What does it say about a franchise when the most exciting thing that’s happened to it in the past ten years is that it briefly regressed a few decades to mimic a 20-year-old entry? Yet that’s precisely the predicament in which Mega Man finds itself these days, forced to dig into its own past to be interesting. Unfortunately, that already happened with last year’s Mega Man 9. This year’s release — Mega Man Star Force 3 — is much less intriguing. It’s an incremental tweak of a concept that Capcom has churned out every twelve months since the Game Boy Advance’s debut eight years ago.
And yet, taken on its own merits, Star Force 3 is actually a pretty decent game. It’s ultimately not so different from 2001’s Mega Man Battle Network, the inventive card-battling action-RPG reinvention of the franchise that was incredibly popular for a few years thanks, in large part, to a successful anime tie-in. The Star Force games are actually the follow-up to Battle Network; it’s essentially the same game, though far less popular than its GBA predecessors. Oh, there’s a Star Force anime, too, but kids aren’t as easily fooled as Capcom seems to think. You can only sell them the exact same thing so many times before they catch on.