Este juego es cool como el carajo, la historia es genial, el arte y aestethic son hermosas, zero se controla increíble, el diseño de los enemigos está genial, la música también.

Pero dios mío, métanle las bolas en una licuadora al chambón que diseño este juego para que experimente una sensación mínimamente comparable a lo que es jugar megaman zero. Los enemigos respawnean al INSTANTE que dejas la pantalla, los puntos de guardado escasean, y muchos niveles se sienten directamente injustos. Añadile esto que en el maldito primer nivel podés romper el juego y farmear todo el dinero que quieras con un enemigo en particular (lo que me lleva a pensar que diseñaron este juego a las apuradas)

Un ejemplo de esto último es el nivel final, que te pide hacer una jodida boss rush antes de enfrentarte al jefe final, el cual tiene DOS FASES Y NO TE PERMITEN CURARTE EN LA SEGUNDA. Para más masoquismo, es una batalla basada en la memorización, completamente injusta, donde varios ataques pueden ser directamente inesquivables debido al diseño del escenario (y sí, los ataques te quitan la mitad de la vida). ¿Lo gracioso? Atrevete a morir una vez y vas a tener que repetir TODO el proceso otra vez.

Este juego es la definición de dificultad artificial. A pesar de eso, me gusto. Y sus puntos buenos siguen ahí. Solo recomiendo a todas las personas que no sean maniacos diagnosticados usar save states.

[Note: Only shelved this game due to broken 3DS, I’ll either move it to my 2DS or look for repair options in my limited area]

So you probably don't know this but I’m a huge Mega Man fan, I love the classic games despite some of them being pretty dated and well terrible, X has some of the best 4 platformers then everything after X5 Happened, Star-Force is pretty good and the limited time I played with the Legends and Battle Network series (That’s not Network Transmission) was fun.

But then there’s Mega Man Zero, an interesting enigma for me, a series that while I heard was pretty good especially the 3rd entry, I haven't really dabbled into that much and when I have, it’s had some weird setbacks, I played it on a school computer and it was obviously not very good, a friend recommended it to me so I picked up the DS Collection second hand and it had some horrible graphically glitches but I got somewhat far into the game, so now I finally have a different version of the DS Port and had managed to play near the end of the game and well, I was somewhat disappointed.

Let me explain that this isn't a bad game, far from it but coming of the heels of the X series and the sorta of cult following this has now I expected it to be a bit better.

I think the story, characters and art style was pretty good for Mega Man standards despite not being a fan of the new designs, Zero’s amnesia plot is a bit played out for my liking but taking back this fallen world one by one is written well enough (Man Sonic Forces got beaten by a GBA Game that’s sad lol), though it still feels pretty simple like with the Bosses but I'm content with the game’s plot, though isn’t nearly as good as how X1 handled being a new advancement/series and I wouldn't really want a Mega Man Zero series to be so far removed from the X Series as all of that just feel really shoehroned in for me, I also think the graphics and music are serviceable enough though aren't the best of the GBA or even better than Battle Network.

I think how Zero plays is also pretty good, his Z-Saber is fun to mess with, his other weapons, the elf mechanic and elemental chips shake up the gameplay yet still keep it focused and fun enough though feel a bit shoehorned in, The Bosses also give a fun challenge though can be a bit frustrating at times, so it’s a pretty fun time though there is one massive fatal flaw.

The level design in this game sucks.

Like holy shit, this games level design and structure kinda dampers this game pretty hard, like it sucks how well everything else is apart from the level design. The level structure is odd, it’s this weird in-between of the normal Mega Man structure and just a normal game but it doesn’t have a good reason why it’s like this or at least from what I played. But the level design, it’s so boring, having lives didn't really matter because I played in Easy Scenario and for some reason retries didn't decrease so I was fine (though I have heard some awful experiences with the retry system), but I didn't have much fun it honestly, there’s like an escort mission in this desert (which by the way is where half of the game’s levels are, I mean I get it’s to make the world more cohesive but feels pretty lazy in my opinion and they could do the same thing with more unique locations) the escort mission kills the pace of the level as you have to wait for this dude to slowly limp over to where you, it’s also in reverse so you have to awkwardly traverse this stage that weren't supposed to be played like that. It’s also pretty bad that how most of the levels I played felt like blatant copies of each other, which I wouldn't mind but it’s so boring to play these levels when your pace is halted by gimmicks that don't make the game better or more unique but rather somehow even more frustrating & sometimes boring to play.

So overall, from what I played, this game did somewhat underdeliver, it has it moments when its fun, the intro stage is amazing, it’s both rewarding for old fans and a great introduction for new fans, so I never understood why I didn't play it sooner plus the level itself is pretty good, though the rest of levels really dampers the entire experience with repeated themes and boring gimmicks. I really did contemplate giving this game a 6/10 instead but I feel like the level design just slightly makes the game worse, so I really do hope Mega Man Zero 2 is that improvement i’m wanting, I really didn't want to wait till Mega Man Zero 3 to finally see what makes this series so special for others but for now, I’ll probably get the ZX Collection to continue playing this game and the others.

As a huge Mega Man fan, it's a disgrace to my honor that I've never played this series. I've known about them, I know what happens in them, but I've never actually played them myself.

Finally, that has changed; my new issue with MMZ will be fighting against every person who has an incorrect opinion on this game like Zero during the ending. This game sucks. A very likable game, for sure, but it's not a good one.

One of the biggest issues at work to make MMZ1 annoying as hell to play are the universal system mechanics-- ones that don't have to do with anything specific in the game. Leveling up your weapons is stupid and encourages grinding which I despise, the screen crunch will often get you hit (if not killed) by things you couldn't possibly have seen coming, and you can't forget the godawful life system that makes death damn near require (unless you want to spend your very limited stock of lives) restarting the game over from a save point and mashing through multiple boxes of slow, unskippable text. Outside of the system mechanics, the level design is exceptionally weak, basically containing no interesting layouts until the endgame, and I'm not the biggest fan of the music-- which is fairly disappointing in its own right for Mega Man. Z1 has it particularly bad.

Despite me spewing all that venom at the game, I'm not going to pretend it doesn't have swag. It absolutely does, and it's the only reason I didn't give it a lower rating. Not all of the bosses in this game are very well designed (the Guardians :/), but god damn if Zero is not fun to destroy things with. If you're good enough at the game you can absolutely clean house with him and shut down any obstacle in the game. It saddens me to hear that the Triple Rod isn't coming back in any game after this because it's a very intelligently designed and fun to use weapon.

Besides the music, MMZ1 is also presentationally sick as hell. I appreciate what the connected world does for building it up, and so many little things you can't help but think are badass. The banner for this page is the "Warning" siren and I eat that for breakfast. Give me more games with stuff like that!

