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7grandmel · 5 days

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Todays rip: 24/04/2024

Guardian of the Ride Chasers

Season 4 Episode 1 No Album Release (Read More)

Ripper Unknown

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I really don't know what it is, but I woke up earlier this week with Black Parade (MMX Remix) specifically stuck in my head. I guess that's a disadvantage to running this blog - in writing, I tend to listen to the rip in question on repeat to get a good feel of the tone I want to go for, and in the process get tunes stuck in my head (Raft Ride, for instance, has still not left my innermost thoughts ever since The Incident.) But althesame, getting a Mega Man X arrangement rip stuck in my head got me fervently looking for more like it - because really, I think it was just my brain's way of telling me that it misses listening to Mega Man X music. It was through this that I wound up stumbling onto something big, a rip I'd entirely forgotten about and one that's STILL lacking a ripper credit even five years later - Guardian of the Ride Chasers, with no attachment to its origin or its ripper, fucking OWNS.

Mega Man X2 has a pretty different sound to the original Mega Man X in a way that's controversial in a lot of ways, yet the ripper has leveraged those differences to absolutely incredible lengths here. You can TELL that the guitar samples used are different, in some's eyes "whinier" - yet they lend themselves to the dramatic flair of the arranged track ever so well. So then...what is that arranged track? Funny enough, it's a source of music I was only made aware of through a SiIvaGunner project later in the same season - Guardian of the Former Sea, or the theme of the Desert Scourge boss, from the Terraria Calamity Mod. The game is as far away from my area of knowledge as you could come - I've hardly ever even touched the BASEGAME Terraria - but its legendary composer, DM DOKURO, was a name I got very familiar with entirely thanks to SiIvaGunner. Remember the King for Another Day Tournament? Yeah - amidst many other guest arrangers, DM DOKURO lent his incredible skills to a bevvy of arrangements for the event, including one I've covered on here before - September!

And like, that was how I was initially introduced to the Terraria Calamity mod as a whole! I've talked numerous times about how following SiIvaGunner has given me exposure to so many things I wouldn't have checked out otherwise, be it with Aphex Twin Snakes, Plantasia 2, Owner of a Mahjong Board or countless more, but its an entirely new level of cool to discover a composer through their guest contributions on the channel. As I mentioned before, Guardian of the Ride Chasers was already bound to work for me as someone hopelessly attached to the specific sound of the SNES Mega Man X games, but the rip only works as WELL as it does due to DM DOKURO's incredible work with the original track. I love how Mega Man X2's more varied sound in particular compared to the former and latter game resulted in the track being adapted pretty differently, in particular using the particular plink-plonk sounds from Bubble Crab's theme for a lot of the track to give the rip some really nice texture. It can be easy for a banger melody to be lost amidst samey instrumentation, a lot of lower-quality "but in the (blank) soundfont" have shown me just how bad it can really get - but the ripper went above and beyond in making the entire track sound absolutely brilliant in the conversion here.

All in all, Guardian of the Ride Chasers was a two-for-one kind of rip - both being an incredibly cool rip to listen to in its own right, and helping spread DM DOKURO's exceptional work outside of his target audience. Hopefully in making this post, you as the readers will now ALSO be reminded to go check out the other music from the Terraria Calamity Mod, or the other stuff by DM DOKURO in general - this rip is truly only scratching the surface.

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afniel · 7 months

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Nevi Infodumps Upon Request: MMX2

Because god damn let's just make this its own thing and stop doing it on some other poor bastard's post, what did they to do deserve me happening to them.

Also I have to make a correction! There is no Z-Saber in X1, I just remembered that goofy. Zero doesn't give you shit if you upgraded your arm parts, he just dies. It doesn't even exist until X2. I have no idea why I thought that considering I played it recently enough but despite appearances I'm not known for my great recall of chronological order shit.

THIS IS GONNA BE A LONG POST AND I HAVE REMEMBERED THAT "MANNERS" EXIST SINCE YESTERDAY SO. I am using a cut. And lowering my voice. This too is "manners."

@longshotlink I have done the thing! It does not stop from happening.

OKAY SO TO RECAP.

Mega Man X1: *slaps X* this bad boy can hold so much survivor's guilt and self-loathing.

