Mega Man/Nightmare Fuel

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


You think that's bad? Wait until you see his One-Winged Angel form.


The Nightmare Fuel page for all incarnations of Mega Man. Even the cartoon.

  • At the end of Mega Man ZX you realize the basic plot stems from Japanese horror. Then early in the sequel ZX Advent there's the Tower of Verdure mission; you're trapped in a tower with a haywire security system while also being assaulted by a variety of weird plant monsters. This is only slightly creepy, but it leads up to the boss, Rospark. Pretty much everything this guy says, along with his voice, is seriously freaky. Of special note is "Come and cry in my bosom. Cry out in terror and pain!" And then, immediately after that fight, you have yet another encounter with the soul-sucking Artifact of Doom from the end of the first game.
    • Siarnaq. He is so untrusting of everything and traumatized by his past that he speaks in a monotone robotic voice. His personality, emotions and empathy have been completely removed just by whatever happened to him, leaving just his intelligence. Well, it's not entirely gone. He still has a little emotion left, only shown after he kills you.
    • The final sequence in Mega Man ZX. People Jars, Was Once a Man... and all of them more or less killed to power Model W. And then you get to kill it... and possibly them, too.
  • Mega Man Legends and some of its nightmarish songs. "The Sub Gate of the Clozer Woods" almost sounds like it was out of a Silent Hill game...
    • What happens to the Servbots in so many battles (especially the first game) could really horrify people. The best example being the battle on the submarine (can't remember the name of the battle), when you're blowing up Bonne subs. With Servbots inside. Sure, they're "immortal" and we do see that they're okay later on, but until you do...
    • If you play Mega Man Legends and stay on the title screen then servbots walk past. Sometimes they're paper-thin!
    • Pretty much all of the dungeons in the Legends games have some Nightmare Fuel, especially the isolation.
  • The Mega Man X series. Particularly X5, where If the attempts to destroy the falling colony fail, you hear Dr. Wily telling Zero to awaken...to go and destroy X. Then you see Zero on a mountaintop, glowing with purple energy. He finally went Maverick.
    • Plus there's the fact that if the colony crashes, Earth is almost annihilated.
    • Also, in X5, the backgrounds of the first three final stages consist of pure flashing moving straight lines AND this terribly mind-numbing music, along with the the scary violet flashes of the appearing Zero Viruses - enough to freak you down to the soul. Considering that X5 was supposed to be the final chapter of Mega Man X, this could have been a great way to conclude the series altogether.
    • The final stretch of X4 after beating the Colonel. Everything's spiky and full of holes and that ominous vacuum like music. And Double and Iris in the stage.
    • One thing to add - Double = Nightmare Fuel; Iris = Tear Jerker
    • Sigma in X4, as well. In his first form, he's dress like the Grim Reaper and he has a giant, lethal scythe that looks capable of crushing anything when in strong hands. After this form is defeated, you'll face him the second time, only to find him with two separate forms that alternate with one another. One form is his head attached to an alien cannon. The other form, which takes the cake, is his big head, but disfigured with metallic tubes and wires protruding from him, which makes it look like life support. The music in both battles can intensify these moments, especially the 2nd one. Here's a link if you want to check out the forms.
    • The Zero vs. Sigma flashback in X4. Zero gets the upper hand on Sigma by tearing off his saber arm, then closes in with a Slasher Smile. The next time we see Sigma, he's been beaten to a pulp and half his face is missing along with the eye on that side. The other eye has a single straight wound across it, implying that Zero methodically gouged out one of Sigma's eyes, started on the other, then got bored. Zero then (tries to) finish Sigma by snapping his neck, which he really could have done at any other point before then, showing that he wanted Sigma to suffer and die slowly. Even Omega had the decency to stun-lock you to death in 10 seconds. Zero also spends the entire fight laughing or screaming. Awakened Zero and Omega would at least talk.
    • In X8 the final boss Lumine has an attack which is an instakill. It consists of the screen going black and you hear the character you are playing as scream his last. Only one question, What did he do to them?
  • Mega Man Zero 4 also had the entire climactic final battle being composed of high octane nightmare fuel. For one thing, after Zero arrives at the core reactor of Ragnarok, Dr. Weil not only reveals himself to have survived, but you get a closeup of his face, which shows at least half of his face torn off with a mechanical skull revealing itself while grinning psychotically, and he is even heard laughing demonically and maniacally. The fact that "Fate: Theme of Vile" (Dr. Weil's name was Dr. Vile in the Japanese version) is playing in the background also makes it even more tense, and it's even more frightening when hearing Dr. Weil's speech in the radio drama track taken directly from this scene.
    • Then, after merging with the core, the mood turns even more intense with the use of the song Fractured Border. Even after this form is defeated, the Ragnarok cannot be stopped from crashing, and then, when things couldn't possibly get worse, Weil reveals himself to have survived yet again, coming out of a hole in the floor. It's even more intense in the drama track where you not only hear Weil laugh before he speaks and reveals himself to have survived, but there is even sounds in the background that sounded more similar to a thunderstorm. Then he merges himself even further with Ragnarok with wires forcibly being shoved into him (The Drama Track even has Weil grunting in pain, indicating that the transformation process to be quite painful, and the Japanese version of the game even has it becoming a bloodbath while witnessing the transformation), and his completely merged form with Ragnarok looks even more horrific, with the Mega Man Zero Official Complete Works even referring to it as a "sinful abomination of a second form."
    • You know Ax Crazy Omega from Zero 3? Destroyed 75% of Reploid life and 50% of humanity, and would have done more if he wasn't stopped? That was what Dr. Wily wanted Zero to be. Also a rare fusion of Nightmare Fuel and Fridge Horror.
    • Worse than that, it's not the first time this kind of thing happened in megaman history. The Colony Drop of X5 is the canon ending of said game. That's right. That 75%/50% figure is from the remaining 10% that survived and procreated after X5.
  • CircusMan.EXE of Battle Network 6. And you thought The Joker is a Monster Clown...
  • Even the Classic series had some at the end of 2 with the final Wily stage. A creepy cavern with what looks like blood dripping from the ceiling, no music, and Dr Wily turning into an alien, with only one weakness and the ability to kill you in 2 to 3 hits.
    • 2's Wily Stage 3 had a very spooky feel. And 10's endless stage music; the echoes in the music sound eerily similar to what happens if Mega Man dies in the games...
    • Super Adventure Rockman's game over scenes. In the normal one, you watch helplessly as Roll dies, and Mega and Dr. Light hug in their last moments before Wily takes over the world. In the ending you get if you lose to the final boss, it electrocutes everyone, including Wily, to death.
    • In Mega Man and Bass, King proves he's not messing around by chopping Proto Man in half with an axe.
    • In Mega Man 3...the Wily Stages 5 and 6's music...that's all...
  • Surprisingly, the Ruby-Spears Mega Man cartoon had an instance of this in the first episode. In a flashback detailing Rock and Roll's creation, Dr. Wily had them strapped to an operating table to reprogram them. Via an electric drill to their heads. While they were awake. Complete with both of them struggling. It's the robot equivalent of a lobotomy.
    • Also in "The Beginning", Wily warned Light not to follow him after he kidnapped Rock and Roll. If he did, Iceman would freeze him. And Cutman would slice him up.
    • Wily's plans in "The Big Shake" and "The Day The Moon Fell" both involve causing extreme natural disasters, via earthquakes in the former and pulling the moon out of its orbit in the latter. They're played completely seriously.

