Get Equipped With Magic (Mega Pony), Part 2

(What in the world is this? Allow me to explain. A very nice Constant Reader and follower of the Faction tossed a request at me a while back; to collaborate with a Sandiferesque blogger by the name of Froborr. Froborr runs a ship called My Little Po-Mo, which focuses on... esoteric and psychochronographic write-ups of My Little Pony. Now, I know jack shit about that program beyond the less savory parts of its fandom, but I do know a lot about Mega Man! Froborr, by comparison, admits to knowing jack shit about Mega Man. So by putting our head spaces together, we were able to hash out a bunch of interesting words about Mega Pony, an MLP/Mega Man crossover fan game that turns Mega Man into a quadruped dimunitive horse to fight against other dimunitive horses. I wouldn't have approached Froborr with this idea if the game didn't do some interesting shit, but by god if it didn't do some really interesting narrative shit. This is Part 2 of our writeup, and you really should go check out Part 1 on Froborr's blog before you dare venture any further into this thing. Here it is!  While you're there, may I recommend you read The Very Soil? As I said, ponies are not really my jam... but Froborr's Very Soil series is an in-depth look at Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Which is in my top 5 of best Japanese cartoons. He did a good job, and we both put words into this Mega Pony piece. Now then... on with the show!)

That intrusion comes, unsurprisingly, in the form of Discord, whose sheer wrongness mounts throughout his fortress. The first level is a fairly standard Mega Man final level, with variants on puzzles earlier in the game and occasional spots where the boss weapons--always optional in the first cycle of stages--are now required to advance. It even ends with one of the most classic Mega Man foes, the dragon hovering over a pit, though My Little Pony gets its say, too, as the dragon is the aforementioned one from “Dragonshy”, and easily rendered ineffectual by Fluttershy’s weaponized Stare. The corruption increases slightly in the second level with the intrusion of the Windigo from past, but it is in the third fortress stage that the corruption becomes truly apparent. Sweetie Bot is fought again, later followed by Scoota Bot and Apple Bot. The corruption of the Cutie Mark Crusaders is even deeper than in Friendship Is Witchcraft, which other than affirming that Scootaloo is an orphan (something left to viewer speculation in the show) leaves the characters of Scootaloo and Apple Bloom largely intact. Here they are thrown into the same corrupted transformation as Sweetie Belle--literally, once the stage boss is reached, the player falling through the false floor of the previously safe boss corridor to fight a massive robot with three heads, one for each of the CMC. (And, of course, each head is weak to her older sister’s--sister-equivalent in the case of Scootaloo--weapon.)

Then, once that abominable monstrosity of Corrupt Chaos is dealt with… we have the final stage. A boss gauntlet. “Dr. Discord’s Super Chaos Funhouse.” I’m not coming up with that to be cute. It’s clearly visible written in the background. Here, we fight our six heroines again, and a player who didn’t go with the weakness order can find how things work. Pinkie Pie’s zipping upwards is perfect to catch her with the Sonic Rainboom. The Party Balloon will lift Fluttershy’s animals away from her. By now, one is good at this. It’s Mega Man. The average Mega Man player has destroyed so many bad robots! What are six ponies to a Hard Game Beater? Then comes the Discord Machine, and it fires its blasts at you. Nothing too difficult, not really. The tank soon explodes, and Discord begs for forgiveness as the Mega Man 1 “boss clear” jingle pops up. Lovely! Then our ending screen, ripped straight from Mega Man 2. A calming and peaceful tune plays as we look to a grassy field… and then Chaos itself performs the ultimate corruption. The ending screen is snapped in half, and Discord taunts us from the clouds above the fourth wall. Chaos has subverted the narrative, but there’s more to it than that. During all of this, the boss music is playing. The boss music from Mega Man 6, that is. Released in 1993, not even published in America by Capcom, a final quest of Pure Platforming for a dying grey box about to meet its Destructor. Discord is invoking the end of all things here. Mega Man 2 cannot handle the power of 1993, and so it breaks.