There, that's it, that's the recap you get.

My second favorite game in the series is X2 and you're about to find out that I like them in the order they came out in, so this is going to look chronological. It is not! Not really. This is a coincidence.

Six months after X got PTSD real bad from everyone he knows dying/being killed by him (except technically Dr. Cain I GUESS, I forgot he existed for a moment there) he's still tracking down Sigma's followers and presumably shooting the hell out them. He goes to an abandoned reploid factory with the Maverick Hunters, where Green Biker Dude dies after a glorious ten seconds of doing nothing but popping a sick wheelie on a Ride Chaser and getting shot to fuck.

Rip to a real one, I guess. Pour one out for Green Biker Dude while we're here.

(Because we source our art here, this is by Springqueen on DeviantART.)

X tears through the factory and kills a huge-ass mechaniloid—wait, you say, the hell is a mechaniloid, we got reploids but that hasn't come up yet? Well, see, there's normal robots, and there's people robots, and mechaniloids are the normal robots who aren't really self-aware, and you literally cannot predict who the fuck is which:

This is a sentient being, with a rich inner life and emotions equivalent to a human's! (Only the C-15 model from X1, though, after that they're mechaniloids.)

This man is just a really fancy computer who can't actually feel anything!

I am not even joking. This is canon. Figure it out! I sure can't. It is a mystery. Nothing makes sense and everything is confusing and quite possibly bad.

There are three dudes ominously watching X and talking about some kind of nonsense bullshit crap, and these guys are Agile, who is tall, smirky, and pointy; Serges, who is short, Dr. Wily, and pointy; and Violen, who is huge, dumb as a sack of hammers, and pointy.

No really, they're all kinda pointy. For some reason they specifically have pointy feet. And they're talking about 'the control chip' and being all m~y~s~t~e~r~i~o~u~s but let's just get it out of the way. These mofos are reassembling Zero for nefarious reasons. Why? Well, you see, when you're Keiji Inafune and you just made a game, even though you teased a sequel in the post-credits, you totally did not think this through (because you have never thought anything all the way through in your life and you are not beginning now!) and now you're stuck, because you WANTED to make Zero the main character, got talked out of it, and then somehow ended up killing your intended main character. And everyone else. The only surviving named characters are X and Dr. Cain, and like...now what, right? Shit. Fuck. You fucked it up. You were supposed to leave some guys for the sequel. Well uhhhh they're all robots, just...reassemble someone real fast. Like Zero. You wanted him to be the cool one anyway, let's try that again but not wrong this time!

But never mind that! It's all fixable. Everything is fixable. Even Zero! Well, no, X isn't fixable, he's a goddamn mess, but details, man.

This gets a LITTLE fucky to summarize because there's some branching paths, so I'm gonna flip back to the actual game side for a second. X2 actually fucking slaps as a game. It's got an extra math coprocessor in the cartridge! Did you know that? The Cx4 chip showed up again in MMX3, and was the reason X2 suddenly had WAY more onscreen sprites, transparency effects, and even 3D wireframe enemies. This shit was amazing on the SNES.

Also, X2 is another case of "oh no, these Mavericks are ex-Hunters again," so like. ACAB. Not all of the Mavericks are, but still more than none, which you'd hope would be the number. They have not learned shit about shit for vetting members. The call is coming from inside the house, guys! Maybe Hunter HQ should think about the implications of the fact that—*I am shot in the head by Keiji Inafune, who has never once thought something all the way through in his life and is not beginning now, killing me instantly*

In X1 there were basically three kinds of defector:

I'm So Bored Please God Kill Me Now

I Just Love Hitting Things

and

Whatever You Say Chief!

Well, and Storm Eagle's unfortunate little thing of

I Got My Ass Beat To Hell And Back Until I Said Fine I'll Kill The Humans With You Just To Make It Stop And All I Got Was This Terminate On Sight Designation T-Shirt

X2 is a little more varied than that. You now have the new exciting backstory flavors of

I Love Money More Than My Life And This Guy Promised Me A Raise, Sooooo... (Bubble Crab)

The Bad Guys Are Somehow Less Ableist Than The Good Guys (Overdrive Ostrich, who USED TO be able to fly, lost the ability in an accident, and retired because the Hunters were kind of treating him like damaged goods and he was over it. Editor's note I do not blame this dude at all, what the fuck!)

