The History of Mega Man 10

Inti Creates and Capcom returned, with Keiji Inafune producing, on the logic that Mega Man 9's retro experiment had been, in his words, a huge and overwhelming success. The tenth game's brief was to listen to two audiences at once, old school players and lapsed players who had not touched a game in years, which produced the series' first true Easy Mode, added in answer to complaints about Mega Man 9's extreme difficulty. Inafune named the only real challenge as meeting the ever increasing expectations that come with yet another installment.

The soundtrack is the series' family reunion. Ippo Yamada led the same four composers as Mega Man 9, and the Robot Master themes were parcelled out to the classic series' returning composers, one stage each: Manami Matsumae (Mega Man 1), Yasuaki Fujita (3), Minae Fujii (4), Mari Yamaguchi (5), Yuko Takehara (6), and Makoto Tomozawa (7) all wrote for the game, a closing credits in musical form. Yamada framed the division of labor precisely: Mega Man 9 was a spiritual successor to Mega Man 2, while Mega Man 10 is original pixel art and chip music, neither a remake nor a revival. Japan received two albums within weeks of launch, the original soundtrack and the Rockman 10 Image Soundtrack, an arranged remix record in the series' long Rockman arrange tradition.

Proto Man is playable from the start this time, shield, slide, charge shot and all, at the price of double damage taken and double knockback. Bass followed as downloadable content, with rapid fire in several directions and his wolf Treble as a jet. The three downloadable Special Stages raid the Game Boy games for their bosses, the Mega Man Killers Enker, Punk, and Ballade, and Mega Man alone can take their weapons. Eighty eight challenge rooms round out the package.

The plot's twist is the series' bleakest joke about its own formula: Wily created Roboenza and the only cure, planning to ransom the cure to the robots he infected. Roll gives her dose of the prototype medicine to a stricken Mega Man; at the end, a sick Wily is carried to hospital by his enemies, escapes within days, and leaves behind enough medicine to cure everyone. Even the villain's bioweapon ends in the status quo.

Capcom's Christian Svensson said the company was pleased with the sales. The hiatus that followed is attributed, in the record, to fatigue, with the reuse of Mega Man 9's concepts in this game and the sheer number of spin off titles released through the 2000s. Inafune left Capcom months after release, and the classic series simply stopped, until a new producer picked it up eight years later. The virtual cover art repeated Mega Man 9's joke, another iam8bit painting of an adult Mega Man with a pistol, this time as one panel of a triptych.