I don't have much of an opinion about Megaman sequels, per se, given that the last instance I played was, like, 3 or so, but the “X” as a number-/nam-ing scheme for Goods confounds many Brands.
Take Apple, for example, and Mac OS X.
When that was released, Mac OS X was the “new” and “totally different” operating system for a new age. Never mind that it was a straight build off NeXTStep (from a company Steve Jobs founded when he left Apple in a huff because the world didn't like non-square pixels, ran into the ground, and then bought back from himself as “interim” CEO when Apple came crawling back to him for his movie star presentation), fluffed up to mostly-useable by embracing and extending various open source software (including hiring the starving coders, all too ready to sell out for a real paycheck GNU told them they didn't need, who wrote it), and plenty maligned in the public eye as “Rhapsody”, a daring when new but now outmoded musical form, whose questionable imagery was discarded for Production release in favor of… wait for it… Big Cats. Everybody likes Zoology.
At roughly the same time, Apple coughed out Mac OS 8.high and 9.x, a final batch of smoke and mirrors to give the appearance they were still supporting both a processor architecture the perfomance of which handheld devices surpassed around the same time[1], which processor architecture anyone still using seriously was using under a Real OS, and earlier, less desireable versions of the same processor architecture that the new toy required.
When Mac OS X was released, Apple-insiders swore up and down that the X meant ten (10), and disparaged anybody who dared pronounce it “ex”. But, as these things go, that software product was neither Perfect nor Ideal, and, as such, minor- and subversions (ho ho ho) were required. You will not find any Apple literature using it, but “X.1″ certainly appeared Out There on the Internet (”Why not Xi?” is a question worthy of some omphalotic discussion, but maybe another time). Capcom obviously encountered a similar conundrom, spawning Megaman X2 and X3. All things settle out eventually, and I'm typing this on an Apple Powerbook running Mac OS X 10.4.5, which merely reopens the question: “What's the X mean, then?”
It should not go unnoticed, nor is it irrelevant, that these X “versions” appeared flailing desperately against the receding riptide of such stillborn media-cliches as “Generation X”[2] which begat “the X-games” and so forth.
The transparent lesson here, of course, is that despite their recent, clever tricks at penetrating “community” web sites on the Internet (where nobody Knows anyone, but everybody thrills slavishly to pretending that they are members of an Elite—or, perhaps, 1337—Set), Marketers did recently and do still chase and clutch after “what's Cool”, getting something that smells vaguely like a fish on the line, on a good day, three or so degrees of separation away from The Kids.
Confusion over whether these vendors postfixed an X to represent the Roman numeral, to signify a departure from pre-existing Product, to linguistically (or glyph-ically?) represent crossing paths, or in a corpthink analogy to a reptile brain response to questionably-gathered, outdated, and statistically-normalized Market Data is certainly frustrating, but has clear causes: even they would have been unable to give you a single, cogent answer (not that anybody bothered to really Ask) for why they did it by the time they went to market, but they knew damn well it was Edgy, and they Win because here we are still talking about a single letter in their commodity's fucking Name, which is kept alive in the Consumermind because we are.
[1] Surpassed by using later generations of the same already-clearly-doomed line of chips, a sinking ship its manufacturer was so desperate to abandon that they had already accepted a lifeline from Big Blue, whose turn as Kong had long since come and gone, chips used to greater end-user utility than by Apple in devices that fit in a palm rather than on a desk or even in a lap. Disregarding emotion or sheer village idiocy, it can only be the job-market politics involved in canning everybody involved in general-purpose CPU development that possessed Motorola not to kick the whole division to the curb right then and do nothing but what was and is actually making them money: cellular phones.
[2] Douglas Coupland's origination stands as the only acceptable pre-ironic use.
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