Dr. Wily looks like he should have been a villain in Fiendish Freddy's Big Top Of Fun, not a game about devastating evil robots bringing the world to the brink of doom. It might be argued that Wily chooses his clownish appearance to throw his foes off, but I don't think he's that much of an evil genius. More than anything he looks like an old-fashioned stage magician. "For my next trick, I will, defying all odds, fail yet again to conquer the world!" It's no wonder he designed the likes of Toad Man.
In some series, you have to give the idiotic villain some credit just for being able to unleash and coordinate a legion of dissident minions, even if it's all for nothing. Dr. Wily doesn't even rate this level of villainous honorable mention. Not only are his legions not coordinated, they're barely even unleashed - mostly they seem to have conquered their own bedrooms. That, and they're all robots, so if Wily did coordinate them, it wouldn't prove anything, except that Wily is enough of an evil genius to actually use the controls and programming he presumably implanted in each of his creations. In short: why anyone would be afraid of this guy is beyond me. Wily is the worst villain ever.
Even if playing as Forte is a somewhat, er, limited experience, I still think he's a pretty cool robot, all things considered. Black armor is pretty edgy, I can forgive the big bat ears, and he seems to have been imbued with "attitude" in a laid-back manner (that is, he's more Sonic the Hedgehog than Bubsy th Bobcat or Aero the Acrobat).
I have a problem with his picture, though. I'll voice this concern again at the very end of the CD library, too. In general, I count on the cooler robots having cooler portraits - after all, the artist has more to work with. Here, though Forte seems to be saying, "Get out of here with that damn camera!" Just not good enough for a badass who's supposed to be, you know, one of the heroes of the game.
About the only thing that might ever make Rush cooler than Gospel is that Gospel has a moronic name in the English version of Mega Man 7. I'll admit that you might be able to spin some wretched puns off of "Treble," like "We're in treble now!" But this isn't enough to make up for the fact that the translators had a technique that they could have called the "Gospel Boost," and knowingly changed the name of the dog involved so that the only conceivable name for the attack would be the "Treble Boost." Since this sounds a lot like a stereo system feature used only by extreme feebs, the whole thing really hurt Mega Man 7's sales, and may go a long way towards explaining why Rockman & Forte was never released in the US; Capcom was just too embarassed to inflict that name on us again.
King is the (supposedly regal) final foe from Rockman & Forte. Well, semi-final. After you beat him, stunningly, Dr. Wily reappears and does battle with you. This takes place, if memory serves, even if you're playing Forte, which is odd since Forte was only fighting King because the unlikely monarch of metal had some sort of rivalry with Wily. If you followed that, read on for speculation on the reason for this obvious gap in logic.
It might be that King was being controlled by Wily, who, in his senile old age, created this new robot to attack himself, for no apparent reason. At the end of the game, King and Mega Man seem to be friends; perhaps he just sees the error of his ways and leaves the scene, and Wily steps in to take advantage of the power vacuum. Either way, I wish they'd at least called this guy "King Man" or even the politically troubling "Dr. King." Just being named "King" is even more unsettling than all those planetoid freaks a few games back; at least they were cool enough to justify a single-name designation. King is not.