game's production, the developers had lost the main planner, Inafune having to take his position. Inafune concluded, "I knew that if we had more time to polish it, we could do a lot of things better, make it a better game, but the company (Capcom) said that we needed to release it. The whole environment behind what went into the production of the game is what I least favored. Numbers one and two – I really wanted to make the games; I was so excited about them. Number three – it just turned very different." The next original character design Inafune would create was the character "Punk" in the 1992 Game Boy game Mega Man III. Capcom set on the development on a new series for the Super NES, Mega Man X, which continued the plot of the original series, but set a darker tone and took place 100 years after the previous storyline. Inafune designed the character Zero for the games. "I didn't get to completely design a Mega Man [protagonist] from scratch until Zero (Mega Man X, SNES). Back when the SNES was coming out, I was asked to give Mega Man a redesign, so I created this character. But I realized that this design wouldn't be accepted as Mega Man, so I had another designer create the new Mega Man, and I worked on Zero to release him as the 'other main character' that would steal all the good scenes!" Hayato Kaji took over lead illustrator role for Mega Man 7, which was released in 1995. Inafune contributed some designs to the game. He designed the character of Auto, as well as the initial sketches for two new characters named "Baroque" and "Crush". These characters were handed over to Kaji who finished the design, and they became known as Bass and Treble. Producer Long time producer Tokuro Fujiwara, departed Capcom. Inafune was then made producer for the next Mega Man title, Mega Man 8 in 1996. Inafune produced the three-dimensional Mega Man Legends series after receiving requests from Sony to develop a new 3D Mega Man series exclusively for the PlayStation. Although he envisioned high sales and was an ambitious supporter to the development of the game, it was not a massive success and Inafune likens it to a "clumsy son". Inafune says it was quite difficult to promote the game, as there was little media interest