Good evening everybody! This is Aifos coming to you alive from Abel City! Golly, I sure am glad this place isn't about to be hit by a missile strike as the first surprise attack in an android rebellion! That would sure be unfortunate! But anyway, I have always loved Mega Man, even though I've never actually played much of the games. But I just loved the premise and the vibe they had, you know? And now, having almost beaten Mega Man X for the first time, an idea popped in my head that this series would be perfect for a Metroidvania! Only, as I thought on the idea, I actually ran into quite a few roadblocks... So first, if you're unfamiliar: [b][u]The premise of a Mega Man[/b][/u] game is simple. You load into a menu with eight levels that you can play in any order. At the end of each of these levels is a boss, and once you beat that boss, you unlock their weapon that you can swap to at any time, albeit with limited ammo. These bosses are usually pretty honking tough, [i]BUT[/i] also have a weakness to one of the weapons in question, and pretty much become a pushover once you have the weapon they're weak to. But of course, you have to figure out those weaknesses on your own, assuming you aren't using a guide. [b][u]A Metroidvania[/b][/u] is a genre of game where you load into an interconnected and usually labyrinthine world, and go around collecting upgrades that allow you to progress deeper into the world, and get more upgrades. The parallels here should be clear. Mega Man's weapon system is already a sort of pseudo Metroidvania, where getting the new weapons opens up new paths forward in which bosses you can defeat. As I started thinking on this idea, I quickly came upon a roadblock, though. A big part of the fun in Mega Man is your ability to choose which order you fight the bosses in, while a big part of the fun in a Metroidvania is actually the fact that you can't go wherever you want at the get go, and have to unlock more areas of the map as you go. Even though Mega Man seemed like a perfect fit at a glance, and I would still argue is indeed a pseudo Metroidvania, its design philosophy is actually at odds with a Metroidvania. So, I thought it'd be fun to come up with an idea how its map could work! Keeping all eight Robot Masters/Mavericks available to fight from the beginning was an important part to me, so I decided yeah, you can do that. There are some upgrades you can obtain from non-bosses that may still be required to progress in this stage of the game, such as the armor upgrades in Mega Man X. These would be scattered pretty evenly throughout, and would indeed probably lock off the bosses, but crucially you can reach all the upgrades before fighting any bosses, and the path to get an upgrade would probably be on separate paths to the bosses themselves. At this point, you can just play it like a regular Mega Man game, but the catch is there aren't only 8 areas in this game, there are 16! Somewhere in each of the zones that contains a Robot Master/Maverick, there will be some sort of "lock" that you need a weapon from a different Robot Master/Maverick to open, which will allow you to enter a whole new zone. These "second layer" zones are interconnected, but the passages between always require the weapon used to open them, so you can't skip any of the Robot Masters/Mavericks. At the end of each of these second layer zones would be another boss, but these bosses, I imagine, would be much bigger, and don't drop weapons for you. They still have weaknesses, though, and these weaknesses are different from the ones used to enter their area. Beating one of these giant bosses will net you a key used to unlock the final area, which for funsies will be found in the starter zone. And yes, there will be a refight against all the Robot Masters/Mavericks in this final zone. Maybe the giant robos too? And of course, throughout all 16 zones you can find minibosses, health upgrades, energy tanks, ammo tanks (yes ammo tanks!), maybe even weapon upgrades? It could be similar to Mega Man X, where the weapons all have their default functions, but on the maps you can find upgrades to unlock their charge functions, but where in MMX they were unlocked all at once, here they could be unlocked one at a time. It'd also be fun to try and slip in some sequence breaks so that you can actually reach the second layer zones without the required weapons if you know what you're doing, possibly letting you skip some of the Robot Masters/Mavericks. It'd be kinda fun if this had an effect on the endgame boss rush, too, though I don't know what. Possibly just skips them. Like they're hanging out in their lair, waiting for Mega Man to show up, and he just never does. :p This adds a sort of fun multi-layer system to the map. You first get a sort of mini-Metroidvania within a Metroidvania, collecting Mega Man's armor pieces and default abilities like dashes and double jumps, and that sort of thing, which let you reach the Robot Masters/Mavericks, and you assume all you need to do is beat all eight of them to unlock the final zone, as is standard in a Mega Man game, only to learn as you're exploring that you just opened what you thought was an optional door into a whole new second layer zone, and the map turns out to be twice as big as you thought it was, and these new giant robots are a fun twist on the Mega Man formula too, I think. [b][u]Tl;dr? Here's my point![/b][/u] I want a Mega Man Metroidvania, and hypothesized how you could pull it off. The answer is of course multi-layered maps! But that's all for now, folks! Jambuhbye!