All in all: Zero 1 has shit, and Zero 1 has sauce. If they can make a game that is just Zero 1 but an actually good game, I think I'd love it. Let's hope Z2 is better.

On the surface, Mega Man Zero seems like a cool game, but after some time with it, it seems as though Inti Creates asked themselves, "How can we make a game like Mega Man X but less fun?"

Instead of finding power-ups throughout each stage, the player is asked to instead find creatures called Cyber Elves. Some of these are one-time uses, while others grant permanent health upgrades, stat improvements, or the ability to use subtanks. Before you can use a permanent upgrade, however, the elf holding the power must be fed with a randomly dropped currency, which results in lots of grinding late in the game. To make matters even worse, some elves are missable and using these elves results in the player receiving a lower rank, which thankfully doesn't impact the game itself but instead makes the player feel as though they are doing something wrong. Again, all of these components add up to a less fun experience.

If the mechanics weren't so solid, I wouldn't recommend this game at all, but die hard Mega Man fans might enjoy the challenge. Personally, I wish Inti Creates had retained more of what made the X seres so fun.

Mega Man Zero is certainly a good start for the series, but there are some blatant flaws here that can’t be ignored. I’ll start with the Cyber-elves. You’ll find them throughout the missions and most of them give you a temporary boost of some sort (stunning enemies, healing Zero, etc.), but some others will provide permanent upgrades for Zero. However, you’ll need to feed them each some Energy Crystals before being able to use the permanent Cyber-elves. This sounds fine, but the problem is that the necessary amounts of Crystals are staggeringly high. You will really have to grind for these things, and that’s not fun. I suppose they didn’t want to make it too easy to fully upgrade Zero, but they definitely didn’t have to go that far with the Energy Crystal costs. Next up, we’ve got a big one: the lives system, and I have one question about it: who the fuck thought it was a good idea? For those who don’t know, this game really broke the mold by not giving you some extra lives back after losing all of them, therefore you can only get more of them as they’re scarcely scattered throughout the levels or very rarely dropped by defeated enemies. This issue is coupled with the fact that you are locked out of a mission if you fail it without any lives left. Yeah, I guess you could say it makes sense in terms of story, but you could apply that logic to so many other games, just about all of which don't have these kinds of features! Thankfully, this bullshit can be avoided in the Legacy Collection with the Save Assist feature, which gives you checkpoints throughout the stages. You’re automatically sent back to the most recent one upon death without any lives lost. While such a feature might not be necessary for the other games in the collection, it’s absolutely essential for at least your first playthrough of this one. Once you have Save Assist enabled, you’re in for a fun action platformer. It has the same fun, fast-paced movement of the X series, pretty good music, and generally solid level design. The bosses are kinda hit or miss (The second phase of the final boss is an absolute miss), but I felt like the good outweighed the bad. Also, while the story is rather simple in this game, it provides a nice foundation for what’s to come and has some really cool moments (rot13 spoiler: V ernyyl yvxr Mreb erzrzorevat ubj zhpu orggre gur erny K jnf hcba qrsrngvat Pbcl K) Overall, despite its blatant issues, Mega Man Zero 1 is absolutely worth playing if you enjoy challenging action platformers.

Recommended by PKMudkipz as part of this list.

The Mega Man franchise is something I've held dear to me as a fan of classic no-frills side-scrolling run-n-gun action, but despite the plentiful spinoffs into nearly every genre under the sun, I've never actually ventured very far into any of the franchise's numerous spinoff series. So, at the behest of one user's suggestion, I'm dipping my toes into yet another Mega Man spin-off series with Mega Man Zero.

Taking place in the far, far future, Zero (from the Mega Man X series) has been revived by a struggling Reploid rebellion force to help aid in the fight against an X that has gone from all-loving hero to genocidal despot. Already, the concept of turning your old hero into the villain of a spinoff is novel, and transforming the dynamic from law-enforcement agent snuffing an attempted rebellion in Mega Man X to rebel fighter struggling against a powerful government agency is something MMZ runs with at full speed. MMZ is no doubt about it, the hardest Mega Man Game I've ever played. Your resources are incredibly limited, the enemies you face are tough as nails and are always placed in a way to wreck an unsuspecting player's shit, and the way missions are structured means running out of continues can lock you out of content and chances to get additional resources. This constant struggle against the game's many challenges really sells the struggle the characters deal with, and makes you feel like every victory is earned by the skin of your teeth. Despite this, I can't say it ever dips into outright unfair territory. If you're patient and pay attention to your surroundings and enemy attack patterns, the game can quickly become a breeze, especially with the breadth of weapon options and the ease with which Zero controls, sliding and wall-jumping everywhere while never feeling slippery or loose.

MMZ, while fun and challenging, suffers from a lot of systems that feel superfluous. The Cyber-Elf system is very helpful for newcomers and skill-impaired players, offering many boons that can help take the edge off the game's difficulty, but it feels a bit like an afterthought and the amount of resource grinding required to make the most out of some of them feels like a waste of time. There's a ranking system that encourages replays and mastery, but it's incredibly demanding, knocking off points for many, many actions in a way that discourages using a lot of the tools the game offers a player, and it's pretty frivolous even if you do care about that kinda thing, as there's no immediate reward for getting S-Ranks outside of bragging rights. But as a whole, Mega Man Zero was a solid time. It wasn't enough to immediately sell me on the rest of the entries in this sub-franchise, but it's a solid action-platformer and a good dose of Mega Man X-flavored action if you still need that particular itch scratched and (somehow) haven't tried this spinoff series out yet.

Inspired by pang’s recent venture into old Capcom action games, I went back to a very formative, but uncompleted title from when I was kid- though after a few minutes I quickly remembered why it was such a wall for me. Zero has an immediate sense of style, with a cinematic presentation and a dark tone, but it’s also remarkably hostile to a new player, not just making you a glass cannon and pitting you against tough enemies, but spending much of the runtime exacerbating this tension and stressing the way your failures will spill out and affect others around you.

A standout early-game fight sees you fighting a tough boss under the pressure of a timer- a new player having to both acclimatize to the controls and doing so quickly enough that your resistance allies aren’t killed in the process, with your only assistance being the Cyber-Elves, which grant you a variety of buffs at the cost of their own lives. It’s about as formative an opening as you could hope for in establishing the tone of a new series, a crushingly bleak world you’re meant to carve a way out of. This all proved to be way too much for my younger self, but pushing through it now revealed a different, less artistically sound side of the game, as some of the more obnoxious RPG elements start to rear their head.

To unlock the full moveset of each individual weapons, you’ll either need to consciously swap between weapons to make sure their full moveset is unlocked, or more likely, dedicate some time to attacking the same enemy over and over for a few minutes to unlock a basic 3-hit combo and the ability to charge your attacks. The Cyber-Elves, as thematically sound as they are, are similarly buried under the amount of grinding you’d need to do to feed them and unlock a selection of the most powerful upgrades. The score penalty and the narrative weight of the system might be enough for you to reconsider, but the meaningless time investment is what really cemented it as a feature never to be used.

