July 22, 2011
I’m still collecting my thoughts over the cancellation of Mega Man Legends 3, so I thought perhaps I should put fingers to keyboard here and write up a commentary on it. To be honest, I’m actually hoping that this Musing becomes obsolete, because I’m hoping that Capcom will someday revive the project in some manner. I doubt they’ll do it with the same sort of fan participation that they were using before, as that appears to have scared some folks in upper management. But hopefully someday they’ll at least do something with the game, and release it in some capacity.
As I mentioned elsewhere, if I had to put into words what I was looking forward to the most in Legends 3, it would probably be the exploration. Exploring not only the island itself (whatever island or islands the game ended up taking place on), but also the characters and the cute little details that Capcom has a habit of inserting into the series. I enjoyed this aspect of all three of the main Legends series games that exist as of this writing. Misadventures had the least amount of this due to its format (not a whole lot of freeform exploration, though interacting with the Servbots made up for a lot of this), and I still think the very first Legends game possessed the most charm of the three of them, but all of them were very enjoyable in this manner.
The ironic thing of all is I was planning to buy a Nintendo 3DS just to play Legends 3. I hadn’t yet picked one up, but I’m getting to the point where I may have been able to manage to purchase one in time to even experience the prototype, had it been released. Now I guess I’ve saved myself some money. (This is the main reason, if I do buy a game system just for a single game, I generally wait until the game is released before putting the money down on the system.)
Regarding the game’s cancellation, I’m disappointed, of course, like any other fan. But I work in the game industry, where I see the ins and outs of the politics of the industry, so cancellations are par for the course for me. Having said that, I do feel for the fans who were eagerly looking forward to it and had their hopes crushed. But most of all I feel for the people who were developing the game. They put in many hours of creativity and effort, coming up with the game design document, the plot, new characters, artwork, models, scripts, and so on. Voice actors recorded lines. The programmers made a working prototype of the game engine. That’s a lot of people’s hearts and energy that poured into the game, only to have it all come to naught. Now, this happens all the time in the gaming industry, more than most people realize because most games are canceled before they are announced to the public. (In fact, this is one reason why most games are not even revealed to the public at all until they are nearing completion.) But it’s still a shame.
It’s no surprise that my mail box is filling up with people asking if the Mega Man series is dead. Although I have no way of knowing what Capcom is going to do, personally I rather doubt it. As a whole, Mega Man is too big of a property for them to simply discard entirely. They may be shuffling the chairs on the deck trying to reorganize themselves after a certain recent departure. But I figure they’ll do something with Mega Man again in the future, and probably for a long time to come.
It might or might not be Legends 3, though.
- The MegaMaster