BLOCK OUT THE SUN (Flame Stag)

I Love Trash (Morph Moth, who was not a Hunter)

Idk I Was Already Doing Crimes, Might As Well (Crystal Snail, also not a Hunter)

Sigma Is My Literal Dad (Wire Sponge, made in one of Sigma's reploid factories. He came out wrong even for a Maverick. Good job, Sigma. Great quality control.)

There's Still No Virus In The Continuity But I Sure Caught It Somehow Anyway?? Help Me (Magna Centipede, who used to be in Zero's unit, but got 'brainwashed' somehow.)

(This happens a lot. This will keep happening. Zero collects subordinates who are just WAITING for an excuse. Also this will make a whole lot more sense once they retcon in the Maverick Virus and then MORE sense once they retcon in that it is coming from Zero specifically but we aren't there yet so right now it's just weird and kind of unfortunate!)

And you still have at least one I Just Love Hitting Things (Wheel Gator).

Also why are so many of these guys invertebrates? This is like the invertebrate game. X1 has two, but X2 has five of these things. (X3 has three, X4 has two again, X5 has three again, X6 has three, X7 only has one, and you will not see another game with five again until X8, the last one. I don't know why I went to count that.)

After X whacks a few of the Maverick stage bosses, there's a little cutscene at Dr. Cain's lab. The three shadowy weirdos from the intro call Dr. Cain to say like, "Hey, X, we named ourselves the X-Hunters for reasons you'll never be able to guess, and also we have Zero's parts. Meet us at the wherever the hell on the map we visibly teleport to after this in fifteen minutes for an ass-kicking." They hang up, Dr. Cain is like, "Well, it's fine, we still have Zero's control chip here and they can't really resurrect him without it, plus this is obviously bait, so maybe don't do anything too hast—"

X declares he's got to get Zero's parts back at any cost and runs the fuck off, because he's fine, okay. He doesn't wanna talk about it.

This scene is way more interesting in Japanese, where Serges and only Serges slips a bit and calls him Rockman X, which is sus, because nobody really mentions Rockman in the games, except for some reason Dr. Cain in English who calls him Mega Man X. Dr. Cain has actually read Dr. Light's notes so he's got at least a historical reason to be doing this, but Serges wouldn't know that shit, right? It is definitely unrelated that the Japanese materials describe Serges as having comparable intellect to a certain unnamed mad scientist. It is also certainly coincidence that despite Zero being an absolutely undocumented black box of a Wily creation, Serges somehow knows how to upgrade him too.

Let's assume for the plot that X does go through and collect all of Zero's parts, which is his head, torso, and legs. Now correct me if I'm wrong but his head did not actually fall off in X1...but meh, details, right? Once you have all three, Dr. Cain says he needs a little more time to get Zero's control chip installed, so go deal with the other Mavericks until then. Then, once you do that, he tells you it's going to take even MORE time, but hey, the X-Hunters are hanging out at the North Pole, like some kind of shitty dollar store Santa Clauses who come down your chimney and murder you. So X fucks off to the North Pole to do some violence, and shoots the hell out all three of the X-Hunters, like you do. In Japanese, Serges is kind of pissed that "Light's memento robot" defeated him, which again...yeah, that seems normal, nothing to see here!

Once X murderhobos his way through the rematch fights, he gets a random zoom call from Sigma, who invites him to come to the central computer in fifteen minutes for an ass-kicking, and once there he gets a nasty surprise: his buddy Zero is there, chilling, and Sigma is like, "Lol he's so mad that you let him die. Look at how upset he's getting. Look at his fists. They're balled. He wants to beat you up so bad." Except, assuming you collected all of Zero's parts, this is a shitty dollar store Zero with a palette swap, and the real Zero is offended as shit and shows up and kills the fuck out of his copy, saving you a fight. Sigma is like, "WHY are you not on my side though man you should be. You should totally be on my side and fighting him instead, it's your destiny." Zero's like, "Maybe so, but I still don’t like you!" <- Unlike almost everything else I keep putting in quotation marks, that's a real quote. I'm not making that one up. It's even better in Japanese because it's SO DISMISSIVE the way he says it. It's literally, "It's because I don't like you," but you'd almost have to localize it to something like "It's because I don't like your face," to convey the don't-give-a-singular-fuck disdain. He's just like, fuck your stupid destiny thing, do I look like the kind of person who cares.

