Capcom certainly has a strange sense of humor. After cancelling two different Mega Man games last year and excluding the character (any iteration of him) from both versions of Marvel vs Capcom 3, the company has finally resurrected him to star in Street Fighter X Tekken as a playable fighter. The strange thing about this is that it's the version of Mega Man from the original Nintendo Entertainment System game's box art in which he's a pudgy middle-aged armed with a gun and dressed in a yellow and blue body suit. Capcom officially announced the inclusion with a new trailer that shows him in action (along with Namco's Pac-Man and the previously announced Cole "inFamous" MacGrath and Sony's own cats, Toro and Kuro). All of them are Sony version exclusives, by the way, landing only on the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita versions of the game.
Mega Man fans are not happy, particularly since this Mega Man's backstory establishes him as some kind of the Mega Man Legends version of the character. Consider the wound freshly salted.
Known as a Digger, a person who digs up relics from the past for research. He is a hot-tempered man, but has a strong sense of justice and is also very polite. His weak point is that he is easily rattled when backed into a corner. He is always running around in a hurry due to the demands of his partner Roll, and this time he’s been asked to travel to Antarctica to retrieve a mysterious box.
I don't particularly have an issue with this Mega Man appearing in the game. He's not the version I'd have picked if I were calling the shots at Capcom, but it's kind of a funny gag if you remember that Mega Man fans have been chiding Capcom for decades about the art on the original Mega Man game box and that we were supposed to see this version of Mega Man in Mega Man Universe as a playable character prior to seeing him here had Universe been released. It's almost as if this is a punchline to a joke that's missing the setup. I can see how this would cause irritation in the fan community still reeling from the cancellation of Mega Man Legends 3 and Mega Man Universe, but I wouldn't say that the Mega Man legacy is diminished by this design choice. Mega Man's original creator Keiji Inafune was even in on the development prior to his departure from Capcom according to Street Fighter producer Yoshinori Ono. That seems about as sanctioned as it gets. Besides, things could be worse. It could be this version of Mega Man that appears in the game.
