Rockman and Conceptual Inbreeding

His name is Rockman and you'll like it.

There’s a common misconception about how Rockman was conceived. A lot of people misattribute the character and concept as being inspired by Osamu Tezuka’s Tetsuwan Atom, or Astro Boy. Actually, most of this series is pretty much lifted point for point from Shotaro Ishinomori’s cyborg-centric manga and TV tokusatsu series Android Kikaider, though Atom undoubtedly played a part in its creation. I’m not going to dwell on this, except to go and tell you to watch the 2001 anime adaptation of Kikaider and maybe peruse some of Ishinomori’s works. They’re great. I tricked you into clicking on this article and now you’re going to watch some cartoons for me.

There’s a funny thing about art and franchises and how things progress. Generally speaking, the “DNA” of art can be re-expressed an infinite number of times in different sequences and create something that appears new, even if the individual elements are from other things. These core ideas and inspirations shape the early life of observable video game franchises, and those who understand these core ideas and inspirations are often the ones who are most dissatisfied with the current state of things nowadays.

Rockman sprung forth from the fertile soil of the 1980’s bubble economy in Japan, and the people making it were young artists and programmers who laid out Rockman’s design thus, and things were pretty good for a time. Naturally, as time passes, these people begin filing out of the team and new individuals file in to take their place. These individuals may have no particular stake in the work nor do they have to have any enthusiasm for it. These individuals are not necessarily people who understand the core ideas of a piece of art, or its inspirations. They take the art as a holistic piece, and iterate on this concept exclusively, rather than continually reinventing itself in conceptually true to form and fresh ways which is immediately preferable to things becoming parodies of itself.

An illustrated example of becoming a parody of oneself. Rockman (1987, left) and Rockman 11 (2021, right).

As you can see, Rockman began as a fairly simple and cute character design. His body was constructed of simple, lumpy shapes arranged in an appealing manner. He was childlike, but had an air of a goofy action hero. Rock, the character, is a robot boy who, under the circumstances he was placed in, volunteers to become a fighting machine; Rockman. He’s got clear cut features that can’t be mistaken, and a big, adorable, expressive face. You might even say that it looks like a kid dressing up in a costume, with the way that his “armour” appears as flexible cloth-like material.

As time progressed, these traits were eventually phased out and lost entirely. The current character model is a disproportionate, lanky nightmare with dull and uninspired mechanical panel-lining (because how else would you really tell that this was a robot?). It’s wholly unnecessary and robs the character of its inherent charm and whimsy — a kid doing a grown-up’s job. They ape the original iconic running and jumping poses from the NES days but with a 3D model that isn’t abstracted for the perspective. Nobody understands why these decisions were made, merely that they were made and that these things are sacrosanct and cannot be changed.

There comes a “breaking point” with character designs. When you make so many paranoid little changes to a design that it becomes a fundamentally different thing, what is there to do? Well, they already thought of that in 1993.

A true successor in every way. Unique, new, but not a replacement for the original; he takes a bold step somewhere new.

Rockman X was a very different ball game. The more round and chubby original character remained in the background, but X was new and innovative. X isn’t actually that much of a far cry from the original Rock, but he’s got a few key additions.

X looks, and probably is (in terms of mental age) a fair bit older than Rock. His stories are less episodic Good VS Evil affairs and more melodramatic and character driven, concerning the nature of autonomy, the place of sentient machines in the world, of becoming aware of one’s own capacity for death and the ways in which people must deal with their own violent urges. He’s taller, he’s more heroically proportioned, has a more determined look in his eye.

It’s not a replacement, it’s an advancement. X fulfils the more brazen and perhaps even “edgy” direction media was taking in the 90’s, of post-bubble malaise, but he’s also an intensely tragic character capable of untold evolution himself. The “X” motif springs up all around the panels and cross-contours of the character, “X” meaning “Variable”.

These two would end up being brothers in more than spirit. Their similarities meant they would have to fight, inevitably.

It would be remiss not to talk about X’s perhaps most defining attribute; how he evolves with the player. Rock was far from a deep character, but X struck a chord with players by having his character development tie to not only his physical appearance and in-game abilities, but also how it relates to his Older Brother/Mentor figure in Zero.

Zero is, to the layman, a reorganization of Blues’ concept from the original Rockman games — a competent older sibling for the protagonist to be tested by. After X’s crushing defeat at the start of the game to an enemy with a bottomless pool of health, Zero assures X that one day, he’ll be just as strong as Zero is, and strong enough to defeat the seemingly invincible Vava. By setting this theme of inadequacy up early, the game is able to make good on Zero’s sacrifice later in the game.

Zero dies a lot in these games. He’s like Rockman’s own Optimus Prime, but his first death is arguably his best one. By this point in the game, you ought to have collected all the armour parts, heart containers and sub tanks, but it still isn’t enough to defeat Vava’s ride armour. Zero sacrifices himself in the last moment to destroy it, and X finally gains the confidence in himself to defeat his enemy. A psychological barrier is broken, the unbeatable boss now has a health bar, and if it has a health bar, it can be killed. If X hasn’t collected the Buster upgrade part, Zero will actually give you his own before he passes. X has become a real hunter, and a real man, in Zero’s stead.

In the remake, Irregular Hunter X, they go a step further by actually having Zero’s buster do something different from the one that the Light Capsules give you, but it highlights just how far you’ve come since you, yes, You, got your ass kicked. You become more like your mentor over time in both design and in ability, and the Buster upgrade serves as a literal passing of the torch from teacher to student. It’s a wonderful marriage of gameplay and narrative, one that would basically never be explored again.

