  • Mega Man Xtreme (Game Boy Color)
  • Mega Man Xtreme 2 (Game Boy Color)
  • Mega Man X4 (PSX)
  • Mega Man X5 (PSX)
  • Mega Man X6 (PSX)
  • Mega Man X7 (PS2)
  • Mega Man X8 (PS2)

Mega Man Zero

  • Mega Man Zero (Game Boy Advance)
  • Mega Man Zero 2 (Game Boy Advance)
  • Mega Man Zero 3 (Game Boy Advance)
  • Mega Man Zero 4 (Game Boy Advance)

Mega Man ZX

  • Mega Man ZX (DS)
  • Mega Man ZX Advent (DS)

Mega Man Legends

  • Mega Man Legends (PSX)
  • Mega Man Legends 2 (PSX)
  • The Misadventures of Tron Bonne (PSX)

Mega Man Battle Network

  • Mega Man Battle Network (Game Boy Advance)
  • Mega Man Battle Network 2 (Game Boy Advance)
  • Mega Man Battle Network 3: White and Blue (Game Boy Advance)
  • Mega Man Battle Network 4: Red Sun and Blue Moon (Game Boy Advance)
  • Mega Man Battle Network 5: Double Team (DS)
  • Mega Man Battle Network 6: Cybeast Gregar and Cybeast Falzar (Game Boy Advance)

Mega Man Star Force

  • Mega Man Star Force Dragon, Pegasus, and Leo (DS)
  • Mega Man Star Force 2 Zerker X Saurian and Zerker X Ninja (DS)
  • Mega Man Star Force 3 Black Ace and Red Joker (DS)