Hey friends! I'm excited to launch that I've finally written the intros and the first entry to the ROCKMAN Play Diary! Check it out!

If you don't want to read the giant intro stuff, in short: I'm doing a play diary based on my attempt to clear the game (one stage at a time) taking no damage whatsoever. It's... very hard at times. In fact, the very first entry took hundreds of attempts to finish.

I didn't want to blather any more than I already was in the diary proper, so I'll talk a little bit about naming conventions here.

It took me a while to really decide what naming conventions I wanted to use for the game titles and characters (lol remember my Wod/Ward thing) because they aren't consistent across the series nor the fandom. So I'll explain why I chose the things I did:

Japanese names - I decided to play the Japanese versions of the games because they are much more consistent. Plus the titles are a lot easier to distinguish. Some examples: Wily is called Wily, Willy, Willey, Waily, etc. throughout the series. In Japanese he's always just "Wily." Later in the series, you'll see even weirder things, like in Mega Man X5, they decided to create all new names for the characters (even more different than the normal name changes), but then had Squid Adler (originally Volt Kraken) refer to Launch Octopus (originally Launcher Octopauld) as "Octopardo," using not only the Japanese name, but spelling it wrong... And then with the game titles, there's stuff like how Mega Man 5 is the fifth NES title, and Mega Man V is the fifth Game Boy title, but Mega Man 5's title is written as Mega Man V in the game, and stuff like that... This kind of confusion just doesn't exist in the Japanese version. There are many times I actually prefer localization changes (and when talking about the game casually myself, I will use my preferred titles and names for everything using my own consistent conventions I've created lmao), but for the sake of the diaries, I'm siding with consistency.

Character name stylization - This is something that differs throughout the games and fandom as well. Is it "Magnet Man", "MagnetMan", "MAGNETMAN", "Magnetman" ...??? I double-checked with the eleven main games (I didn't really look at the GB games) and the first two write the names like "MAGNETMAN", while after that they are consistently stylized with a space ("MAGNET MAN"), except for in ROCKMAN6, which for some reason reverts to the former style. Also, they're usually only in all-caps because they appear in places where all the text is capitalized anyway. In the few cases where it is not, they're either written in Japanese or with normal capitalization rules. So I'm going to be consistent with that stylization and use "Magnet Man." There is one exception -- the titles of the games and the lead protagonist seem to always be stylized as "ROCKMAN" even in contexts where the other characters' names are not stylized as such, so I will continue to use "ROCKMAN" for the game titles and the name of the main character when specifically referring to his ROCKMAN persona in contrast to his character as a whole or his service robot persona. In general, I will just refer to him as Rock, because that's his name and it's a lot easier to type.

Game Titles - To make this one short, I'm stylizing the titles this way simply because it's the way I like it best. There's lots of competing stylization here, too. Classic main titles are written with no spaces (ROCKMAN2 &c), the same with X titles (ROCKMANX7 &c). Titles that use multiple words will be spaced (ROCKMAN & FORTE, ROCKMAN WORLD 3). Except for the words "X" and "ZX" titles that contain multiple words will be spaced (ROCKMAN & FORTE, ROCKMAN WORLD 3, ROCKMAN Zero 4, ROCKMANZX Advent &c). Again, all this is just... the way I like it.

The period after "Dr" - This is just a personal stylization thing. I don't write a "." after "Dr" (Doctor) and other titles (Mrs, Lt, etc.) because I don't like the way it looks, even if this is prescriptively improper. Since there are many "Dr" characters in this series, it will come up a lot, lol.

That's all I can think of for now. Hope to get Judy's scenario finished today, too, so be on the lookout for that!