This post is an analysis of the storyline in Mega Man X 2. Here are links to the rest of the deep dives:

• Environmental Storytelling
• Bosses
• Miscellaneous

Spoiler Preface!!!

This post contains content that some may deem as spoilers. You have been warned

This is gonna be a long one folks. And a weird one. I hope you can bear with me.

See, I have a thesis about this game. Admittedly, it is going to sound a bit conspiratorial. I don’t like that, but this is what I see, and I find it hard to shake. I don’t know if I will prove my thesis, but I am going to try and present the evidence as best I can.

The Synopsis

Before we get into it all, let’s have a brief rundown of what happens:

Six months after the events of the first game, X finds himself mopping up the last of Sigma's forces, while struggling to move on from the loss of his friend and mentor Zero. As he begins to wage battle against eight new robot masters, he is contacted by a group of Mavericks called the 'X Hunters'. They claim to have Zero's body parts, and are planning on reviving him. However, they are willing to give X the parts back, provided he can be all three X Hunters in single combat.

Should you obtain the parts, the villains will construct a copy of Zero, who the real Zero will one-shot kill in his triumphant return. If you don't, then the villains rebuild the real Zero, and you are forced to fight him and remove his brainwashing. In either case, the story ends with another battle against Sigma, who is kinda sorta revealed to be a computer virus, rather than a mere robot.

The Thesis

Okay, so here’s the thesis broken down:

• I believe the main purpose of story was not merely to bring Zero back, but to make the MMX fanbase become more intersted in - and emotionally invested in - Zero than they were in X.
• I believe the story uses certain psychological manipulation techniques that are extremely similar to the ones used in professional wrestling.
• While I don’t believe that wrestling was the inspiration, I do believe that the use of these techniques was intentional.
• I also believe that they were extremely effective
• I believe that Keiji Inafune was the “mastermind” of this story, and I think he knew exactly what he was doing.

The Wrestling Connection

I haven’t watched pro wrestling since high school, but I occasionally find myself reading about its history. Wrestling is built on the use of psychological crowd manipulation, and I find it utterly fascinating.

Storytelling in pro wrestling is all about generating the maximum amount of emotion in the least amount of time and effort. It’s the only way to tell stories within the time constraints of the medium, and it allows promoters to change stories and characters as needed, without having to worry about longform character development.

But to make this happen, they need to essentially artificially juice the audience’s emotions, and that’s where psychology comes into play. If you do it right, you can take a new, unproven wrestler, and get the crowd to cheer for him with the same level of emotion as a baseball fan watching their team make the World Series after a thirty year drought.

Then you can take that same wrestler a year or two later, give them a new character, name, outfit, etc, and act like the old character never existed. If you do it right again, then the crowd won’t question it.

These are the two fundamental storytelling techniques that I see in MMX2. Let’s break them down with some examples and specifics.

Character Changes

So as I just said, wrestlers sometimes change their character and appearance on a time, without warning, while the wrestling promotion acts as if nothing happened. In any other storytelling medium, the crowd would immediately reject this notion. But wrestling fans generally roll with it.

One of the most blatant examples of this phenomenon can be found with wrestling legend Mick Foley. Throughout his career, Foley had three main characters. The first was Cactus Jack, a hardcore maniac who was as touch as they come:

Next was Mankind. This character had a whole backstory. He was locked away in a boiler room as his life, his face was disfigured,and his best friend was a sock puppet that he used in his finishing move. Early Mankind played up the idea of being a weird, disturbed man who was meant to creep out his opponents.

Character #2.5 was also Mankind, but this time he was a source of comedy. He looked the same, but his theme song went from this dark funeral dirge, to this rather goofy rock song with car crash sound effects. He teamed up with The Rock for a tag team named “The Rock and Sock Connection”, and became a lovable, dumpy slob to Rock’s snob.

His third persona was Dude Love, who was a hippie who wrestled:

The thing about Foley in particular is that he didn’t just change to each character in a linear fashion. Eventually he would switch between all three as needed. According to Wikipedia, at one point fans got to vote for which character he used during a match.

