The artstyle of the Classic Mega Man series, which only began to find its footing just after the third installment, is iconic. I have a majorsoft spot for Keiji Inafune’s artwork for the NES-era Mega Man titles, as well as Ryuji Higurashi’s illustrative work for Mega Man 9. I’ve even spent a good while trying my hand at the style, of which you can check out here!

Though, every artstyle has to start somewhere, and even though the later NES Mega Man titles had some excellent looking artwork, the illustrations for the first couple of games were… interesting. The characters of the original Mega Man and its sequel were drawn in a much more rounded artstyle, looking more chibi like than the anime-esque style it would evolve into, and after the first few Mega Man games, it was quickly improved upon.

When you really take some time to sample Mega Man 1 and 2’s artwork, however, you’ll find that it’s not thatbad of an artstyle. Sure, the infamous ‘Capcom hand’ looked odd from having the middle two fingers fused together, but outside of that, I find that it’s an artstyle that doesn’t get a lot of representation in Mega Man fanart and is one I’ve grown to appreciate in these past few weeks.

And from having drawn a near-identical Inafune-styled Mega Man a month ago, yet another challenge for my artstyle replicating smarts arose… could I do it again, but take more after the style of Mega Man 2’s artwork?

See for yourself!

I’ve been playing a whole lot of the first Mega Man Legacy Collection for the past few weeks, and in that time I’ve beaten all six games (Some even twice or thrice like Mega Man 5), read all of the database entries, and have been sampling the game’s enormous backlog of illustrations from Mega Man 1 through 6!

In doing so, I found myself developing a fondness for the artstyle of the first two titles in the series— while I do prefer the artstyle of the later NES games, the humble beginnings of Keiji Inafune’s illustrations for Mega Man appealed to me, and it was a style that I definitely wanted to see if I could come close to replicating.

And so, it was shortly decided that I would be drawing Mega Man in the Mega Man 2 artstyle! … but what pose would I draw him in? I thought it would be neat to have a MM2-styled version of Mega Man from his appearance on Mega Man 10’s box art, and the instant I thought of that pose, I got straight to work!

Compared to its modern counterpart, the style of the earlier Mega Man games has some pretty key differences: most glaring are the pupils of the eyes, which are much more wide than the slimmer pupil shapes seen in later titles. The eye shape itself is also a lot more circular, too, and certain aspects of robot master facial features (Such as their mouth or chin) are much larger.

The hands and boots of both Mega Man and robot masters are also greatly simplified, too. The 'feet’ section of the boot is much more round, and also lack the 'Z’ crease shape you would normally see on non-segmented boots. Instead, the boots (And often other parts of the body, such as the legs or buster) have minor crosshatch shading, though nothing too major.

These were design elements I made sure to account for in my initial sketch, and much like when I last drew Mega Man, the most important part was getting his head to look as 1:1 to the original that I could. You might notice the 'Capcom hand’ looks a bit wonky, and this is because I was using my Switch for references and it was tough to draw a good looking one pointed left instead of right— it wasn’t a huge deal. I could always fix it when I digitalized it!

After I got the sketch fully lined to my liking, it was time to figure out another crucial aspect to staying true to the look of Mega Man 2’s visual style: the colors. The colors I used here were directly picked from Mega Man himself on Mega Man 2’s box art, but when I wasn’t liking how dark the colors came out, I brightened and desaturated them a slight bit to give it that vintage feel.

The shading was particularly easy, as I referenced the shading from my main reference of Mega Man in 10’s main artwork, though I intentionally left some areas unshaded (Such as the buster meter and inner earpiece) seeing as Inafune tended to do the same every now and then.

An extremely small detail that I’m glad I acknowledged was how you can only see Mega Man’s right (Or hisleft) earpiece as opposed to both. In artwork from the first two games, whenever Mega Man is at a ¾ths angle, only one earpiece is present, whereas both can be seen at the same angle in later games.

I’ll be honest, it was actually a whole lot of fun drawing in 2’s artstyle, since it’s a lot more simplistic compared to the perfection 9 and 10’s style demands when replicating it— I may even attempt modern robot masters in the same style to see what they may have looked like in earlier Mega Man titles… or perhaps even draw faux official artwork for the obscure Bond Man!

That said, I hope you’ve enjoyed my dive into analyzing the artstyle of the earlier Mega Man games, and what my research yielded in perhaps one of my favorite drawings I’ve done this year!