Wily: I will create chaos! Destroy everything! Mankind will beg me to take over!

    • The Lion Men were not well-received, but they have one moment of genuine scariness. After zapping Dr. Light with his mind controlling lionizing Eye Beams, Tar turns his attention to Wily and turns him into a lion man as well. He then frisks him for his reprogramming device and zaps the Robot Masters with it, including Protoman and Roll, turning them all loyal to him.

Protoman: *strained* You...are... our leader...Tar!

    • The image of Rock/Mega on a lab table as a Terminator-esque endoskeleton in the intro is a little unnerving, even though it only shows up for a few seconds before dissolving into an image of Mega from that same position but with his "skin."
    • And there's the first nightmare in "Mega Dreams"; while the idea of Gutsman and Cutman pretending to be a couple may amuse you, that moment comes after a shot of a stuffed dino with what looks like blood on its muzzle.
    • In "Brain Bots", Wily places Mega Man in a Death Trap. The trap consists of a Descending Ceiling with spikes. Unlike some death traps, Mega was bound to the floor as it descended. What pushes this into Nightmare Fuel is what Wily said about it; he uses it to recycle robots he no longer needs into scrap metal. Meaning he's done this to his own robots.
      • What makes it worse is that some robots, like Fire Man and Star Man, were only in one episode and never seen or mentioned again...
    • Some of Cutman's lines fall under this. His Peter Lorre-esque voice makes it worse.

Cutman: I'll give them haircuts... from the neck up!

    • In "Mega X", the amount of destruction caused by Wily's superlaser. And this was on low power.
    • In "Bro Bots", Protoman's revelation as the Heel Face Mole is met with resistance. How does he control the heroes? By threatening to shoot the governor in the face.

Protoman: Power down, or I'll give Deacon a plasma shave!

    • Sometimes the Robot Masters (and Rush) are literally blown to pieces. This isn't too bad until one episode showed Roll in pieces, invoking the Uncanny Valley as Mega Man picks up her head to talk with it.
    • The show often used acid as a weapon, one time weaponizing acid rain; some kids became convinced that they'd die in an acid rain storm.
    • In "Curse of the Lion Men", Mega and Rush are about to be ground up at a salmon-canning company. They actually show the salmon hitting the saw blades.
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