This series deserves some new blood, and Z-grade knockoffs aren't gonna cut it.

But re-releases like the new Legacy Collection do make the wait a little easier.

If you need a quick refresher before you go tackle some Robot Masters in the fight for everlasting peace,

We've put together a handy-dandy Mega Man Timeline for you.

As always, there's gonna be spoilers throughout.

And sorry 'Battle Network' fans, we're sticking to the main timeline for this one.

We'll do a whole video on it once they announce 'MegaMan 11' for Switch.

And I hope we do, because 'Battle Network is really dope.'

So let's begin with Mega Man Classic.

It all started in the year 200X, when Dr. Thomas Light changed the world with his robot revolution.

Which isn't something you can say for most mall Santas. I mean look at the guy he looks drunk. All the time.

Mega Man! You must go after him! We don't know who he is, and it's dangerous to leave him alone.

Light wasn't satisfied building industrial machines.

He was more interested in robots that could think and feel.

His first experiment was an android named Proto Man, who escaped from the lab before he was completed.

Next, Light built a brother and sister pair of robots named Rock and Roll.

Hi! My name is Rock! Who are you?

I'm Dr. Light. I built you.

Are you my father?

These two were way more chill, and they all lived like a happy family for a while.

Meanwhile, Light's old colleague Dr. Albert Wily was still salty about being passed up for that Nobel Prize.

He reprogrammed six of Light's industrial droids to conquer the planet for him.

Earth's governments quickly cowered before the terror of a little metal man with scissors on his head.

That's Cutman. And he's kind of a pain unless you beat Gutsman first.

Seeing his father's work perverted for evil, Rock volunteered to be converted into a fighting robot and take them on himself.

Light wanted a peaceful life for his weird robot son/housekeeper, and I totally get it.

I'd be worried sick if my Roomba enlisted in the Marines.

But Rock was mankind's only hope.

So he welded a bigass gun and some blue armor on the little guy and turned him into Mega Man.

Super fighting robot... Mega Man!

Honestly there's not much story progression in the original series. It's kind of just one big game of rock, paper scissors. No pun intended.

Wily is the main antagonist in literally every game, even when Capcom tried to fake us out.

The closest thing to character development we get is in 'Mega Man 7' for SNES.

After stopping Wily for the zillionth time, our hero is so fed up he considers murdering his nemesis in cold blood.

It's definitely a Batman/Joker kind of moment.

I'll break you in two!

Oh, Batman. If you had the guts for that kind of fun you would have done it years ago!

And it's about as deep as the original series got.

There's no definitive ending to the classic era, so let's jump forward 100 years to the era of Mega Man X.

In the year 21XX, no one really knows what happened to the original Mega Man.

Maybe he went to the robot retirement home with Johnny 5 and Paulie's butler from Rocky IV.

You know, "Happy Birthday, Paulie?"

Doctors Light and Wily are long gone, too.

But before he died, Light completed one last robot:

An advanced prototype named Mega Man X.

X was a fully intelligent, self-aware android.

He's so advanced he makes Mega Man classic look like a lawnmower.

But Light didn't want another Proto Man incident on his hands, so he sealed X away in a pod to learn the difference between right and wrong.

Doctor...

Farewell, X. You are the world's one true hope.

Wily built a next-gen robot too.

Zero is basically everything a hyperactive nine-year-old thinks is cool.

He's got a stylish ponytail, badass 'tude and, oh yeah, a f*cking LIGHTSABER.

Total edgelord.

But he went berzerk the first time he was activated, so Wily locked him away to chill for a while.

100 years later, an archaeologist named Dr. Cain discovered X's capsule.

The technology inside was so advanced that Cain used it as the basis for a new generation of robots, called Reploids.

It goes as well as you'd expect for A.I.s designed by a guy who digs up fossils for a living.

An evil virus made the Reploids go haywire.

My fate is sealed. I have no choice.

It even infected Sigma, the leader of the peacekeeping Blade Runners-- I mean, Maverick Hunters.

He escalated the conflict in a full-blown rebellion, and X and Zero spent eight games shutting him down.

The battle may be over, but the war is just beginning!

It's later implied that the virus was actually Dr. Wily's disembodied consciousness, so he's still kind of the main antagonist.

And his final creation Zero was the original carrier.

He's the focus of the next entry in the timeline, Mega Man Zero.

At the end of the 'X' series, Zero handed himself over to the government so they could find a cure.

They came up with little programs called Cyber-elfs to eradicate the virus and put an end to the Maverick uprising.

But they were corrupted by Dr. Weil, yet another mad scientist who tried to conquer Earth in the bloody and unfortunately named Elf Wars.

X sacrificed himself to seal away the Dark Elf overlord, and then for a while the humans and Reploids lived in harmony in a supercity called Neo Arcadia.

They even slapped together a clone of X to run the place, but without Dr. Light's morality training he went off the deep end.

The Copy X started killing off innocent reploids, so in the year 22XX the robot Resistance reactivates Zero in a brand new body.

He destroyed the copy, defeated the Dark Elf and put a stop to Weil at the cost of his own life.

200 years later, all that's left of Zero is a tiny biometal artifact containing his soul.

Because of course robots have souls. How else could Robot Hell exist?

Here ya go!

Wow! That was pretty brutal even by my standards!

The two annoying kids in the short-lived Mega Man ZX series use Zero's power to fight an evil corporation, and honestly?

I'd rather talk about Mega Man Legends.

This series takes place at the very end of the timeline, thousands of years after ZX.

No one's sure about the exact year, so let's just call it XXXX A.D.

'Cause that rolls off the tongue. We'll just call it...

Earth has been flooded, and tiny islands are the only surface left.

Kind of like 'Wind Waker.'

Also? Humanity no longer exists.

They fled to a space station called Elysium before mysteriously going extinct.

Sound familiar? Did they just bite a whole plot from Mega Man?

The dominant life form on the planet are artificial humans called Carbons.

They're made of organic material, but they can swap out their body parts for mechanical replacements.

The total fusion of man and machine.

But energy is scarce in the new world, so a lot of Carbons find work scrounging up technology left behind by the ancient humans.

It's a decent living, even with pain in the ass pirates like Tron Bonne flying around.

Our hero is Mega Man Volnutt, a digger with a dark past.

Before he got reformatted, he used to live on Elysium with the Master, the last living human.

I remember now... I came here, I came to Terra with the Master... Then...

When the Master finally died, it activated a failsafe plan to exterminate all the Carbons and clone a new generation of humanity to take their place.

It's really scary.

Mega Man stopped the purge, but the last 'Legends' game ends with him stranded in space with no way home.

And... that's it.

That's where the series ends chronologically, on a huge cliffhanger that set us up for a game that never came.

Anyway, I wonder how Mega Man's doing? We have to get this thing working so we can go get him!

Keiji Inafune's 'Red Ash' is supposed to be a spiritual successor, but given the disaster of 'Mighty No. 9,' I'm not gonna hold my breath.

Seriously, just try to play 'Mighty No. 9.' It is a disaster.

For now, in the year 2017, the Mega Man Legacy Collections are the best we've got.