August 5, 2005
This Musing is a mini-FAQ on how the different Mega Man series connect together...
Q) Do the original series and Battle Network series have anything to do with one another?
A) Probably not, but let’s walk through this.
The first thing to remember is that MegaMan.EXE is Lan’s twin brother—a human being inside a computer. He was born from the same mother at the same time as Lan. Simultaneously. Mega Man (the original series character) was not a human being to start with and he never had a human brother that we know of. So it’s unlikely that he is Mega Man converted into a Navi.
You could try to argue it the other way around—that MegaMan.EXE was eventually given a robot form and turned into Mega Man (after Lan had grown up and moved away or died or something to put him out of the picture), but there’s another problem here.
Tadashi Hikari, the character who looks like Dr. Light, is already dead by the time Lan is in grade school. Kind of puts a crimp on things. This means, if anything, the original series would have had to come first, but as noted above, that doesn’t work either. Additionally, Wily (in the Battle Network series) was into robots, but Dr. Hikari was researching networks (cyberspace and Navis). Dr. Light primarily builds robots, but evidently the Hikaris never did. In fact, there is no evidence that any humanoid robots have ever been made in the Battle Network series thus far (unless Regal himself is one); Wily’s research funding was canceled, which is part of the reason he got so upset.
Some have suggested that Lan himself might be Dr. Light (after he gets old enough and goes through a name change). This is probably the most likely scenario of any of them, but it does seem improbable that the entire network society and PETs and Navis would be completely forgotten and gone by the time Mega Man comes around. It also seems odd that Lan’s twin brother would start calling him “father” instead of “brother,” heh. (Also, what are the odds of two mad men named “Wily” trying to take over the world within a 100 years of each other?)
The only remaining possibility is that the characters themselves are not the same, but that the worlds are. In other words, that the Battle Network series takes place in the far far past or the far far future of the original. This might be feasible except for one key problem: the Battle Network series gives its year—20XX—which incidentally is also the same time span the original series games give.
Q) Is the Legends series connected with the X series?
A) This one is more likely. The Legends series could be the far future of the X series, after some catastrophic event flooded most of the world. (Given what goes on in the X series world, this wouldn’t be very far-fetched.) The technology in the Zero series (which takes place about 100 years after the X series) is starting to resemble the ancient technology that you can dig up in the Legends series, so it’s possible that Legends takes place sometime after the Zero games. (There still aren’t really any Reaverbots in the Zero series games, but I suppose we just need to give them time.)
Of course, MegaMan Voulnutt himself would have no connection with original Mega Man or X, given that he was made by the Master, and X and Mega Man were made by Dr. Light. However, the world could be the same.
You might even go so far as to speculate that maybe, after the catastrophe that flooded the world, the humans recovered some bits and pieces of data left over from the original and X series, thus resulting in video games and cartoons with characters named “Mega Man” which is where Barrell got the name for the baby he found...
- The MegaMaster