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Looks like the heroes are all together and ready to put a stop to Sigma. That’s quite a big crowd shot for the good guys; there’s way more than just Sonic, Mega Man and their buddies this time, even though the extended cast does make for a cluttered panel and not all of them get much focus or even more than two lines total.
This issue being a Mega Man one, it comes with a side story showing the titular blue boi training in the Sky Patrol alongside his “younger brother” X! Their interactions are honestly pretty wholesome and its cool seeing what Mega Man thinks oif X’s time period, likewise with X hearing how Rock deals with Dr. Wily.
The best bit of Mega Man #50 right here!
Oh yeah, Shadow fricking DIES
Not just Shadow, but all of Team Dark and side characters from both franchises. I saw it coming and I was still disappointed, but this was simply included at the nudging of editor Paul Kaminski, who is the reason why the stakes are raised and for Xander Payne’s repeated appearances. Apparently Shadow dying is meant to totally shake Sonic and the gang and I guess it could be used affectively, but the comic does its best to skim over that and their deaths are ambiguous at best, because it looks like Shadow has everybody teleport outta there to places unknown, allbeit without one Inhibitor Ring for some reason.
The Roboticized heroes shoot each other in the face, get overwhelmed by weird hallucinations and an ominous voice, and then they’re...back to normal. For the life of me, I cannot understand what happened nor why it happened. Did the two friends realise just now that they were fighting each other (even though Mega Man doesn’t remember Sonic), did the doctors plan for this specifically to happen so that they would instantly hate Sigma, or is it Xander Payne’s plot-progressing hijinks? I like the visuals and illustrations that go into it, but the abruptness of it just makes it ring totally hollow.
Even better? The doctors didn’t plan on having this happen to the heroes, but they were going to revert them to normal later in Sigma’s hideout? I thought the idea was to have the good guys become robots and shoot each other. Its so unnecessarily confusing and really, REALLY just feels like the plot just wanted them to revert back and didn’t care how weirdly unnatural the execution would be.
Its really telling that even Doctors Eggman and Wily are unnerved by Sigma’s insane plots to merge their universes, though the two are still going through wit their super-secret plan to have the heroes kill each other amid Roboticized brainwashing. I’m still a little confused over what they aim to do, but it could just be because the villain line-up are just s o diverse and with their own agendas that I got lost while reading.
At least we get a rather cool splash page out of it!
This is a pretty neat ending to the first bunch of issues: the doctors are on the run from the brainwashed Zeti, and while the heroes are coming together, Sigma’s mass-producing all the different Mechaniloid enemies from the X series. Spoiler alert, the fight scenes don’t get any better but I will always appreciate Dan Schoening’s attention to detail in this last panel.
Oh god, it begins.
Archie Mega Man villain Xander Payne is starting to be more prominent in this crossover, and trust me that is only the start of it. I always found it weird, even years later, that this traumatized anti-robot terrorist is changed, mid-crossover, into a posturing, solemnly calm, destiny-obsessed man who can shoot portals out of his eyes and follows the ways of the plot to a T. I see it as an abrupt shift in character for the sake of the events of the crossover, but who really knows why this guy suddenly becomes more important in the end than our main heroes. Xander has become a literal plot device.
The robot-fighters and some doofy-looking animals emerging from a portal to aid the heroes is such a silly visual I wish the comic went more into the hilarity of it xD
