Override is the central mechanic of Mega Man: Dual Override and the reason the game is named the way it is. It replaces the time-limited special moves of earlier entries with a resource you bank, spend on your terms, and then pay a defined price for. Everything about how the game feels flows from that single decision.
The Override gauge fills through combat - both from dealing damage and from taking damage. The second half is the important one: getting hit is a resource gain, not a pure penalty, which is what makes aggressive play viable. Once full, a gauge can be stored, and up to three gauges can be held at once. Banking them rather than spending them the instant they fill is the core skill of the game.
This is the sharpest break from Mega Man 11's Double Gear, which ran down on its own and made you use specials quickly or lose them. Here the meter decreases as you attack - Override is a bank you spend, not a countdown you race. You are never forced to trigger it, and a stored gauge survives a long stretch of ordinary play.
Mega Man's Mega Buster fires in rapid small bursts rather than the slow heavy shot of earlier games, and the Charge Shot gains tiers:
The bigger prize is that Special Weapons cost no Weapon Energy while Override is active, so you can fire them without the usual energy cost. The catch is that switching weapons ends Override. Choosing which weapon to enter Override with is therefore a real commitment - bring the wrong one and your overclock lasts four seconds.
When Override ends, you are overheated for roughly twenty seconds. During that window Custom Actions are blocked and the gauge will not recharge. This is the cost side of the whole system, and it is deliberately long enough to matter. Triggering Override as a panic button right before a boss dies is a trap: you spend your window with your Custom Actions locked while the next phase begins.
Exact gauge fill rates, the precise overheated duration in frames, and per-weapon energy costs have not been published. The system has been demonstrated in trailers and in the demo, and the behaviour described above is what has been shown - but numeric tuning is not public, so treat any specific frame-data figure as unverified.