Megaman 10 Robot Master Analysis

These are the 8 Robot Masters of the recently announced Megaman 10. If you haven’t seen their sprites yet, you can consult my post from yesterday. As promised, I will be talking about their designs more today, laying out what I feel are key aspects of the latest set of eight.

When I look at the bosses of Megaman 10 I can sense a difference between them and their predecessors. While the game’s designs are still in-line with the overall classic Megaman aesthetic of cute and simple anime-style characters, there’s a consistent theme throughout their designs which only occurred sparingly in previous Megaman games.

The most prominent one is that the descriptor in their name dictates a lot more of their design in general than in previous games. Strikeman’s torso is designed to look like a baseball. Commandoman is a tank on legs. Sheepman needs no explanation. The properties that define them are more explicitly incorporated into their designs. The closest we get to more orthodox designs are Solarman and Chillman, and even they have somewhat unusual bodies.

While you have a few Robot Masters from previous games which do follow this trend seen in Megaman 10, such as Heatman having a Zippo Lighter for a body, they’re more the exception than the rule. When you compare Metalman to Blademan, Metalman is merely adorned with sharp spinning blades, whereas Blademan has swords for arms and a sword for a head.

Overall, these robots do not look quite like any bosses from the past. They do not resemble any of Dr. Light’s designs, nor Dr. Wily’s or Dr. Cossack’s. I think this is intentional. My suspicion is that, in actuality, none of these Robot Masters are Dr. Wily’s, and that they’re coming from another source entirely or from multiple different sources. In a way, they remind me of Megaman 6 because that game also had Robot Masters who didn’t seem all that Wily-esque, which made sense seeing as all of them were supposed to have come from different countries.

So I’m throwing it out there: I don’t think Dr. Wily is responsible for the Robot Masters in Megaman 10, and in fact I bet he was planning to attack with his own set of 8, but his minions also got affected by the “Roboenza” virus. That doesn’t mean he won’t be the villain, but I think it’ll be more him taking advantage of a bad situation. Or maybe once you figure out the cause of Roboenza and find the cure, then he’ll make his move.