We could, perhaps, have seen this coming. There is momentary notice before it all breaks: chocolate rain, pouring down from cotton-candy clouds, Discord’s harbinger once before. But almost before we can register that, the future breaks in, and in so doing breaks the game. The final stage is a perfect representation of a broken NES cartridge, distorted sprites misplaced, random jumbles of text, a complete disconnect between what’s shown on the screen and the underlying physics. Instant-death spikes must be walked on, and walls walked through. An entire screen’s floor is made of a flickering swarm of overlapping Metools, firing constantly. Another room features hovering fireballs that trigger the flash and sound of damage, yet do not reduce Mega Pony’s health. And perhaps best of all, at the base of one ladder, the player must climb down the floor beneath it--only, when they hit the bottom of the screen, to be thrown up to the screen beyond the ladder’s top. At one point, there is even the death sound-effect and explosion from Mega Pony--who remains unscathed. Death itself, that final imposition of order that cuts off all possibility of chaos and change, has no place here. Until, that is, one reaches the boss chamber to face Discord, Chaos itself.

At this point, all semblance of the future comes crashing down. Discord’s entrance into the boss arena is a clear reference to Sigma from Mega Man X, released in Japan in 1993. It makes sense. No wonder everything broke; Discord has commanded the next generation of Mega Man for his own benefit. It’s similar to the final boss fight of another fan game, Mega Man Unlimited; in that game, Mega Man faces off against a half-completed Zero and finds himself totally ineffective. The classic series can do little against its own future in a fair fight… but Chaos’s own transcendence and rulebreaking can be turned to our advantage. If anything goes here, then why can’t anything go for us as well? Discord, to his credit, attempts to destabilize things further by using an attack pattern that feels reminiscent of Dracula from the Castlevania series. We’re not even in the same series any more, and yet we press on, determined to vanquish this chaotic space. Once enough damage is dealt, we see our six friends--foes up until the Chaos Funhouse--fueled by the Elements of Harmony. They channel that energy into us, and then… then we break the rules ourselves. With a Mega Buster of Harmony, a Rainbow Beam that should be foreign to Mega Man 2 but fits with this broken world. Discord is blasted by pure Order, and is turned to stone. Everlasting peace has returned to the world, and things can now properly conclude.

The true ending credits, interestingly, are pure pony, a chiptune version of “A True, True Friend,” a song which in the show celebrated and depicted the restoration of the Mane Six to their true selves. Generally speaking, chaos mounts in the Mega Man series over time. Wily always returns, and when at last he is no longer able to do so, creates the Sigma Virus to take his place. Each successive incarnation of the series, from the original Mega Man to X to Zero, depicts a darker world than the previous. But here? Here ponies have won. Harmony is restored. The Mane Six, healed and with their new friend Mega Pony, return home to find ordinary, uncorrupted Cutie Mark Crusaders, along with Spike and the princesses, waiting for them.

Well. That was Mega Pony. Never letting one of its influences overwhelm the other, it somehow strikes a perfect balance between being a Mega Man fan game and an MLP fan game. It is solely neither, but a blend of both. I have no doubt that its creator has fond love for both of those things, from the genuine homage to Mega Man 2 to the myriad of pony references within. It’s a strange sort of alchemy, but somehow it creates the intended effect. Possibly due to the chaos churning within its inner sanctums, but that’s always a danger with this sort of alchemy. The children of the great grey box are bigger on the inside, fueled by one’s imagination… and in this case, the darker side of indulgence has been let loose and gives way to a game where you shoot the heroines of the show with a Mega Buster. Strange, but the themes inside are interesting enough. With fan games like this or Mega Man Unlimited, Mega Man need not die, need not give way to the Beck and Call of a new body without its ancestral memories. Until Capcom decides to make a Mega Man 11 (doubtful, really)... the spirit of Pure Platforming sleeps in our minds.

Perhaps it dreams of ponies.