Mega Man 11 is the first new main-series item in eight years, but it feels like it`s been much longer than that. Both Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10 were very conscious retro throwbacks, with graphics and gameplay styled after the six original NES games. As a true step forward for the classic series, it comes after a 20-year dry spell. At E3 2018, we spoke with producer Kazuhiro Tsuchiya and director Koji Oda about finally modernizing one of Capcom`s most iconic franchises.`When we were tackling Mega Man 11 and we were thinking about what kind of presentation do we want to make, I felt like having another retro game just didn`t feel right,` Tsuchiya said, via a translator. `It would severely limit the amount of stuff that we could do. Since there`s been such a long lapse between the last game and this one, I felt like the best thing to do is to make the game appropriate to modern hardware, use as much of its potential as possible, and make a game that people would be able to look at and recognize that it`s the next item. It`s a step forward in the Mega Man franchise.`Ultimately that meant designing a new look for the game, but finding a way to make it recognizable and a natural progression. Tsuchiya said they were very conscious of making it stray too far from the existing style, not wanting to `alienate pre-existing fans.` Ultimately the team aimed to make a Mega Man `that looked like he was taken straight from a piece of artwork.`Part of the visual style, naturally, is the animation. But when it came time to animate Mega Man in this new generation, with a fully polygonal character, Capcom discovered it needed to tweak the frames in subtle ways so that it would feel like the classic games. The result is a gorgeous and vibrant new presentation that feels as if it controls with all the pixel-perfect responsiveness of one of its 8-bit counterparts, which was no accident.`That was something that we took special care in working with the animation artists,` said Tsuchiya ...
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