Thread by @gravislizard

punk singer: megaman 1 ost!!
crowd: <cheering>
singer: mm2 ost!!! lemme hear it!!
crowd: <going berserk>
singer: mm3 ost! yeah! shout it
crowd: we are! we're shouting
singer: mm4 ost! fuck yeah
crowd:
singer: mm5 ost! mm5! yeah!
crowd: <deafening coughing and shuffling>

i've played megaman since forever, i had 3 of the nes carts growing up and i gotta say: i hate the megaman series :) :) :) its decline into generic flavorless dreck is deeply depressing :) :) :)

and i think a big part of it is the music. you listen to mm1-2-3, even some of 4 and it's driving, emotional, it's going somewhere. mm5/6/7/8 it's completely phoned in, you can tell.

megaman 1/2 designer talking about the troubles he had initially with the composer on mm2 (shmuplations.com/megaman/):

i feel like this attention to detail was completely lost, and i really feel like that's kinda true for the art and level design as well. even as a kid i remember mm5 and 6 feeling un-alive, indistinct, nothing like the energy and intrigue 1/2/3 held

mmx brought all this back, and then after 3-4 iterations it too slid into dreck. I tried to play MMX4 and 5 a couple days ago and... blegh.

A lot of it comes down to tone. MMX has a very distinct tone in the dialogue, but if you fast forward to X4 you're like "wait, this sounds like a throwaway 80s robot OVA." even in subs you could tell when those were total assembly-line, clock-punch productions.

i was just playing Radia Senki for the Famicom last night, and noticed the same problem. Really poor pacing, like there's a bunch of missing lines of dialogue so the characters seem to woodenly react to crises. Like a broadcast cut of a movie leaving out most of the motivation.

I guess a lot of this could be lost in translation? I don't know for sure, but it does seem like there couldn't possibly be room, even in japanese, for the characters to have nuanced conversations

but anyway, x4/x5 have pretty bland music as well. And I've played the later like, GBA and (DS?) games some, and everything is just... bland. flavorless, emotionless. the music is competent but has no edges, it's just mushy, impersonal crap