Ended up being reminded of the first Zone of the Enders, both games undercutting a straightforward power-fantasy with scenarios that stress newfound responsibility that comes with your power- and also for the fact that they have these half-baked systems that seem like they were meant to fill out and mask some already short runtimes. It’s a strange balance, and it puts Zero in an awkward place where I think it’ll both be too off-putting for new players, but saddled with design that drags the pace down for those who get through the opening gauntlet and really want to dig into the game.

At the same time, these are also the kinds of rough edges I’ve also come to like about the first entry in a series, the sense that the game hasn’t been whittled down to its most focused-tested, agreeable features. One of the best qualities here that might lose out in a safer game is the seeming freedom to experiment with the series formula- sometimes surprised with a boss fight at the very beginning of a mission, or where defeating one will only mark the halfway point before tasked with a making a sudden escape or, less glowingly, escorting an NPC back to the starting point of the level.

Really bolstered by the strength of its fundamentals and it’s bookended quite well too. Already mentioned what a strong impression the beginning makes, but the ending pulls the game up quite a bit, your kit filled out with its full range of utility and some of the later fights really putting it to the test- both forms of the final boss get particularly good mileage out of your mobility and offensive capabilities, demanding that you play aggressively to shut down its most lethal attacks. Having to precisely move around the screen, trying to manipulate the boss’s attacks and keep track of which platforms are safe is probably the best use of Zero's moveset in the game, and one of the few challenges that seems conscious of the limitations brought on by the screen crunch of the GBA.

I’ve dipped into some of the later Zero titles, and it feels inevitable that I’ll end up enjoying those more, given the dramatic improvements present in their openings alone, but it was nice to finally finish this. A bit of closure for my younger self and an admirable, if intensely flawed game in its own right.

Mega Man Zero is not the best Mega Man game, but it was probably the most ambitious.

The mission Protect the Factory is probably my favorite moment in the game. The player enters the level, and immediately encounters the boss. The boss, Hidden Phantom, is the only one of the game's main Reploid bosses which has no elemental weakness. When he is defeated, he tips the player off to the fact that the factory is rigged to blow in 3 minutes. The player is told to evacuate. If the player enters the factory instead, they are told how to defuse the bombs, but are reassured that they aren't expected to do this.

It has always surprised me that people consider the Zero series to be particularly difficult, and not just because Mega Man is generally a hard series of games to begin with. Mega Man Zero is a game that gives you the option to abort most of the game's missions, even encouraging it at times. The punishment for skipping levels, failing objectives, dying, or using upgrades is a decrease in rank, but the ranking system in this game amounts to little more than bragging rights. There is no punishment for a low rank, and the only "reward" is that some of the bosses' patterns become more difficult; in short, the ranking system is there for people who care to master the game, it can easily be ignored.

The game's most immediately glaring fault is a lack of visual polish in certain specific regards, in particular the character portraits by the dialogue boxes, which mostly look like scanned concept art that was never cleaned up. The screen shake in one of the boss fights reveals weird artifacts on the top edge of the screen.

It does seem though that they tried to polish the game wherever they thought it counted. If a boss is defeated by a regular sword slash they get cut in half. Most bosses have clear audio cues for each of their attacks.

I love the connected levels and world. I love rescuing NPCs in missions and watching them populate the resistance base. I love that the interlude stages feature the base under attack, and because the enemies path towards the base goes through areas the player will have previously traversed for other missions, there's a real intensity as the player has an awareness of how close the enemy is getting.

I like that the level select menu gives an idea of the practical goal of what the player is doing; the game doesn't often directly tell you what boss you will fight, but that information should really only matter to a repeat player, who should probably already know these things anyway. The boss order doesn't really matter, there aren't boss weapons in this game. That's not to say that beating a particular level doesn't grant the player some particular reward. Some levels give the player cyber elves, some levels give the player an element chip (which serves as the actual weakness of the bosses), some allow the NPC Cerveau to develop a new weapon. If the player occupies the factory, they can visit the area outside of missions to gather energy crystals. Depending on an individual player's skill level and priorities, selecting a level is a much more meaningful decision than just picking whichever robot master happens to be weak to the weapon you most recently obtained.

I love how expressive Zero's sprite is. His posture is terrible. His idle animation sees him hunched forward, his standing pose has his head tilted down and his hips well in front of his shoulders; I've seen people stand like that in real life, it's not healthy! But Zero is a robot, so it's whatever.

Starts out very strong, with this enemy force wiping the floor with the resistance members at the start, then you take control of Zero and the dynamic reverses, you cut through them like butter. The moment to moment is as sharp and as fluid, if not more so, than any of the X games. Then you get a bit deeper into the game, you realize a lot of basic moves are gated behind an arbitrary grindwall, that health and E-tanks are gated behind this unintuitive cyber-elf system, you realize that if you use all your lives you either have to start from a previous save, with however many lives you had at that point, or abort the mission and never play it again, meaning you have to be perfect or you’ll either be hanging by a one life thread for much of the game, or you’ll potentially miss out on a boss weakness, except you’ll probably get screwed over a couple times because a lot of these levels have some really cheap hazards and demand you take a lot of risky leaps of faith (that goddamn factory with the lumber platforms). On a semi-redeeming note though, the bosses are all pretty good. And the story is surprisingly interesting.

The game at it’s core is good, but be prepared to wade through some frustrating bullshit. Hopefully it’s ironed out in the sequels.

When Ciel resurrects Zero in that abandoned underground laboratory, her circumstances are at their most dire.

The dwindling population of reploids live under the threat of immediate genocide they remain powerless to impede; a massive energy shortage crisis looms in the horizon, promising to bring about mass apocalypse. Heck, right before Zero awakens, Ciel can do nothing but watch as her lapse of judgment continues to befell her, as all her companions are mercilessly slaughtered, slayed and sacrificed before her eyes, leaving her as the last one standing. Zero is quite literally her last hope at achieving world peace.

When Zero offers assistance towards Ciel's plight, the situation is far, far worse than one might think.

The resistance base is restrictive and compact; the rebellion's continuously failing efforts to fight back against the constant onslaught of vicious enemy assault have shrunken their numbers and their territory. They are constricted, trapped, and foolishly stepping foot outside the borderlines of the base practically guarantees instant death. This gives the base and its surrounding areas where missions take place a sense of connection, establishing the connective tissue that forms Mega Man Zero's worldbuilding. It's fittingly small in size to encompass the dire situation and lack of breathing room faced by the resistance, emphasising the importance of Zero's mission - should he fail, even this morsel of ground the resistance occupies will crumble underneath the tremendous pressure.

