Mega Man Headcanons/Fanon, Game Ideas, and Inter-Series Connection Hypotheses (MAJOR SPOILERS)
Just some of my own ideas on details of how various series conclude and connect with others, since some have yet to wrap up. (Again, warning for MAJOR SPOILERS for those who haven’t yet played the Mega Man games.)
Dr. Light has, in secret, began working on the his X project. Dr. Wily’s spying robots find out about this, and in competitive retaliation, Dr. Wily begins working on his own project to suprass Light and destroy Mega Man once and for all. With a plan prepared and satisfaction with his work on his project thus far, he starts another situation, and Rock resumes his role as Mega Man to stop Dr. Wily once more. Seeing this as an opportunity to defeat and destroy Rock, Bass intervenes to challenge Rock. Rock loses and is nearly destroyed, but before Bass takes a final shot, Wily intervenes, capturing them both. Contact with Rock from Dr. Light and Roll is lost, and Wily unleashes extra robot masters to wreak havoc again. With Rock still lost, Roll becomes determined to, this time, take the helm as the new Mega Man. Going by the title Mega Woman, Roll sets off to stop Wily and save her brother. Taking on a red and light red armor complementing the blue and light blue color pattern of her brother’s armor, and using a copy ability in the same manner, she sets off to first stop the new robot masters. Proto Man/Blues joins forces with Roll, and the two of them go forth on the mission.
In Wily’s fortress, the two are met with two fearsome foes: Mega Man and Bass, hijacked by Wily to fight against the intruders. Roll and Proto Man have no choice but to engage them in battle. However, thanks to the foresight of Dr. Light, they have a way to stop them without destroying them; Light had considered if Wily would surely attempt to reprogram Rock and Bass as he had done with the original robot masters, and so sent with Roll a way to counter Wily’s intervention and restore them to their original personalities and programming. With the heroes successfully doing this, Wily retreats, ready to test a brand-new robot against the now four enemies in his fortress, a new creation which he is certain can take all four of them out for good. Bass, angered at Wily once more and satisfied that, finally, he was able to best Mega Man, was easy to convince to help the group take Wily down. The four press on to the heart of Wily’s fortress. When they finally corner the mad scientist, however, they are met not with a fight against Wily himself, but with a mysterious, bare but menacing robot waiting for their arrival. Zero, Wily’s successor to Bass as an overhaul and enhancement of the original (with adjustments from referencing Proto Man’s design and data) stands before them, ready to take on the four of them at once. Despite their best efforts, the four are defeated by this monstrous new robot. Before Zero finishes them off, Wily enters the chamber in vehicle, praising his new creation and ordering it to finish the job. However, Zero, being erratically programmed and very ill-behaved, instead turns his focus on his creator, chasing him off in a pursuit of attack. Bass, in his rage, follows Wily and Zero in his own pursuit, vowing to take revenge on them both. In the end, he is destroyed by Zero, and Wily takes advantage of the clash to re-capture Zero, to shut him down and attempt to fix him properly.
Meanwhile, before the remaining three heroes can pursue, they are met with a relentless flood of enemies, the strongest of Wily’s defenses they’ve ever seen. Weakened as they are from the near-death experience with Zero, they begin to retreat, though it looks unlikely that they will make it. Hence, Proto Man, knowing he is at the end of his limited lifespan as is, sacrifices himself, allowing Rock and Roll to escape while he holds off Wily’s countermeasures with everything he can muster. This is where Proto Man meets his end.
By the time Rock and Roll are able to make it back, it is apparent Rock isn’t going to make it much longer without fast intervention and good luck. Dr. Light does everything he can, but in the end is only able to retrieve the damaged I.C. (Integrated CIrcuit) chip of Rock, containing his fracturing personality, memories and data collections of weaponry, other people and other robots. Not only does Rock require a new body, but the only hopeful way to restore him to functionality involves a formatting, in which Rock would lose his memories and personality. Dr. Light, though distressed by the turn of events, takes the opportunity to finish his most grand creation, and seeks not only to repair and format Rock’s I.C. chip, but to further integrate it into a new cybernetic “DNA soul” which would embody the personality of his new creation. He designates the DNA soul with name of “X” and programs it into the new, more advanced body. With this, Mega Man X is created, a reborn Mega Man Rock with a pure and clean beginning and, with the enhanced and notably more advanced programming provided by Dr. Light, an unknown number of possibilities for the future. However, he must be sealed away in a capsule for at least 30 years for his behavioral reliability and perception of justice to be tested. Dr. Light lives out the rest of his life with Roll as his daughter, though in time, she is either labelled as expired, eventually malfunctions, or simply shuts down for good once her creator passes away.
