In honor of the Blue Bomber’s 30th anniversary, Mega Man 11 is heading to consoles and PC on October 2, 2018. This new entry into the long-running series of action-platformers is the first original game released since 2010’s retro-inspired Mega Man 10.

After releasing two games that were inspired by the NES era of the series, it’s great to see Capcom taking the series in a new, modern direction. However, while the visuals, audio quality, and gameplay mechanics appear to be heavily updated, everything looks like it will retain that slick, precise feel of playing a Mega Man game. It’s a feeling that anyone who has played any game in the series will easily identify with.

So far, only two of the eight Robot Masters have been revealed: Block Man and Fuse Man. However, while part of me is certainly curious to see what else the game has in store for us, I kind of hope they keep the rest under wraps, since part of the fun in playing a new Mega Man adventure is finding out what the game’s unique cast of characters has in store for you. While I used to worry that Capcom would eventually run out of unique ideas, everything we’ve seen so far about this new game shows me that I really don’t have anything to worry about.

As for the story, it looks like Dr. Wily is back up to his old tricks again, but this time he is looking back at some of his past research from his days as a university student, giving his latest batch of Robot Masters a fairly substantial upgrade. It also means that Mega Man will get a similar upgrade in order to counter this latest threat, introducing a whole new type of gameplay mechanic for players to get used to.

As a big fan of the series, I really want Mega Man 11 to do well, because I’d love to see Capcom move forward with finally making Mega Man X9.

We can dream, right?