When Zero emerges from a century of cryogenic sleep without the memories of his past, its almost as if a toddler was plunged into a battle against trained soldiers.

At the beginning of Mega Man Zero, Zero is seemingly just as powerless as the Reploids he's tasked with defending. Every slash of the saber is heaved with mounds of great effort, and every bullet of the buster feels as if they barely leave a dent against the powerful adversaries Zero faces. This induces a sense of brutality within the gameplay, as every enemy is relentless and unforgiving, and every boss fight serves as an immovable barricade. This game wants you to feel the struggle the resistance is coping with in their uphill battle, and that is evident in how difficult this game is compared to every other entry in the series.

However, with every small victory Zero and the player steal from the jaws of defeat, the paradigm of the war begins to shift in the resistance's favour ever so slightly.

The previously barren corridors of the resistance base slowly grows in numbers as Zero saves each and every one of them from peril, providing a sense of accomplishment and proving your efforts weren't meaningless. But more importantly, every successful mission gradually imbues a glimmer of hope - Zero's abilities and swordsmanship gradually return to him as the game progresses, and soon enough, he's the unstoppable force that legends spoke of, a shining beacon of hope that is pivotal to the growing numbers of the resistance. Previously daunting obstacles are now taken care of in a few slashes, and the bosses that once terrified you are now seen as a fair challenge. Still an arduous task that requires great hardship and sheer will to overcome, but one that can be handled painlessly if the player has mastered the gameplay loop of Mega Man Zero. Combined with the fluidity of Zero's movement and the satisfaction of executing masterful slashes against the incoming horde of enemies, the latter half of the game injects a subtle feel-good factor within the player. Just like the resistance, they will begin to believe that maybe, just maybe, they can fully overcome the harrowing obstacles laid before them and emerge victorious.

Even when Zero finally infiltrates Neo Arcadia and deals the critical slash that eliminates the threat of Copy X, victory is yet to be ascertain - the looming threat the energy shortage crisis still dances dangerously on the brink, and while the resistance can rest easy for the moment, they still have the rest of the world to reclaim from the oppression of Neo Arcadia. With Zero leading the charge, though, they have someone to look towards.

Total victory may be far off reach for now; but the resistance are slowly beginning to fight back.

This shit is better than Sonic Forces and it's not even close LMAO

Final score: 8/10
Focus: The overall tone of Mega Man Zero and how it complements the narrative and difficulty of the gameplay.

After Capcom said their farewells to Mega Man X and ended the series on a note that could have been worse with X5, it was time for X's partner-in-crime Zero to get the spotlight.

Mega Man Zero is quite the game. To compare it to X4 for obvious reasons, Zero feels like an absolute dream to control and even better than he did in the MMX games, making slicing and dicing through enemies fun as hell; but unlike X4 the level design doesn't feel as tight in comparison. Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely nowhere near as bad as the MMX's series' worst moments and still fun regardless, but something about X4's level design felt more like it put Zero's moveset and physics to better use. Various areas in Z1 felt like the biggest challenge was enemy spam or dealing with the GBA's screen size. Something I do like though is how it's not always just a straight shot to the boss; sometimes you have to rescue Resistance members or destroy certain items. It's not always executed super well but it's kinda cool and ties the story into the gameplay well.

Speaking of which, the story in this game is actually quite nice. Zero wakes up about an unspecified period of time after the X series, but it's a long one. His memory is hazy, but his good heart still remains, and joins forces with Ciel and the Resistance to take down the dictatorship of Neo Arcadia and X's loathsome copy. The MMX games felt like they struggled with story one way or another, whether that be because it was told in an awkward way, or it just wasn't very good to begin with. But MMZ1 does a good job of presenting a well-written story presented in a non-awkward fashion unlike something such as X5, making you question just what in the world happened while Zero was away, and even sets up questions for future games to answer.

The standard attack unlock system from the previous games has been replaced in favor of an arsenal for Zero. Your trusty Z-Saber is always useful and the buster gun and Triple Rod come in handy from time to time (the latter even sometimes being SUPER busted when upgraded), though I never found much use for the Shield Boomerang.

This game, however, does something I am absolutely not a fan of. What in the absolute FUCK happened with the lives system? In a normal platformer, when you game over (and you WILL game over in MMZ1), you'd normally have to start the entire level over again with 2-3 lives. In Mega Man Zero? You either give up on the mission or load an old save with no lives replenished. It's VERY easy to get stuck on a save with only a singular life left if you don't take the time to sit there and grind the shit out of enemies in order to score an extra life or two. I have no idea why the game does this; this system makes the game so, SO much more tedious than it should be, and it's even weirder since later Zero games apparently go back to how it's always been done.

This game has a lot of issues that I hope get fixed in future games, but as it stands it's not half bad. I found way more fun in this game than a majority of the MMX series, and I feel future games have the potential to surpass even X4; I can't wait to see the rest of what Inti Creates has cooked up.

Never fully reviewed this as a part of my MMZ retrospective, so let's get this underway.
If you don't find much enjoyment out of this, I completely get it; the skill ceiling is pretty high and the level up system is a bit of a pain along with some frustrating levels. But regardless, this game managed to find its way into my heart and solidified itself and its sequels as my favorite games of all time.
The game opens up with a fantastic spectacle of confusing yet familiar tones. Some blonde-haired chick and the resistance are frantically trying to escape the indestructible golems that are obliterating their forces. Blondie reluctantly lets her Cyber Elf friend sacrifice herself to bring the resistance their only hope: Zero. What’s a Cyber Elf? Why is there a resistance? What’s a Cyber Elf? These questions don’t matter right now; you’re blasting through all the enemy troops as a blonde-haired badass destroying anything in your path. You eventually get your hands on your original Z-saber, conveniently given to you by some unknown computer force. Who was that? You slash your way through the massive golem hoping to uncover the answers as you proceed. And that’s it; that’s the gritty yet badass sequence that sets up the mood and groundwork for the rest of the series’ events, and it’s all revealed just in the opening.
The gameplay ties into the story very well, Ciel sends you on missions as if you were a soldier carrying out orders...which is exactly what you’re doing. By the end you bring the entire resistance up from rock bottom. Zero is such a blast to control, taking what the X games laid out and making it feel so much smoother. Dashing and jumping across platforms to scaling walls just feels so good. Slashing your saber at the right moment to satisfyingly destroy your opponent. The levels have a sense of cohesion that just feels right. There’s some moments where I feel the enemy placement kinda sucks. The Factory being a main example of this with not being able to see enemies in time on the moving platforms. Other levels are great though; jumping through the hazy desert sands, slashing birds and worms as fast as possible while keeping your guard up. Shit’s just a blast to play and I love it.
The level up system isn’t as bad as people say, but on a first playthrough it definitely gets annoying. Nowadays I can run through the whole game without having to grind at all which I think was definitely intentional. The design philosophy encourages you to keep replaying and playing until you’re able to fully master the bosses, levels, to a point where minor grievances like the level up system become obsolete. But the keyword there being “replaying.” If you don’t catch on to this philosophy I don’t blame you. Some levels can be tough as nails on a first try and can be very discouraging. For a first time, the level up system definitely blows since you'll be needing charge slashes to kill bosses due to unhoned skill. That’s the real flaw that I feel is why so many get kinda filtered by this game.
Bosses have unique and fun to learn patterns. Every death you may take from them is usually just based on skill. Keep trying and eventually you’ll get it. Learning the patterns leads to creating some awesome combos being made using the different weapons that would only further improve in the next games. Speaking of which, the Triple Rod and Shield Boomerang: these are great weapons but I could never really find much use for them personally in a lot of situations. I’ve seen some fantastic Triple Rod/Saber combos pulled off so I don’t think it’s useless out of the question, just beyond my skill level. The shield boomerang is kinda cool because you can use it for some insane damage stacking on mini bosses and the like. There’s definitely a ton of crazy combo potential with both of these weapons.
You’re near the end; you’ve just refought all the Guardians and expect the finale to be a climactic battle between you and Copy X. You arrive and Copy X states his motives. You understand his feelings and conflictions, but you know they’re wrong. He must be stopped. The real X would never have wanted this. Copy X transforms into a beast never thought would have been possible until that moment. You unleash the final slash upon his helmet. He falls to the floor, defeated. He ponders upon how this could have all happened and where he went wrong. You reply with, “He was not as naive as you are. That’s what made him a hero.” The room self-destructs and you land outside in the desert, surrounded by a horde of enemies. “I’ll leave this world to you…” And with that, Zero slashes his way through one last enemy. The End of an Era....