Concerning Dr. Wily and Zero: Eventually, seeing only one option to make Zero properly function for the purpose of destroying Light’s creations, Wily seals Zero in a capsule, only to re-open when a patch program, based on the Roboenza virus and its cure, is in its final stages of repairing Zero’s erratic and irregular programming. Before the end of his life, Wily would adjust this patch to become a virus based on himself, which would begin to spread when Zero finally awakens, and would cause robots to behave erratically and violently. In this way, Wily’s legacy would be preserved as his personality would spread into certain Mavericks a century later (such as Serges and the X-hunters whose personalities are constructed for the purpose of ensuring X’s destruction). The near-full cast of the Classic series is eventually passed, though the deceased Rock is reborn as an entirely new robot, X, whom the eventual Reploids of a century later would be based on.
Between the X and Zero series:
Little bit of fan speculation: Reploid bodies develop to become even more human-like. When the original Zero’s body was stolen by Dr. Weil to create Omega, his new copy body was created by this new standard. Similarly, when X disappeared to keep society safe from the corrupted mother elf and Ciel constructed Copy X, this Copy was made with this new lifelike design standard. The Four Guardians also took on this design standard. Hence why the reploids in general look vastly more sleek and humanlike in the Zero series than in the X series.
Master Thomas has begun his operations to “reset the world”, and desite the successful stopping of Master Albert, Maverick attacks continue. Vent/Aile go searching through the remains of Ouroborus for Model Z, accompanied by a few guardians. Finding its signal suddenly appearing, they pursue the signal. They find that Master Thomas has already sent two other Mega Men after Model Z, who was currently in a state of stasis from having used so much power at the end of ZX Advent. It turns out that the surviving Prometheus (and Pandora?) had laid a trap for the Mega Men and sought to have them battle to a weakened state before striking to finish them. The Mega Men manage to retreat and escape with the taken Model Z, but Vent/Aile survive, and convince the attackers to stop, claiming that they can help them defeat the other Mega Men and end the Biometal struggles for good. Prometheus scoffs, but he does stop his attack, claiming that they could be useful to him and leaves. Vent/Aile manage to track the movements of the other Mega Men through the remains of a maverick destroyed in the earlier struggle. With Model Z in his grasp, Master Thomas operates to create more biometals from Model Z to serve his purposes. By the time Vent/Aile find him in his current lab, he had finished his purposes and vanishes, leaving Model Z behind for the portagoists’ taking.
In time, the protagonists (including Ashe/Grey who appear later) encounter not just the other four Mega Men from ZX Advent, but two enemies chosen by master Thomas to be new Mega Men/Mega Women in this final conflict of the trilogy. They wield Model V (extracted from Model Z) and Model O (stolen from the Guardian base by the other two Mega Men while Vent/Aile were away), taking a form more resembling the larger form of Omega in MMZ3. Some way through the game, information on the past reploid Colonel (and some combat-ready form of Iris?) is extracted from Model Z by the Guardians, and Model C (and maybe I) is created either for the player to use or is given to a different Mega Man. In time, Prometheus and Pandora might even fully side with the protagonists against Master Thomas, and Master Mikhail might be rescued to help in the fight. More pseudoroids are created to be hunted down by the Hunters and Guardians, and Master Thomas’s Mega Men are defeated before he is finally taken down. However, all the enemies were intended to simply slow the protagonists down, while he worked on his program intended to “reset the world”. Master Thomas is defeated, but not before his program is complete, unknown to the protagonists.
Speculation: Transitioning to the beginning of the Legends series:
Some time passes in universe, and plans to create a superior Utopia, Elysium, begin to be brought to fruition. This would be protected by the Old System mentioned in Legends lore. Master Thomas’s program eventually (somehow) brings about a cleansing ‘reset’ of the world in form of a major, permanent flood, resulting in massive population losses. Some of Earth’s inhabitants manage to flee to Elysium in order to survive, while other survivors are stranded and forced to rebuild on the islands. The Old System is soon shut down to be replaced by the more effective Master System, which eventually, for an unknown reason, brings about the next evolution for the humanoids and reploids living on Earth (now called ‘Terra’): The Carbons, a near-perfect unison of human and reploid into a cyborg type of life form seen in the Legends games.
(Disclaimer: I’ve yet to play the Legends games and we still don’t have a conclusion to the Classic, X, ZX or Legends series to confirm any of this, so this group of headcanons and ideas are simply my ideas and subject to argumentation and subsequent releases of new games. And again, these are just my ideas that are probably far from canon, so fellow fans stay chill and don’t attack me pls. I’m personally very hopeful that, with the release of Mega Man 11, Capcom might just fill in those gaps in time with more games. A fanboy can hope. Meanwhile, I may well update these headcanons as more games are hopefully released and I play through the Legends games.
Also side speculation: Master Albert in ZX Advent based Model A’s physical design and combat style on the Reploid Axl, having either accessed a database of some kind or accessed Axl’s DNA soul floating around somewhere in cyberspace. The similarities are just too similar to just be a creator’s homage to an earlier character, IMHO.)
