I was asked this, and felt I should answer as a post rather than as a simple (non-rebloggable) answer… because it’s a bit long.
“Are there any stories or concepts in the Transformers franchise that you consider almost as bad as Novas Aventuras de Megaman? ~RADIX”
Even with the “almost” there, which does actually make a huge difference…. to be honest? No.
That’s not to say that Transformers hasn’t given us some absolutely shitty pieces of fiction. Pat Lee’s original 6-issue opener is abysmal on almost every level. The Beast Within takes everything that was horrible about the Dreamwave era and concentrates it into a super-powerful slurry of suck. ”B.O.T.” remains -to me- the stupidest episode of any TF cartoon ever, yes, even more stupid than anything in Energon, which is a nigh-total waste of a series. And the first half of Kiss Players is something that… wugh.
BUT. The reason none of these offend me on the level Novas Aventuras does is not really because of the storytelling or art or anything, but because of the nature of Transformers versus classic Mega Man as a fictional setting, and their intended audiences.
It was established pretty early on that Transformers could be a goofball adventure as it was in the cartoon… but could also go dark and serious, if not outright grim. Hell, this is the series that ended its original 4-part comic story (which was originally going to be the last issue of the entire series!) with a powerful new villain coming in and effectively killing all the good guys save one, and the next issue we see he’s strung their corpses up on the ceiling and decapitated Optimus Prime. And it more or less remained a much more serious and occasionally depressing take on the franchise, moments of goofy aside (and honestly? I enjoy “Buster Witwicky and the Car Wash of Doom”). Transformers: The Movie had a severe tonal shift from the preceding cartoon, putting out something excessively violent and bleak, and the third season of the cartoon followed up on that… while it was never as dark as The Movie (thank goodness), it still had a much more serious tone overall and a lot less goofball “wacky kids adventure toon” stuff.
Transformers, as a franchise, is amazingly versatile, and that includes its fictional tone. Thanks to the early variance, it can really work as a wacky adventure for kids, a whiz-bang special-effects extravaganza, a horror story, a tale of gods (or god-like beings) determining the fate of all of reality, etc. The only thing I ever found that didn’t “fit” was the sheer level of rape imagery in Kiss Players… but you could remove that from the narrative and the underlying story and events, while still amazingly dark, actually pretty well fit into the TF tonal rainbow. There’s a world of difference between the preschool-aimed Rescue Bots cartoon (which his great, by the way) and IDW’s adult-aimed output, which has included some great stories that simply aren’t kid-aimed on any level, like atrocity-laden bloodbaths (Last Stand of the Wreckers) and socio-political tales (the current Robots in Disguise series). Yet both manage to feel “right”. And even when Transformers is awful… rarely, if ever, does it not FEEL like Transformers.
Classic Mega Man doesn’t have that flexibility. This is not inherently a bad thing at all. But it is a big thing, and it’s a thing we have concrete proof of. In the R20/Official Complete Works book, series guru Keji Inafune pretty explicitly lays out one of the “rules” of classic Mega Man, when he apologizes for the existence of Super Adventure Rockman, in part due to its level of violence:
“The ultimate unspoken rule about making a game that is geared towards children is that you simply cannot kill anyone, but here you have military helicopters falling out of the sky and people dying in droves… If we, as developers, start getting confused about what ‘safe for children’ means, we’d not only be betraying our players, but I’d feel like I was betraying every single creator that ever put time into the series.”
It’s pretty blatant that classic Mega Man is a series aimed at little kids even without Inafune laying it out like that. That’s not to say you can’t tell “kids” story that can be serious and appeals to older sensibilities; the Archie comic is currently doing a great job of that very thing (this is also one of the big strengths of Rescue Bots and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic). Even Ariga’s more violent and adult-aimed Megamix/Gigamix series lacks a human bodycount.
Novas Aventuras de Megaman, however… we are explicitly shown numerous human deaths, carried out by classic characters. Christ, the (thankfully) final issue has a voodoo doctor excavating a heart from a just-murdered girls’ ribcage. And let us not forget that Roll spends numerous episodes running around in little more than robo-pasties and a metal strapless bikini-bottom. It is an orgy of brainless violence. It would never have gotten Capcom of Japan or Capcom of America’s approval, and I’m fairly convinced the only reason it got any level of approval is because nobody at Capcom of Brazil or wherever actually looked at it before saying “yeah sure that’s fine”.
This is on top of all its other many many many problems as a narrative. It’s not telling a classic Mega Man or Mega Man X story in any capacity, it is merely (and barely) using those names and images for its own idiotic ends, and doing so poorly.
It is, in pretty much every sense, a betrayal of Mega Man, and nothing Transformers has put out has hit such a level.
