Mega Man fans: What's your favorite game in the franchise and why?

I also feel the upgrades should lose the whole "You must collect this heart tank/energy tank with the character you want to have it" mentality because, frankly, ever since X5 it annoyed me greatly. I figure letting you have more characters to choose from would translate to letting you pick what you think is better for the stage, but even if I think, say, Axl is better for one stage than X, or I think one stage is a bad fit for Zero, I have to pick the character anyway if I want them to have more health or weapon energy, especially with the rescue reploid system making it so I have to ignore reploids if I want certain characters to get the buffs over others. This system is inherently flawed and enforces sticking with one team over using others, and it especially makes some levels even worse when it comes to trying to pick a good team.

Yeah I ended up mostly having upgrades on Zero by the end, since I preferred using him over Axl and X doesn't become playable until so late in. It would be a lot better if all the upgrades applied to all characters rather than just one.
 
Splitting up the X collections as they were released, I would say in regards to the first collection X4 is easily my favorite. The other X games 1-3 were fine, but X4 is just much more fun to me and feels better to control. It also has what is personally my favorite interpretation of playable Zero in the X series overall.
Oh, yeah, I meant to say earlier, sorry in advance for X3, especially if you try to 100% it. (well, it's not in advance anymore but yeah). X3 isn't like bad or anything but it has issues with being bloated, in that the stages are long and often tedious, and the game has way too many collectibles and multiple branching story paths that are more annoying than cool. Traditionally it's been lumped in with the first two games by default, but in recent years people have been a lot more divided on it and nuanced in their criticism.

X4 is absolutely outstanding though, yeah! And absolutely gorgeous too. The pinnacle of pixel art for the Mega Man series, before they would start relying on digitised graphics for X5 and X6. And honestly, I like the cutscenes too.

X Collection 2 is fairly mediocre. I see a lot of hate for X7 in particular circulate around, but personally I think it's a fun game. Very flawed and mediocre at best, but still fun. X8 feels like a solid improvement, probably a toss up between that and X5 for my favorite in the collection.
Yeah, I generally don't recommend MMX Legacy Collection 2 to non-fans. All four games are frustrating in their own ways and I pretty much can't stand X5 through X7 at all, while MMX LC 1 has all the must-play ones.

X8 has a ton of potential but suffers from level design issues and an over-reliance on gimmicks, so it's very much a mixed bag for me. The collection adding the assist mode is a great feature for X8 though, as you can play X8 on Normal difficulty but with the assists, getting around the annoyingly high difficulty the game has, but without missing 2/3 of the game like you would if you played it on easy. I replayed it that way when the collection first game out and had a blast!

and are unable to play the main character
Hot take, I know it's a divisive decision but Axl is the main character of Mega Man X7. It's his story, Red is his villain, and Axl's even front and centre on the Japanese box art. The overseas versions are misleading by putting X in front, or X as the only character in Europe's case.

As for a controversial choice... I hate to admit that x6 is my favorite of the X series. It's a bad game with tons of cheap shots, unfair level design at times, the annoying nature of the nightmare virus enemy type... But I can't stop playing it, even on Xtreme, likely due to how amazing the atmosphere of X6 was. I can't get enough of it's odd music and unusually worrying tone, I can't stop feeling bad for the world bombarded by Eurasia's crash... That, and it's the only X game I got close to the end on when I was a kid playing it on the gamecube's X collection. Beat everyone but Shark Player, that jerk's stage was too annoying for me with the crusher...
I must admit I'm still yet to properly dive into X6, but from what little I've played I absolutely agree with everything you've said, especially about the atmosphere. It's absolutely amazing and it sets the game apart from the others. X6 also fixes a lot of minor annoyances X5 has like Alia bothering you all the time. And the soundtrack is easily some of the best in the entire series, and does a lot to set that atmosphere too! I think if I actually played X6 properly I would hate it, but I love that much about it at least.

As for a brief note on the Classic series:
Mega Man Legacy Collection 1 is... Meh. It sure is a collection of retro Mega Man games. It serves its purpose but there's probably better ways to play those old games.
Actually, MMLC is pretty outstanding as far as representing those games, especially compared to previous re-releases. It's also somewhat interesting because it's the only one that wasn't developed internally by Capcom, but rather was the debut project for the newly revived Digital Eclipse.

On a technical level, MMLC uses a hybrid emulation approach where most of the game code is actually running natively, similar to what you probably heard about Super Mario Galaxy in SM3DAS on Switch. In practice that doesn't actually mean much for gameplay and presentation compared to just using an ordinary NES emulator, but it is a rock-solid representation of the originals (post-patch at least, it had audio issues at launch) and some basic enhancements like removing the sprite limit to reduce flicker. Some people have some issues for it, and the menus are a tiny bit sloppy, but I think it's one of the best ways to play those games, and the challenges are fun too. Plus, it's cheap, actually available on modern platforms and was actually released in more than one country.

As far as other options for the Classic Series go, Rockman Complete Works has some audio quality issues but does at least eliminate slowdown and offer some arranged soundtracks for the latter three games, and the Atomic Planet-developed, North America-only and extremely overrated Mega Man Anniversary Collection is a sloppy port of RMCW that screws up the image quality, adds severe input lag and non-remappable controls (and they're mapped BACKWARDS on GameCube), and is outright missing features like the arranged soundtracks on Gamecube too. Sure MMAC has other games besides those six, but they're all completely broken too. And the menu system in that collection STINKS.