I feel like this game is just kind of less interesting at the end than X1. Sigma did actually run off to Magna Centipede's level for his final stage for some reason, which is unusual. A lot of the implied angst in the first game exists, and X basically ignoring Dr. Cain's attempt at warning him to be careful because OH MY GOD WHAT IF HE CAN FIX THIS ONE THING AND MAYBE AT LEAST ONE PERSON HE CARES ABOUT WILL BE OKAY is pretty good. And once you blow up Sigma, he does have a little foreshadowing about Zero being "the last of the doctor's creations," or MUCH more specifically in Japanese, being "the last of the Wi...num...ers..." aka the Wily Numbers, aka Dr. Wily's robots, which is like...where'd you hear that, hm? Were you talking to that shady Serges guy again who was also basically your lieutenant? Couldn't be he's someone from the past who would know all this shit.

But I'm not gonna touch the epilogue just yet because let's say X decided that actually he should focus on the mission at hand and ignore these guys clearly trying to goad him into doing something stupid. Good call, X! You have finally learned a little self-preservation. Except, this goes badly actaully, because the X-Hunters will break into Dr. Cain's lab, not butcher him for some reason even though that would have been the logical thing to do if they really wanted to fuck with X and hamper his efforts, and steal all of Zero's parts, including his control chip.

I have a little headcanon about the reason they didn't bother, but I'll save that for a second or three later. For now...

X fucks off to the North Pole as before, deals with the X-Hunters (who are now shitty dollar store Santa Clauses who come down your chimney and STEAL YOUR DEAD FRIEND'S LEGS??), meets Sigma at the central computer, and Zero is there, only that's the real Zero, and X has to fight him. Maybe for the first time, but not for the last time, because reasons! X wins, which apparently slaps some sense into Zero, who for some reason apologizes for causing so much trouble (probably having been resurrected, reprogrammed, and then kicked in the head by your bestie until you're unreprogrammed makes you stupid) and says he's going to go destroy the main computer.

Wait, what main computer, like do you mean this entire stage? When did we ever establish about there being a main computer that needed to be destroooooh fine whatever go destroy the main computer and X can just fall down this hole where Sigma is. X is like, "Take care of yourself, Zero. I don't have time to put you back together again," and once again that's a real quote and I'm not just being flippant. Was that an attempt at humor? In Japanese it's just, "Do you intend to die?" which is like. God damn, X. I know this is the point in the game in which Zero exploded himself last time, but he JUST got here, he's not going to Death Hug the computer too. But ya boy is evidently having a flashback.

From there things proceed as normal, X defeats Sigma, and this time,

Two of them.

Joined by his friend Zero, Mega Man X gazes out over the sea. Sigma has once again been destroyed, but X wonders if the fighting will truly end. Was Dr. Light’s dream of a world in which Reploids and humans lived together in peace merely a dream? The price of peace is often high, X thinks to himself. Who or what must be sacrificed for it to become a reality? And when the time comes, will he be able to do it? The future holds the answers or…

It's a lot less of a downer than X1 was. The music is tense and kinda gloomy, but it's not the endless despair party that X1's ending theme was. X is like, okay, maybe this will work out. Sigma's defeated again, this sucks and all, but he's clearly the bad guy in this situation so there's less of an internal conflict about Was This The Right Thing To Do. Obviously so! It's less, was this right, and more, can I do this? And Zero's back, so maybe even some of the mistakes are fixable. It's not going to be easy, sure, but it at least feels possible.

Or maybe it's hopeless after all. Will the fighting truly end?

Haha, no. But don't tell him that right now, I don't think he could handle it. Can you imagine. Let the poor dude rest for five minutes. Just let him have this one little victory. God damn.

Anyway, let's leave those guys on their cliff and go over here instead for

HEADCANON TIME oh boy let's do it!!