The beginning of what is in my opinion the best Mega Man sub-series. Undoubtedly a very rough game that doesn't make it easy if you're a beginner, but once you master its gameplay, it becomes one of the 2D games with the best character control ever.

Mega Man Zero takes as a base the gameplay of the first Mega Man X and expands it a bit to adapt it to a character like Zero. Now there are no more skills to copy, because we are not Mega Man or X, instead, Zero is able to control different types of weapons, of which we have 4, which are the classic buster, the saber, a spear and a shield, and all (especially the saber) are quite useful and pleasant to use, even, I would dare to say that this Zero controls better than the one appeared in Mega Man X4. This game implements some RPG mechanics, as the aforementioned weapons have the ability to level up, and although it is an idea that I love, I would be lying if I said I liked how it works, because instead of existing to give us the feeling of progression, it rather feels like a burden most of the time, because of how limited our attacks start at level 1.

Getting into its story, Mega Man Zero takes place in the distant future of the X saga, which means that none of the characters that were in the Mega Man or Mega Man X stories are still here, only Zero and X are left. But well, after Zero is awakened from a slumber, he joins a group of mavericks who call themselves the resistance. The story has a very different approach to the already worn out "one villain with 8 robots who wants to take over the world", but nevertheless, I couldn't say that I like the story, because I feel that almost never something relevant happens and it's almost always "Zero go and help..." or "Zero, we are under attack.... ", but looking on the bright side, that makes the levels and why they exist feel more natural, I mean, in Mega Man and Mega Man X every boss mysteriously has a level completely made for itself, but here the levels, stages and why you visit them just make a lot more sense, complementing nicely to the fact that on the map everything is interconnected. There are a lot of boss battles which I appreciate, the downside is that they are battles that can be broken very easily once you get the elemental chips, which are the equivalent of this game's rock, paper, scissors, but very simplified compared to other Mega Man games. Something very annoying is that every time you lose all lives you fail the mission, and therefore you can never try it again, once again this sounds like a good idea, but the truth is that you will end up just reloading the previous save file and retrying as many times as you want.

Something I should mention, is that thanks to the fact that this game was designed for GBA, it feels much more frenetic than Mega Man X, this is due to having a fast character in a slightly smaller field of vision, but that and the fact that Zero has very fluid animations and movement, make controlling him feel simply sublime. On the downside, though, I feel that the potential of weapons like the spear couldn't be fully exploited due to the limited field of view.

Mega Man Zero moves away from the colorful worlds of the previous Mega Man games, changing both the character design and art style, to instead present us with more muted color scenarios, but creating that atmosphere that this world really is in decay. The pixel art is good most of the time, although Zero gets the best part as it has very well done sprites and animations. And as usual in GBA games, there are some backgrounds that seem to be taken directly from the concept art and I really like it, although on a screen other than the GBA or NDS, I think it can look bad. And as for the music... it's a disappointment, I mean, it's decent and creates a good atmosphere, but it doesn't compare to the outstanding music that any other Mega Man game has.

And lastly I will talk about the Cyber Elf system and the rank system. Two good ideas, but they feel more like a punishment for any normal player rather than an incentive to improve. The rank system basically determines how well you played a mission, taking into account things like time, damage taken, among other things. Pulling A or S rank causes bosses to have an additional move, which ironically makes the battles more challenging, so yes, pulling A/S rank is basically the real hard mode in Mega Man Zero, and is only recommended to do if you're looking for a bigger challenge. As for the Cyber Elf, they are basically consumable items that cause permanent upgrades to Zero such as increasing his health, or they can also be single-use, causing statuses such as reducing the boss's health or healing us a bit. Cyber Elves are usually found hidden in the levels, and are a good incentive to explore, which I like since it somehow keeps that exploration factor of Mega Man X that I like so much, however, Cyber Elves never turn out to be really useful because they cost a lot of money, not to mention that using them gives you a point penalty when it comes to getting your rank in a mission. Taking the above into account, I recommend that in your first playthroughs you don't give importance to rank and play at your own pace, and when you feel good enough in the game try to get A/S rank.

Conclusion
Yeah... the game has some flaws, however, I think that all the good things it has and proposes, such as the gameplay or the different approach to the typical Mega Man formula, make it simply very difficult for me to look down on this game, besides the fact that this was the first portable Mega Man with a genuinely good gameplay.

A game that despite its rough edges is very enjoyable, and even though its sequels make it feel more rudimentary than it really is, I think it's important to remember that it's thanks to this game that the Zero sub series exists, plus, cutting your enemies in half is something that will continue to be satisfying even until the end of time.

More like Mega Man Zero Out Of Ten! Got 'em!

That scathing indictment aside, Mega Man Zero is a great game that I have enjoyed replaying over the years. I prefer the sequels by a fairly large margin, but the first game has some charm to itself!

The story is fairly boilerplate scifi with some familiar Mega Man characters, but it does have some fun and exciting moments. In particular, Zero's theme cutting in when he's revived always manages to get me excited to play the game. The world of this series is not too well detailed at this point, but of note is the flip from hunting Mavericks in the X series to being the defenders of said hunted Mavericks. Zero is a rogue element in this setting who seeks to work with a rebel organization assassinate a (the?) world leader. It's not a revolutionary (pardon the pun) take on a Mega Man story, but it's a nice change of pace from every previous Mega'd Fella just being a fairly straightforward tool of the status quo.

