The Blue Ink Reviews Sonic the Hedgehog #248 – Worlds Collide Part 3: Foreign Exchange Market

“Science studies what’s at the edge of understanding, and what’s at the edge of understanding is usually fairly simple.” -Noam Chomsky
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We left off having finally gotten the full explanation of how Mega Man ended up in the Green Hill Zone, and how Dr. Wily and Robotnik got the Genesis Wave to cross the dimensional barriers. On the surface, this unlikely fight seems to be evenly matched; Sonic has speed, but Mega Man has endurance and firepower on his side. There’s only one problem with this theory: Winning is usually a matter of figuring out who wants it more. And right now, Sonic seems to be the one who wants a win.

Of course, while Mega’s firing off lemons and Sonic’s doing his thing, confusion reigns supreme. Sonic thinks that there’s a tiny little animal powering Mega Man inside of him, and Mega Man thinks that Sonic is a robotic lifeform who just needs a little reprogramming. In any other circumstance, they might both be right.

The fight’s a lovely thing for the evil doctors, who are sitting back, sipping champagne, and getting back rubs from robotic masseuses while watching the match-up being broadcast by Tails Man on Robotnik’s super flatscreen. While Sonic and Mega Man are beginning to realize that they might lose this fight, our evil overlords welcome back the remaining Roboticized Masters who have the Chaos Emerald taken from Mega City. It seems they have something worse in mind once they have all seven… and they’re just missing the green one.

Sonic uses the terrain of the Green Hill Zone to his advantage to land a sneak attack on the Blue Bomber, but he makes the mistake of gloating. Mega Man may have trouble shooting you, Sonic, but if you get close enough, he still has a fist, and a punch from him hurts. Remember, this is a guy who was strong enough to hold up a collapsing roof in Mega Man 5, so you know he’s strong.

And then the scenery changes.

Back in Mega City, Proto Man returns to Dr. Light’s lab looking plenty beat up. He’s lost the gem, his brother, and the bad guys, but he has a flash drive with some recorded evidence about the ring portal they used to get away. Light thanks his oldest son and gets to work on the problem, and we get to see a little of his old phobia rearing its ugly head when Roll pleads with him to let her fix him up.

As we know from past issues, Blues is deathly afraid of having old Doc Light work on him, because he values his personality. Thankfully, he trusts his sister more than his dad, and so he goes into the shop for a much needed repair and recharge. Light’s glad that she’s taking care of it, because he has his own problems to deal with: Science!

To quote the Six Million Dollar Man, “We have the technology…” And Light’s able to re-create the ring portal that the Badniks used to make a clean getaway. He also says he’ll be making a phone call for some backup… might it be we’ll be seeing Elec Man and the Sunshine Seven in Part 4? One can hope.

The re-appearance of a warp ring in the Green Hill Zone is a welcome sight for Mega Man. He’s about had it with this crazy, looping world and its wide open scenery. He needs buildings, concrete, and more robots! More importantly, if the portal goes back to Mega City, then he can fight Sonic on his own turf. Mega Man’s definitely taken the worst of the pounding so far, because this Zone is Sonic’s backyard, and it wasn’t built for the sort of close-quarters combat the Blue Bomber’s used to. Taunting Sonic to come at him, Mega Man gets both himself and this crazy blue blur through the portal and out the other side to home base. While Dr. Wily scrambles to send their top agents to deal with Dr. Light once and for all, Sonic has other problems.

He’s suddenly in a world full of humans and robots. Now, he’s seen humans, and he’s seen robots, but he’s never seen so many. Talk about your rude awakenings.

And with Rush, Beat, Eddie, and even Tango arriving on the scene to help out a Buster-disabled Mega Man, it just got a lot ruder.

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In any other circumstance, Mega Man and Sonic would have killed each other. Yes, perhaps that statement is a little presumptuous, like Cloud always getting voted tops in those “Who Would Win?” polls on GameFAQs, but it has a basis in psychology. For one, Mega Man doesn’t like to kill anyone. He usually gets by just disabling his enemies. Every time he’s shredded a Robot Master, it’s either with extreme remorse or because something was frying his circuits. Like the time he shot Ice Man in the face? He wasn’t right in the head then.

Conversely, Sonic can buzz through Swatbots and Badniks with the best of them, but he’s more interested in getting answers than leaving a pile of scrap in his wake. Remember, all his buddies are missing. It wouldn’t do to permanently deactivate the one mechanized fella who might have an answer. The both of them were geared, at the start of this fight, to just roughing up the other enough so they’d give up. It wasn’t until they realized there was a chance that they might lose this fight that they started fighting for keeps.

We can hope that cooler heads will reign, and soon: With Bass and Metal Sonic on their way to bust up Light’s lab– the second time for Bass at this point in this warped timeline– it’s going to take all hands on deck to protect the one genius-level scientist type who might be able to supply the necessary answers and gear they’ll need to take the fight to the real threat.

For The Blue Ink.

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When he isn’t writing “The Blue Ink” reviews for The Mega Man Network, Erico (The Super Bard) spends his days keeping track of the “Legacy of Metal” fanon, dabbling in cooking and tea-brewing, and exploring the human condition from his Iowa stomping grounds.

The views expressed here reflect the views of the authors alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Mega Man Network.

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