So, it is not at all a stretch to say that Serges is probably some kind of AI incarnation of Dr. Wily. The game is not explicit about this, no, but it's heavily implied in the Japanese version, and Keiji Inafune, who has never thought anything all the way through in his entire life and is not starting now, is on record as having left it intentionally vague so that you can draw your own conclusions. Weird thing to tease, if there weren't a little truth to it.

This takes some of the later games' plot existing to make sense, but I don't think the X-Hunters really exist to be subservient to Sigma and just carry out his funny little genocidal reploid rampage. It's established that Zero was created by Dr. Wily, and if there's one thing that you can count on with Dr. Wily, it's that he is the kind of guy who will create a whole guy whose personality is summed up by, "I exist to kill this other guy and then after that I have no idea." He definitely did this with Bass. He definitely did this with Zero. In fact he went so overboard with Zero's Kill A Guy programming that Zero wanted to kill EVERY guy upon activation, which Sigma had to beat out of him (X4), making him weirdly normal.

(In fact the original recipe Maverick Virus was just a day-one patch for Zero's omnicidal bullshit tendencies to make him fucking stop it, dude, you have things to be doing that aren't creating new Pollock works all over the buried lab every time like a rat or something wanders in. But then because Wily is kind of a shit programmer but a really good scavenger of other people's shit, the day-one patch went, fine, you suck, I'm doing a world tour and getting stronger and coming back and FIXING YOU. Maverick Virus out.)

Now if you were some kind of AI version of Dr. Wily watching this—your favorite and final murder machine that you made specifically to kill Dr. Light's little baby-boo-bop hugs and love machine—and he is NOT doing that, he is in fact BECOMING BESTIES FOR LIFE with his enemy, this is not cool! This is just more proof that you are a bad programmer. Or, your original meatsuit self was a bad programmer, and now YOU are a program made of and by a bad programmer, which is arguably WORSE. It's enough to give a guy a FUCKING COMPLEX. Which is also a common thing to happen to any given Wily creation.

So your goal, here, because you think you're Dr. Wily or close enough to count, is to manipulate the situation into getting Zero to remember that he's supposed to be biting X to death with his teeth, not whatever the fuck pattycake he's playing with him right now, what the FUCK. WHAT the FUCK. Ahem.

If you have the X-Hunters kill Dr. Cain, well, that's not going to incentivize this happening at all. X is going to be so mad he kills you, and that's not optimal for shit. So fuck that guy. We ignore him. Unused variable. Just get Zero's parts and scram, because the important thing is rebuilding Zero, not fingerpainting with the innards of some human. (Even if Violen would probably be into that, but he's an idiot whose text box dialogue even appears more slowly than anyone else's, you can't listen to him if you want to get ahead in life.)

Sigma is really secondary to this too. He's very conveniently placed, and kind of easy to manipulate: just tell him that you know all about Zero (which is true) and that he's supposed to be on Sigma's side (which is close enough to true that he won't question it) and you can make this happen (you think you can. IT SHOULD WORK. Dammit. How bad of a programmer was your mental predecessor, anyway?). So Sigma kindly sets up everything for you, and you do your thing.

And they fight! Finally. It is glorious. Of course you are dead by the time this happens, probably, but maybe you aren't, because you have probably vacated your trashed-ass body into some other convenient system. (You will definitely not show up in X6 as some guy named Isoc, who upon finishing his work, goes absolutely inert like his whole-ass self just left his body, which you have definitely not just done and will not do again.)

EXCEPT GOD DAMMIT ZERO X HIT YOU IN THE HEAD HARD ENOUGH YOU CALMED DOWN AGAIN. GOD. DAMMIT. WHY THIS. FUCK. Okay, yeah, you're leaving. See y'all in X6, this sucks.

Anyway the real takeaway here is that Dr. Wily was just such a big fan of percussive maintenance that Zero occasionally needs to get beaten in the head with a wrench for a bit and then he's great for a while. If he starts twitching, that just means it's Wrench Time.

Anyway, that's X2, my second most favorite one.

Wire Sponge is a luffa, by the way. Loofah. However it's spelled.

This thing. That's what he is.

And I will not stop calling centipedes 'hyakuleggers' now because Magne Hyakulegger is way funner than Magna Centipede as a name.

#long post #I have been asked to infodump and SO I HAVE #Mega Man X2 #mmx #mega man x

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