The gameplay is rough, especially compared to later games in the series, but manages to immediately strike a contrast to the X series. Gone are boss weapons/weaknesses, and have been replaced by more action and skill based gameplay. RPG elements and various consumable stat buffs in the form of Cyber Elves, which I will get to momentarily. You are not locked into one weapon, very quickly going through what I feel is a homage to the X series where you start with just a buster (which is actually just a pistol that Zero carries around, in a change that doesn't matter mechanically but I think is nifty), and getting Zero's classic Z Saber at the end of the tutorial boss fight. Later you can get an additional weapon, the Triple Rod, starting the series tradition of weird one-off weapons for each game. Personally I didn't use it, because I saved the mission you unlock it in for last, because it makes the best farming spot in the game inaccessible. Wait, farming? In a Mega Man game? You may ask if you've never heard anything about this game??

Yes, there's only one resource, E-Crystals, similar to screws from the classic MM series, but rather than being used to buy items, they are used to feed and grow Cyber Elves. A Cyber Elf is an ambiguously defined creature, who the game tips you off in the intro need to die to activate their powers. It's rather morbid! Cyber Elves range from one use elves who give temporary boosts like a Gradius style Option that follows you around and shoots enemies, to making enemies drop more items, to healing you. The big ticket items are the elves you have to feed though, requiring a great deal of E-Crystals, but generally worth it. They typically give passive boosts like running faster, increasing max HP, or in more powerful instances they can remove spikes from the game or half the damage taken by Zero. Using Cyber Elves comes at a cost, however... It reduces your score!!! Gasp!!

Score is an interesting mechanic... in every MMZ game except this one. I'll detail it in further writeups, but the only thing any rank matters for in this game is obtained a single bad cyber elf you don't want or need. That said, score is an interesting staple for this series. Every level awards you points based on certain criteria, such as not taking damage, completion speed, completing bonus mission objectives, and as I alluded to earlier, not using Elves. If you don't want to play through the game at absolute minimum power, you are definitely going to be taking a hit to score, and using all elves gives you a -100 score modifier, making an F inevitable. Personally I don't bother. What's this about mission objectives though? What are those? And when will I stop with these painful segues?

So, another weird quirk of this game that has yet to be ironed out is that it's fairly open ended with regards to it's mission and traversable world. So traversable that you can skip and/or fail almost every mission in the game permanently! It sucks! Not accomplishing particular goals, or RUNNING OUT OF LIVES, will cause a mission to be failed, resulting in bad story ramifications and usually locking out particular areas or minor characters. This is great for speedrunning and really sucks in casual play. Mission objectives tend to be varied and interesting, to their credit! You can be saving hostages from prison in one mission and defending the rebel base from a seige machine in another. That said, the fact that they can almost all be skipped means none of them are particularly consequential to the story, so there's not a lot to report. My favorite mission is Anubis's waves of invaders, and my least favorite is the mission where you have to make blind jumps around a factory full of bottomless pits to disarm a bunch of trickily placed bombs.

All that said, I think that the game is great, and I can't wait to replay more!

Being familiar with the Mega Man X series beforehand as well as being a fan of the character Zero, I was excited to get into the Zero series and experience what many told me was a fantastic series of action platformers. And they were right: Zero 1 is a solid entry of the Zero series that got me invested into its world and made me want to experience the rest of the games, to see how the story progressed and enjoy the awesome gameplay along with it.

Now, having experienced all the Zero games and the ZX games by this point, this review will be based on a replay I did of Zero 1 on Normal Mode:

I don’t typically pay too much attention to the story of Mega Man games, but Zero 1 immediately got my interest since it hits you with the questions of what happened to the world, what happened to X, e.t.c. It deals with it pretty well overall; more interestingly, I feel it’s also clear that the game is setting up for major events later down the line, which helped to keep me engaged for the sequels. Ultimately, it’s a story about an old “legendary” robot getting back into action to help out reploids being treated unjustly, as part of the resistance base.

This ties into the gameplay structure: typically Mega Man games have you select which areas to go to and defeat a boss, but here there’s usually an ulterior objective to fulfill with the bosses simply being another obstacle in the way, such as escorting a fellow resistance member or deactivating bombs. It gives an idea of what kind of missions the resistance base has to do while also letting you feel like you’ve become a full fledged member of the team.

More into the gameplay: If you’ve experienced the X series before, in particular the games where Zero is playable, then the gameplay here should feel familiar. It’s fast paced and fun, and you got your buster and Z-saber. Of course, there’s some additional features, namely that Zero has access to two more weapons in the form of the Triple Rod and Shield Boomerang. And while you don’t get any skills by beating bosses, you can level up your weapons to unlock more abilities, such as the Z-saber combo or extending the triple Rod. Furthermore, you have access to elemental chips that are great for beating bosses with an elemental weakness. As a result, the game provides plenty of variety in how you want to approach levels, allowing you to develop your own kind of playstyle even; I personally would use the Z-Saber and Triple Rod the most and try to go through stages as quick as I can, but of course someone else could have a different approach. There is a ranking system in the game as well that can motivate you further to not only improve your skill but develop your playstyle as well.

Another major feature introduced in the game are Cyber-elves. They act as additional help in case you’re having some frustrations or difficulty, divided into three types (Nurse, Animal, and Hacker). The variety of help includes healing some HP or saving you from pits; the cost of using them is that you lose a few points in the ranking system but regardless they’re good if you’re in a bind.

Other details I want to put attention to: the characters are mostly likeable, with Ciel being particularly notable. You feel sympathy for them, Cerveau is daddy. The visuals are good, and I love the artwork in-game and official, its a really nice style that while different from the regular X style fits the tone and mood of the game really well and is just appealing to look at in general. Speaking of the tone, the game also has a generally “dark” or “moody” tone, which I love since it fits perfectly into the current situation you find yourself in. Some of the soundtrack is also really good, I especially adore the boss battle theme, Crash. Most of the areas aside from I believe two are also interconnected, so when you’re not in a mission you can freely explore them and active transers in the meantime too so you can reach them quicker.

Onto some of my frustrations with the game:

I think the weapon level up system hinders playstyles a bit too much than needed. It takes some time to upgrade every weapon to max and this game isn’t particularly lengthy either, so unless you’re partaking in grinding or just exploring the level you may find yourself finishing game soon without having say upgrade your Tri-Rod or Z-Saber to max. Its a bit annoying since it lessens some of the variety you can have while playing.

