No series filters me quite like Mega Man. I'm already a hater of how lives are implemented in both normal and X MM games. I usually love lives in old games, I love being forced to git gud, I'm a heckin battletoads fan man. But Megaman's lives system has tormented me to no end. But to find out that getting a game over in this one locks you out of completing the stage? It's SO rare for me to say this but I find this truly makes the game entirely unplayable beyond all reason. I hesitate to say because it's such a tired trope to compare difficult things to this particular series, and thus feels like it invalidates anything I say, but like...Imagine if in Dark Souls you died once on the lead up to the fight, then died to the fight 2 times. Then the game said lol you failed idiot you're locked out of this content now and as a result are now weaker going into the rest of the game. Forgive the brief tangent but how is it that people hold decades long grudges against incredibly forgiving Sonic games for having an ounce of difficulty at points but Mega Man's allowed to be actively sadistic at all times and be applauded while doing it? MM fans truly built different, more power to 'em. This is where I draw the line tho I'd sooner learn hardcore Kaizo Mario stuff, this is just cruel and unusual.

But yeah I was able to beat this through the modern collection which added built in save points. Makes the game at least playable. Then it's just the typical MM formula of having extremely easy, nothing levels, capped with trial and error boss fights that are 50 times more challenging than anything leading up to them. Nothing too memorable, there's only like one song in the ost I actually like, the story's really not worth it either. If I was reviewing the modern release I'd probably say like a 2 maybe a 2.5. But playing on actual GBA hardware as was originally intended is truly miserable.

One of the many examples of your average megaman game being impossible to play and X6 being better in every way. Time to do another no-armor X6 run 'cuz that's a solid enjoyable challenge instead of the psychotic, poorly designed trainwrecks seen in so much of the franchise elsewhere.

This came is almost amazing but there are so many issues where it just feels like the dev team needed more time with play testing. The timing is incredibly unforgiving. When I was going through the segment in Neo Arcadia with kinto blocks and being attacked by birds I realized that this is Mega Man X married with Ninja Gaiden and that's not a good thing.

There's no reason to engage with the elemental chips outside of bosses. I do like the stun-lock dance the developers want you doing.

Cyber-elves are idiocy. They're purely a collectible because they're single use. What am I feeding these guys for?

The aesthetics are so on point even if the audio quality is pretty trash. I played this through with the patch that reduced weapon grinding.

Tip for those emulating, use one of the control-types that doesn't require chorded inputs for the sub weapon and just map it onto a face button and put both shoulder buttons to dash, it's a much better experience.

Great art direction, some pretty good gameplay, and just the fact that we got a Mega Man X style experience on the GBA back in the day was pretty cool. A few things hold it back, though: the resolution of the GBA means the camera is zoomed in pretty close to Zero, making it hard to tell what's hazards are about to appear until they're almost right in your face. I'm also not a fan of how grindy the Cyber Elf system is and how harshly the game ranks you. Even if you had a perfect run you will get docked big time for having any health upgrades.

This game is weird.
The whole continue/missions disappearing thing is very assholeish for no reason.
There's screen crunch making some shit hard to react to, some arenas are small making it hard to dodge big sprites, the first few hours are brutal. But then you get an elemental chip and you can beat the rest of the game without much struggle.

The weapon level up thing SUCKS, i get why there were going for plot-wise but it's ass.

The elf system is stupidly grindy and annoying, i hate it.

Overall it's ok i guess, not the best but it's definetly better than any game from the X series starting from X5.

Mega Man Zero reeks of bad game design: screen crunch, escort missions, unfair enemy placement and more. But because the game is so short and incentivizes the player to blast through at lightspeed, it never feels dull. Conquering the game with the speed and aggression it provokes allows for a lot of its shortcomings to fall into the background. Furthermore, the length means that none of the bullshit is ever present for too long. The levels are varied enough that each stage has a unique kind of bullshit. Part of the fun was finding something stupid to complain about before finding something completely different for the next level (or figuring out there was a really easy solution to my problem, but I am too ass to figure it out). However, this game just balances on the edge between stupid and plain unfair that powering through every obstacle still remained exhilarating rather than relieving. There is just enough stupid garbage to make beating it feel like putting a cheater in their place and not like you had to cheat to win. Mega Man Zero is the kind of brutal, ass-wiping game that I love to hate.

very complicated game to talk about! you may remember i had a 1 star review for this game before i deleted it. somehow in retrospect i've really started to warm up to MMZ1, even disagreeing with most of what i wrote just a couple days ago. i don't think it's a particularly fun or well-executed game but there's certainly something compelling about it.

MMZ has a very strange learning/difficulty curve to it, and it's not helped by how weak zero is at the beginning of the game. the choice to lock basic combat skills behind grinding is frustrating; luckily it doesn't take too long if you know what you're doing. MMZ's difficulty is somewhat infamous, as it reaches a steep incline the moment you fight the first mission boss. this was what completely turned me off from this game for a long time, in tandem with its notorious lives system - lose a life and earn a heavy score penalty, lose all your lives on a level and it becomes completely inaccessible, potentially locking you out of one of the three boss weaknesses. i opted to (sigh) use savestates, as i know the recent collection has some form of this, and the alternative consisted of reloading from my save and playing the levels over again.

this is where i have to mention that these levels kind of suck! they suffer immensely from GBA screen-crunch, leading to leaps of faith in many platforming sections (factory level being an infamous example of this) and getting blindsided by enemies who are all too often faster than you can react to. of course, you get used to the handful of environments after the third forced revisit to them, but it doesn't make them any better. the music kind of sucks too sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry.

of course, on the flipside, this is a mega man game, so it plays pretty well on a base level, oddly a lot better than any of the PS1 MMX titles it owes so much to. the movement and combat are genuinely fun and satisfying, to a point where they do almost make up for many of the shortcomings i listed. the weapons are fluid, fast and have an excellent feel all around. i kept coming back to this game because as bad as i felt the bosses were on a design level, it was a little fun to strategize and see what i could do to make the fights as quick and dirty as possible (charged z-saber FTW). perhaps this is commendable. (haven't mentioned the cyber elf system but that's because it kind of sucks and i almost never used it outside of healing.)

i don't have any deeper analysis of the story but it's fairly good stuff and i wish it was told through more than static dialogue scenes. copy X twist is kind of lame but i get why they did it that way.

kind of hoping Z2 fixes any of my issues but from the brief sections i played of it... not looking good

(EDIT: i can't believe i spent so much of my childhood looking at Sprites-Inc only to forget to mention how good the sprites are. shameful)

Terminei na base de muito save state e rewind. Não consigo nem imaginar como que alguém daria conta desse tipo de jogo sem qualquer ajuda do tipo lá no GBA original!

Adorei o design dos personagens e embora a história seja bem rasinha só pra justificar o gameplay, fiquei bem curioso sobre o mundinho dele. Torço prós próximos jogos mostrarem além da base em que eles ficam.

Aos meros mortais recomendo jogarem com o patch Mega Man Zero Revisited, que rebalanceia o jogo e deixa ele aceitável embora ainda bem desafiador.