Megaman Star Force/Episodes

Megaman Star Force is a Japanese anime series, known in Japan as Shooting Star Rockman. The series premiered in Japan on October 7, 2006 and finished its run on October 27, 2007.

The English version premiered on Toonami Jetstream on July 23, 2007. On August 25, the series then premiered on Cartoon Network's Toonami block edited as a 2-hour faux-movie presentation composed of Japanese episodes 1 through 9 and heavily slimmed-down versions of episodes 12, 15, and 16. The full series has never aired on television in the US.

The original Japanese episodes are roughly 10 minutes long, with the English version combining two episodes together to fill a single 30-minute time-slot. Although most of the plots in the Japanese version are already split between two 10-minute episodes, a few one-part and three-part plots disrupt what would otherwise be a seamless combination of episodes. Thus, many English-dubbed episodes begin with the conclusion of the previous episode and end with a cliffhanger. Either way, this is problematic, as the series ends on an odd number of episodes. In order to compensate, Viz has combined Japanese episode 25 with ten minutes of recycled footage from the previous 25 episodes. This footage acts as a recap of the story up to that point and is accompanied with narration by Geo Stelar.

The series loosely follows the events of the first Nintendo DS Megaman Star Force video game. However, the storyline makes an obvious shift at Japanese episode 32 using many concepts not featured in the games, specifically, the FM-ians' quest to gather "minus energy" and their ability to transform into doppelgänger forms of the humans they once possessed. This implied that the series was in a state of filler plot-lines until the second video game was released.