The cyber elf system also suffers similarly to the weapon level up system. Certain elves require you to feed them energy crystals before you can enjoy them. A neat idea in concept but in execution the amount of energy crystals you need ends up being a bit too much overall that you likely won’t be able to upgrade many elves unless you grind. Of course, the game does provide you areas with free E.C. for the taking, but even then its not nearly enough I found, and making a trek to these areas constantly does become tiring eventually.

This game also seems to lean hard into having a lot of insta kill moments. Could just be what I felt but a lot of spikes and bottomless pits can be found that can really screw you over.

A final few notes:

I think this game does suffer from “first game syndrome”, but I don’t think its severe enough that you can’t go back to it and not enjoy. Not to mention it still has its own unique features that one may like, such as the connected stages you’re free to explore outside missions.

I personally didn’t find the soundtrack to be too notable. A few tracks stand out, but nothing else really stuck in my head. I don’t really count this as a negative however since the general soundtrack does sound good and it fits with the game. I just think most aren’t that memorable.

The designs of characters are really cool in this game. The four guardians in particular I’m so fond of, they really stand out as a formidable force. My favourite design-wise would definitely be Phantom in this case.

Overall, Zero 1 is good, solid entry into an amazing sub series. I would definitely recommend people to try it out, especially if you enjoy the X games. It’s a good time, and it’s fun to learn the ins and outs of it to get better and achieve a solid rank throughout the game.

Honestly still my favorite game in the series, even with its rough level design and relative simplicity compared to later games in the series.

There's just an aura of oppressiveness, brutality and hopelessness to the whole game that just isn't present in the sequels. Which, makes sense narratively, but this first game is the only one where you truly feel like the last stand for mankind, fighting back against forces infinitely more powerful than you.

Mega Man Zero in general is the peak of 2D action gameplay, and while this game isn't as mechanically complex as later games, it still stands heads and shoulders above most other games in the genre and is filled with tightly crafted bosses and challenging levels, with a lot of fun movement and combat options (Hint: Don't use the Buster, use Triple Rod instead).

The entire series gets my recommendation, and I have a soft spot for this one. But if it scares you off with its difficulty and general mean-ness, dont worry: The sequels get better with it.

WHERE IS THE 1-UPS

SIR

I CANNOT FIND THE 1-UPS

THIS IS VERY DIFFICULT TO COMPLETE SIRS

Replaying as an adult via the Zero/ZX collection on Switch:

Gameplay and story-wise, this is a beautiful new chapter in the X franchise. Takes all the great gameplay feelings from X and tells a new story later in the future. I love how it was tied into the original X games. The story is actually good(?!) and the opening sequence does well to convey the stress and importance of the event, even though it is being shown in a series of still images. The gameplay and level design are excellent. Having the buster shot and the saber as a sub-weapon is great and allows you to smoothly transition between close and long-range combat.

The inter-connected world is a great idea but it is unfortunately not utilized to its fullest extent. I still like it though!

I really enjoy the leveling system for the weapons. While it does take longer than it should to get to the next level, it is always fun for your character's skills with their weapons to improve as you use those weapons. The triple rod was a fun addition too. I didn't use it at all when I was younger (I just wanted to use the cool energy sword) but I used it a lot on this playthrough and thought it was really good. A great weapon choice for the final boss, which I think might be purposeful to make sure that the weapon felt like it had a real place in Zero's arsenal.

The game is definitely not without its flaws though. For one, it's punishingly difficult (at least at the start; see bottom). I found it difficult to beat the first level's boss even with my literal decades of experience playing Mega Man-style games and other action platformers.
Enemies do a lot of damage and the only way to get more HP is with cyber elves which drop from enemies or are found in capsules. Then, after you find the correct elf, you must feed it way too many energy crystals which do not drop as much as they should. In my playthrough I only fully raised one HP upgrade elf and one Subtank elf. They just require too many crystals to feasibly raise all the ones you need without grinding.

The grinding is the next issue, in that there is not really any reason to do except to just get more energy crystals for your elves. As stated above, on a normal playthrough without grinding, I only found enough crystals to actually use two of the major elves that give permanent upgrades. There are also simply way too many elves to find for a game that takes under 3 hours to beat.

With the addition of the levels' ratings, it feels like the game's systems seem at war with themselves. It wants to reward your exploration and repetition by letting you find cyber elves, but the rating system wants you to beat the level as quickly as possible. Then, if you use any of the elves, you are punished for it with a reduced score.

Finally, while I do enjoy the addition of the elemental chips, it makes some of the bosses quite trivial. If you hit them with the element they are weak to, it staggers them and starts them on a new attack animation. Some of the toughest bosses in the game are turned into jokes if you hit them with the right element because of the loop this causes. They start an attack, you dodge and hit them with a charged buster, they stagger, and they start the same attack again. Repeat until dead.

My disappointment is immeasurable... and my day is ruined.

Game number thirteen of my obscure games list is Mega Man Zero, recommended to me by PKMudkipz. Thank you very much for the recommendation, and I'm sorry I didn't enjoy the game very much.

I won't hold back on my thoughts on this game:

Mega Man Zero was a series that even before this review I had been interested in. I liked Zero from Mega Man X a lot and playing as him in X4 was both a fun and unique experience within the franchise for me, so to know that he had his own series which was a sequel to X had me excited.

When I first thought about how this game would be, I just imagined it as Zero's Campaign from X4, but with less weapons.

Instead what I got was a lackluster, grindy Mega Man X game where the life system is shit, the Missions are shit, the Levels aren't very interesting, the artstyle isn't as cool as Mega Man X, and the early game bosses are shit too.

Let's start in order, when I say this game is lackluster and grindy, what I mean is that it fails to capture the speed of the series it is a sequel to. You still have the dash button, and it's still effective, so that's not the reason. No no no no, the true issue lies in the weapons.

You see, when you start the game, you only have the Z-Buster to start, and can I just say, I hate that the Z-Buster is an actual gun in this game. Not like, a part of Zero himself, just a literal, physical gun. It's an artistic choice in both this series and ZX that I have never liked. Eventually you'll get your Z-Saber from your first boss fight, and you'll have both your main weapon and sub weapon slots filled.

That's when you'll notice that Zero's Z-Saber doesn't combo. It just makes one, singular slash, unlike what he had in X4 where he had a 3-hit combo by default.

You see, in order to get mileage out of any of the four weapons in this game, you have to grind them. The process is obnoxious as all fuck, and if you don't know what you are doing, will take you upwards to an hour or more doing so. And you'll want to do them, because not only is Zero's default 3 hit combo locked behind it, but so is his charge attack, air spin attack, and dash air attack as well.

I recommend watching this video if you're planning to play Zero so that you learn how the grinding mechanics work for each individual weapon.

The problem with weapon grinding is obvious: It takes up time and grinds the game to a halt. Now, you don't technically have to grind the weapons, but if you don't the game will be significantly more brutal than it is by default. The game itself literally even rewards you for grinding by putting these totem pole mechanaloids in the first non-tutorial mission that always keep respawning.