X can be anyone, but he’s also you. You are X, and X is X. X is what you make of him. He’s a wonderful character. He’s a true successor to the original Rockman, who never really needed changing in the first place. The creators of the X games didn’t just take the holistic idea of Rockman and make something on top — they took the inspiring ideas, Asimov science fiction, the classic manga and anime they so greatly enjoyed as children, and applied both new technology and a greater emphasis on character to create something uniquely great. Before about 2005, almost every Rockman subseries was this way, a fast-paced iteration race to refine each subseries’ own specific spin on the core concepts and ideas.

It’s all the same rough DNA, they’re just expressing it in new ways. Until they stopped doing that, and started inbreeding concepts, and just like those horrid “toadline” bulldogs you see on Facebook you desperately want someone to just put it out of it’s damn misery before you have to see it again. This is the true essence of conceptual inbreeding. No new healthy genetic matter is being expressed, just the same banal running around in circles, but it seems to be profitable and nobody is being reprimanded at any scale to be noticeable so business continues as usual until interest dwindles and nothing is left, leaving the dumb executives in the room to merely shrug their shoulders and sit on it for a billion years because it was unprofitable for slightly longer than their anally-retentive schemes allowed for.

Even when Rockman is Zero and not Rockman, the expression of core DNA is still apparent.

Rockman Zero is pretty beloved by most fans of the series. It fairly represents some of the best 2D action in the series. It’s fast, precise, kinetic and relies on the same core design traits that have served the series so well since. Zero himself isn’t even a typical Rockman design, and yet we have graciously allowed him the title because we love him and he keeps up with the pedigree we expect.

Zero’s gameplay is an evolution of what the X series was doing. More focus on dashing and wall-jumping, precise platforming and close-quarters combat than the more ranged affairs of the earlier X games and latter-day Classic games. It pushes the gameplay DNA expression to it’s limit, offering us sprawling levels and huge options in terms of weapon type and weapon property, allowing us to do a cool Kirby 64-esque mix and match to suit our personal play styles. Cyber Elves offer an intuitive and interesting spin on the robot buddies from the Classic games like Rush and Beat, as well as the collectibles from the X games. It’s a game for the learned and the tough.

The art direction expresses something entirely new. Toru Nakayama, the art director for the Zero games, is a fan of much of the same things that went into Rockman in the first instance. He’s a fan of classic science fiction, of classic anime, of Shotaro Ishinomori’s works. He has injected a new, healthy amount of genetic material downstream of his love for things like Kamen Rider. It takes different elements from the same sources and uses it to completely shake up the aesthetic in an exciting and fun way, which gives the distant future of the Zero games their own distinctive feeling.

This is an example of a larger shakeup in creative vision from people who understand the core of the work, and have lent their own strengths to it.

This very poorly put together diagram ought to convey the point well enough.

This is a very simplified process of how this sort of thing tends to go but ultimately it represents a real problem. Older, less-relevant items are not discarded when they ought to be but are instead clung to as comfort items, as though it will have less identity for not having them. You can even see how Keiji Inafune’s own “legally distinct” Rockman clone, Mighty No.9 failed to capture audiences as they found a game that they had already played before (Albeit worse and buggier in every way) with character designs they had seen before. It seemed that Infaune had attempted to coast on name recognition as “the guy who made Rockman”. No new material was being expressed. You can actually chart similar shortcomings in other “legally distinct” indie rebirths of classic franchises with the original staff at the helm.

Yooka Laylee didn’t enthuse critics with its outdated game design and eyebleeding colour palette, making it far from the Banjo-Kazooie game we were all hoping for. Bloodstained is an interesting case, wherein the game styled after the classic Castlevania titles, Curse of the Moon and Curse of the Moon 2, did excellently, precisely because it was expressing new ideas and gameplay concepts within the framework of the strutting and whipping of the Belmont family. Zangetsu is a dream to control in both 8-bit Bloodstained titles, as are his colourful companions.

The Metroidvania-style Bloodstained game, Ritual of the Night, was supposed to be the main attraction but seems to have been completely forgotten as its confusing art direction and muddy game design failed to enthuse players as much as the bright pumping action at a reasonable price offered by the Curse of the Moon games did. Every indie developer and their mother’s made a Metroidvania by now, but few have laid claim to the fiendishly difficult action-platformers of the NES days. You have to take these elements of design into a new era if you hope to succeed in the hellscape of modern gaming. Your options are sorely limited between uninspired retro-revival or lootbox DRM infested data scrapers that put NSA backdoors in your kernel.

Turns out you need a bit more than star-power from a time before most gamers were statistically likely to have been born to recapture the success of your glory days. A more refined approach to iterative design must be taken.

Those wishing to create something similar to something they love but also have its own identity should refer to these ideas. Study your favourite media in detail, search for interviews and look at a wide array of art to draw your own conclusions and make links. Artistic DNA is just a matter of doing a bit of study, though not as precise as real geneticist work.

There is zero conceptual difference between these two images. I pity them for existing, and I pity the people who brought them into the world even more, because they’ve got a lot of explaining to do.

The legacy of Rockman (a series that, like X, had unlimited potential) has been reduced to bad mobile games and poor quality re-releases of good games. I want to take it out back and let it watch the sunset, and let it ask about the rabbits before I finally do what needs to be done to it.