(In case anyone is wondering, thankfully that old (and also NA-exclusive) X Collection on PS2/GC is actually pretty great with only minor issues – such as visual bugs in X3, that don't ruin the experience. X6 losing its voice acting is probably the only real disappointment. Most of the games are native ports and all of them run in their native resolutions (looks identical on PS2, though the image is blurrier in the GC version due to the system's deflicker filter being left enabled), and the PS1-era games all load and save faster than on original hardware, much like their '90s PC versions did. Plus it's the first North American releases of the 32-bit CD version of X3 and the bonus unlockable game, Mega Man Battle & Chase, but we already had those in Japan/PAL.)

MMLC2 was the first one of the modern day Legacy Collections that Capcom did internally and IMO it's probably the weakest of the Legacy Collections, in terms of game selection and especially in terms of features. It's great value for MM9 and MM10 + all the DLC alone, though, and MM7 and MM8 are by no means bad games either, but it was the X and Zero/ZX collections that they really started nailing their approach to presentation and to preserving these games. Zero/ZX is absolutely outstanding in every way and I'm so glad the developers gave it the love it deserves.
 
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Definetly MegaMan X, it was my first experience of Megaman, and it really grew on me
 
MMLC2 was the first one of the modern day Legacy Collections that Capcom did internally and IMO it's probably the weakest of the Legacy Collections, in terms of game selection and especially in terms of features. It's great value for MM9 and MM10 + all the DLC alone, though, and MM7 and MM8 are by no means bad games either, but it was the X and Zero/ZX collections that they really started nailing their approach to presentation and to preserving these games. Zero/ZX is absolutely outstanding in every way and I'm so glad the developers gave it the love it deserves.

I quite like MMLC2 actually. MM9 is... Difficult, but I don't really mind that. MM8 comes with that gloriously awful voice acting in cutscenes, which is great. It's overall a pretty solid collection.

Zero/ZX is a fantastic collection for sure, and is easily my favorite of the bunch. I do have some problems with it on PC though. Before I underwent a hardware upgrade, I had a CPU that didn't support the instruction set the game uses to create/save/load data, causing the game to crash on the title screen while creating it's save data. I only just got the other collections recently and have had no such issues, but from what I have heard this same problem did exist. It seems Capcom didn't learn from their previous mistakes regarding this. I had to use a community created fix for this until my hardware upgrade.

Additionally, while keyboard support... Exists, it doesn't natively let you remap buttons to any keyboard bindings you want, instead opting to assign certain keys to DS buttons and only letting you remap between those inputs instead. The community has found a workaround for this too, and I exclusively play using my Dualshock 4 anyway, but it's still something of a problem.

I also would have preferred they had a 30FPS option so that people who experience slowdown have an option to run the games at full speed, even if not as smoothly.

PC or otherwise, I also find the lack of support for choosing which voice dub you want to play with which text language to be rather disappointing, as well as the lack of any option to enable blood splatters outside the JP versions of the Zero games. Yet again, the modding community has you covered on PC, but otherwise you are stuck with the games being localized as they were originally. They have options to switch between the original compression and high quality for voices and cutscenes in the ZX series, why not options to toggle voice dub and blood splatters?

Pure nitpick on my part, but I am also disappointed the Inti-Creates remastered tracks aren't included as a vanilla option for each game. I wouldn't even mind paying a little extra for DLC just for this. Thankfully the modding community has this covered too, which is the definitive way to play each of the 6 games in my opinion, but I really wish this was something included in the base experience for everyone to enjoy. I realize Capcom probably doesn't have the licensing rights to include these, but I'm sure Inti would be happy to strike a deal with them if they had just asked.

That segways into my final gripe: The game intro's for each game display the Capcom logo on startup, but not the Inti-Creates logo that was included in the original releases. I have no idea why Capcom would make this change, since they are still crediting Inti in the end credits of each game. Inti were the original developers of the 6 games in the collection, so why remove their intro credits? Is it because Inti wasn't involved in the porting job?

Overall though, MMZZXLC on PC with mods I feel is the definitive way to play the 6 games in the collection. They are almost entirely feature complete, with the only missing features being the Battle Network crossover content in Zero 3 and a minigame in ZXA that's almost identical to a minigame in ZX that is included anyway. They run butter smooth on a system with the proper specs to run them, and with mods included you can modernize the experience quite significantly. The games have probably the tightest, most satisfying controls in the entire franchise, they have some of the best stories to tell by far in my opinion, and while none of the games are perfect, I would rate any one of them higher than the more hated entries of the other series in the franchise.

I've never played the Battle Network, Starforce, or Legends games properly, but I can only hope whenever Capcom gets around to making collections out of those, they fix some of the issues that previous collections have had.
 
Legends and Legends 2, wish they could make a third one

MM8BDM is very good too, even if it's not official.
 
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Pure nitpick on my part, but I am also disappointed the Inti-Creates remastered tracks aren't included as a vanilla option for each game. I wouldn't even mind paying a little extra for DLC just for this. Thankfully the modding community has this covered too, which is the definitive way to play each of the 6 games in my opinion, but I really wish this was something included in the base experience for everyone to enjoy. I realize Capcom probably doesn't have the licensing rights to include these, but I'm sure Inti would be happy to strike a deal with them if they had just asked.

Yeah, I was gonna say, there'd likely be licensing to consider with the record label, which could especially be an issue outside of Japan. Charging money for DLC could help alleviate that though, I suppose.
 

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