Keep in mind that this is the same person playing all three characters, and that eventually people just started calling him Mick Foley rather than any of his character names. You would think that at this point, the characterization would no longer matter. And yet it did. I still remember watching one of the instances where he switched from Mankind back to Cactus Jack. The crowd went nuts, as if a change in name and outfit would somehow change how he wrestled, that being Cactus Jack somehow made him extra dangerous. To an outside observer, none of this makes any sense, but to the wrestling crowd it was perfectly natural.

How do they get away with this? There’s no one answer, but for the purposes of this topic there is one technique that is relevant. One way to push forward a character change is to distract the audience so that they don’t have time to think about it. This is usually done by giving the character a great match or a new finishing move. Remember - “if it feels good in the moment, that’s what matters”. Fans will not question the change if the new status quo is pleasing.

Character Changes in X2

In MMX1, Zero has a very … particular death scene. It starts like this:

Then this happens:

And this is how it ends:

This is fairly unambiguous - Zero disintegrated.

And yet in X2, when the X Hunters reveal their hand, this is what they say:

To use our wrestling analogy, this is Character Change #1 - we go from Zero’s body turning into dust in the wind, to the villains having his body parts. It doesn’t make sense, but you aren’t supposed to question it. They try to distract you by immediately throwing the X Hunters onto the world map, randomly teleporting to three different stages and throwing off whatever path you planned through the Robot Masters. Admittedly, this didn’t work on me as a child - I immediately began questioning the whole thing about “Zero’s Parts”. I don’t think this was due to me being particularly smart; everyone has that one storytelling device that doesn’t work on them. This was mine.

But we aren’t done yet. We still have the endgame scene where Zero returns (assuming you got his parts). It is unexpected and shocking, and Zero even provides a clever quip:

This is a much better distraction. I will admit that even I found myself cheering in the moment. That’s the key word, “moment” - it feels good and exciting in the moment, and that’s what matters. It is hard to think about the logic of it all when the character makes such a potent entrance.

It also distracts from Character Change #2. Look closely at Zero’s sprite, and then look at this screen from X1:

That’s not the same sprite. The game changed his appearance, but we were too distracted to notice it.

On Emotional Manipulation

Psychological manipulation in wrestling is not only about getting people to cheer. It can also be about getting them to boo, or to feel intimidated or vindicated or whatever. Again, there are lots of techniques you can use, but one of the simplest is exemplified in the famous quote “A lie, repeated often enough, becomes the accepted truth”. If the wrestling promotion wants you to believe something about a wrestler, they will use all their resources - commercials, in-ring speeches, banter between commentators - to repeat the idea again and again. It plants a germ of an idea in your head - “You should feel X about wrestler Y because Z” - and as they repeat it, it starts to grow. They don’t even have to prove Z to be true, as long as it gets you to watch the match.

I can think of many great examples of this technique from my days as a WWF fan:

• Paul Wight, AKA Big Show, was promoted as being seven feet tall and 500 lbs. Any time he was slated for a match, this was repeated seemingly one every ten minutes.
• The Hardy Boys were promoted as a dangerous tag team because of their willingness to do high flying moves (which, to be fair, they did).
• Chris Benoit was labelled the “Cerebral Assassin”, which I guess meant he outsmarted his opponents. This was a darkly terrible and inappropriate theme in retrospect when you consider that Benoit and his family died in a murder suicide brought about by his years of steroid abuse.
• Triple H was a classic villain who won almost every match when it counted. This was justified through slogans such as “I am that. damn. good”, and “I am THE GAME”, which doesn’t make sense, but sounds intimidating.

All of these gimmicks worked on me. Even when I knew what WWF was doing, somehow they still convinced me of these wrestler’s prowess. It is utterly fascinating how something as simple as repetition can influence our thoughts.

Emotional Manipulation in MMX 2

Did you know that Zero is the Chosen One? That he is important?

You don’t? Well then prepare for a screenshot barrage. This is all dialogue from X2:

I think it is pretty clear that the game is trying to plant a seed in our head - “We should care about Zero because he is important”. It doesn’t even have to prove that he is important, as long as we believe it, and as long as it keeps us playing.

That last screenshot is of particular importance. “The last of the Doctor’s …” Who could this doctor be? It’s not Dr. Light, or we would know. It’s not Dr. Cain, for the same reason. That leaves only one other option:

Yeah, that’s right. Dr. Wily built Zero. We know this because it is confirmed in later games, but this is absolutely what X2 is hinting at. This is a huge revelation, and it is absolutely meant to make you not only care about Zero, but want to learn more about him (via additional sequels featuring him).