I don't know why the developers thought this was a good idea. It is nothing more than stretching out the pre-established formula from X, for no reason.

Next is the life system: It's shit. In this game, instead of the traditional life and continues system of X, Mega Man Zero instead has the Retry System. Dying has you start at the beginning of the mission, or right before a boss if that was where you died. In that regard, it isn't so bad, but there's a caveat to this whole thing.

If you run out of retries, you cannot retry a mission. This means you either A: Fail the Mission, or B. Start from the last save, and guess what, Retries don't reset if you do either of these options. If you go back to your last save, you only have as many retries as you had when you saved, and if you fail the mission well, you fail the mission and you have no retries. I've heard of punishing the player, but this takes it to a whole different level of just obnoxious.

It was so bad that not only did the sequels cut out this system (as I have been told), but the Mega Man Zero/ZX Collection rerelease of the game also omits the Retry system in favor of a more traditional lives system.

I don't even know what the fuck compelled them to make the system like this to begin with when there had been an established one that they had been using in both the main series and X by this point.

The missions and levels are not particularly much better. These two aspects are intertwined, because many missions will have you revisiting locations for different purposes. It results in a lot of missions feeling very similar to one another, and levels blurring in with one another.

There are four god damn missions that require you to go to to the fucking desert in this game, and that got visually old very, very quickly. Not only that, but the desert has this hole in there that just flat out doesn't have any artstyle to it. It is just a smear of the same, shitstain color with a black background.

How did shit like this get into this fucking game.

I know this part is just a nitpick at best, but come on, you can't just sneak Dig Dug into a GBA Mega Man Game and not expect it to be noticed, especially when I have to at least see it two times out of the four missions spent in the desert.

Back on track, missions have inconsistency in regards to pacing. Some missions are very brisk, and others are much longer in length. The first "real" mission of the game feeling longer than almost all of the missions that aren't in the final dungeon. It just makes the pace of the game feel all over the place, and given that this is a more narratively focused Mega Man game, it is to its detriment.

Outside of that, the only time that the levels start to look interesting is in Neo Arcadia literally at the end of the game, because that's the only area of the game we had not been to multiple times by that point.

There is a reason that both the Classic Series and X have a variety of areas unique to each boss. If every level in those games looked the same or was reused over and over, none of them would feel remotely special or interesting. It would become a visual bore.

Now, this next part is purely subjective, more subjective than the rest of this review: I don't like Mega Man Zero's artstyle. While I've played games after it like ZX, which share an artstyle, there has always been something about how Zero himself looks in this game that I have just never been a fan of.

This looks like Zero. Cool, badass, the big square shoulders, sharp facial features, and the katana shaped Z-Saber give the character a very unique and inherently Zero style.

This is not Zero. It doesn't have the sharp features that defined the character, the bulky shoulders and boots are all but gone, the facial features all smoothed out and "moefied." I'm sure to some people this is cool in some way, but like, I cannot jive with this. I'm not even like, a Mega Man X Boomer, I just know what appeals to my eyes more, and it isn't this.

The cute artstyle makes it kind of hard to take the more serious nature of the story so serious, which is a shame because the story is actually kind of interesting.

A world hundreds of years removed from both the Classic Series and the X Series, Innocent Reploids are being accused of being Mavericks and killed by X look alike drones.

Right from the offset you sense that something is off, because X would never do such things.

A group of rebels go deep into an underground lab, and uncover the body of Zero, X's old comrade during the Maverick Wars, and they ask him to help them. Zero, cliché enough, has amnesia and doesn't remember any of the events of X1 to X8. He agrees to help them, and help them he does.

His help builds up this resistance led by a young scientist named Ciel, as Zero saves Reploids from the forces of Neo Arcadia. Slaughtering armies, freeing allies, finding computer rooms, and destroying bosses.

On that note, the early game bosses of this game can suck my fucking dick. Flat out, Aztec Falcon should not have been the first boss of this fucking game. A hyper aggressive non-stop shooting bird with a grab attack and wall shots to introduce the player to standard boss fights possibly before they've even learned about weapon grinding was a terrible decision.

The first "real" boss of a game should be challenging, yes, but it should also ease players into what the experience will be like.

A good example of this, and I cannot believe I'm going to compliment it in this review, is Iudex Gundyr from Dark Souls 3. The boss is certainly not easy. It's very agile, and aggressive much like every other boss from DS3. However, it's attacks are well telegraphed in a way where you can see where he's going to hit next. He's also a melee character, with a limited range. This allows for the player to put distance between themselves and Gundyr so they can wait for an opening.

This does not exist in the Aztec Falcon boss. The room is too small so avoiding their blasts feels like a crapshoot, they have ranged attacks that they fire non stop, and he has an aerial grab attack that does massive damage.

Now, this wouldn't be so bad if you were just able to choose another mission and boss... except, you can't for Aztec Falcon. He has to be fought first, no exceptions.

Why?! Why is this the way it is?!

I'm sure you've gathered the big recurring theme of this review, and it goes a little something like this: "Why did Mega Man Zero decide to 'fix' what wasn't broken?"

Every single issue this game has, every single minute problem, every little aggravation, all of it comes from trying to "fix" the formula of Mega Man X.

You don't play as X, instead you play as Zero. Zero doesn't have X's copy ability, so what did the devs do?

Give him four weapons that you have to grind in order to make them remotely efficient at all.

The lives and password system in Mega Man X was way too "easy", so we got the ridiculously flawed and brutal Retry System.

The levels of Mega Man X were all diverse and filled with unique gimmicks, so we got a Mission based game where we revisit locations upwards to four fucking times.

The artstyle of Mega Man X was super cool looking and screamed "anime", so we got a super cutesy moe looking artstyle instead.

The bosses of Mega Man X were too "easy", so we removed the option to fight them in the order you like at the start and put one of the hardest bosses at the beginning of the game.

This isn't even going into the grindy nature of the Cyber Elves or other shit, but fundamentally this game pisses me off because it is just Mega Man X stretched out to the point of just not even being fun anymore.

Sure, there are things I like. The first phase of the Final Boss was a cool call-back, the Four Guardians, Phantom specifically, were all really cool. The story was interesting... but overall none of these things can save the game.

I can't say this is the worst Mega Man game I've ever played, objectively it can't be worse than the original Mega Man, because that game is just flat out unpleasant and miserable to play.

It can't be worse than Mega Man X3, because while Zero stretches out the formula, at least it tried to do something different instead of being a complete failure of a concept that was near to perfect by its first two entries.

What I can say, is that Mega Man Zero was the most disappointing game I've played this year as of right now.

Next time I'll have to learn to curb my optimism and not expect a game to be amazing just because of what I hear about its series.