Is this REALLY Intentional?

I mean, is it? Maybe this is all just a coincidence, and I’m just reading into things.

Here is why I disagree.

Exhibit A: Wikipedia contains the following quote about the development of the original Mega Man X:

Inafune created the character Zero, whom he originally intended to be the game’s main, playable protagonist.[3] “When the X series came out, I really wanted to redesign Mega Man,” Inafune explained. “I wanted a totally different Mega Man. I’m a designer, a creator; I wanted something new. I didn’t want to use the same old Mega Man.

As well as this quote about Capcom’s reaction:

Fearing a negative reaction from fans, Zero was ultimately reduced to a role secondary to Mega Man X

Here is another quote about the character, from another Wikipedia entry:

Inafune created the character intending him to be “the ‘other main character’ that would “steal all the good scenes”

And one more about the development of X2:

Inafune was “hands-off” with the art design in Mega Man X2. He instead began focusing more on planning, producing, and story writing for the newer series beginning with this title. According to Tsuda, it was Inafune’s decision to bring Zero back to life in Mega Man X2 simply because he thought it would be “a shame” to keep him dead. Inafune felt particularly attached to Zero, a character whom he had designed and originally intended to be the main protagonist of the X series. Even though Inafune had mostly relinquished his character design duties in Mega Man X2, he refused to allow any drastic changes to the illustration of Zero.

What we have here is a creator who had an idea, got rejected, and seemingly began to put it in motion anyway. Hmmm …..

Exhibit B: X2 hints at Zero’s importance and his origins. Both of these themes are followed up on and clarified by later MMX games. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. The story may be poorly told, but it knew exactly what it was doing.

Exhibit C: As I pointed out in an earlier post, Zero eventually became the deuteragonist of Mega Man X, and got his own spinoff series (in which he was the undisputed protagonist) on top of that. Inafune clearly got what he wanted in the end, and it is hard for me to believe it was coincidence.

Exhibit D: We know Capcom rejected Inafune’s desire to make Zero the hero, and yet not only did he try to make it happen anyway, but he started in the very next game. How did he think he could possibly get away with doing this?

Simple - by not making it obvious. You don’t force Zero upon the fans. Rather, you use some psychological manipulation to juice their emotions and make them care about the character more than they would have otherwise. It is one thing if Inafune asks to make Zero the lead - it is another if the fans start asking for more. At that point what choice do the suits at Capcom have?

Is Inafune Really that Devious and Clever?

I don’t know the guy, so I can’t say for sure. But when I look at his career, I see reasons for concern.

For instance, at some point in time he became known as the “Father of Mega Man”, which is in no way true. While he eventually admitted as much, by then the damage had already been done. Notice how that piece is from 2007, yet in 2010 he was still being introduced with that title. It doesn’t really matter what is or isn’t true once a legend becomes accepted by society.

Then there was the time where he became the head of Creative output at Capcom. It seemed like every single project had his name attached. Meanwhile, he was all to happy to crap on Japanese developers while praising (and making business deals with) western devs. The consequences of these deals were devastating to Capcom in the long term, but they made sense in the short term. I know from 35 years in this country that when it comes to Americans, you can win a lot of friends through praise and short term business success. Perhaps this is why the man never really faced criticism from western journalists for any of his failings, even as he continued to stir the pot on his way out from Capcom.

Keiji Inafune launched a failed Kickstarter that had people accusing him of being a con artist.

He made a Mega Man ripoff that was worse than any actual Mega Man game, leading gamers the world over to finally realize that maybe a single person isn’t nearly as responsible for the success of a good game as we like to think.

Now he’s quietly working at Level 5, having lost all his goodwill within the industry.

I’m not trying to say Keiji Inafune has no talent, but the guy seems to have a knack for saying the right things to the right people to put himself in the spotlight and exert his influence. After everything I’ve seen from the guy over the years - and especially when I consider the ways in which he has seemingly dodged criticism or responsibility for his actions - I would have to say “yes”, I do think it is possible that he knew exactly what he was doing with MMX2.

Conclusion

Whether I am right about any of this or not, one thing that is certain is that this game is no fluke. This is the setup for everything that comes later. I don’t like it, but it is extremely important.