Throughout the Mega Man X games, there's been a consistent throughline in all of their narratives. X and Zero are essentially operatives of a fascist state, one that kills all that it sees as opposition to its tyrannical rule. It is a world governed by human interests and oppression of the other, the robots that are functionally human but are treated as slaves. The games seem somewhat aware of this dichotomy yet always agree with the fascist views of X and Zero by the end. That ultimately, what they're doing is correct and should be continued. It's quite frustrating.

Mega Man Zero, though, decides to buck this trend entirely. Zero has lost all his memories and been recruited into a guerilla resistance cell, one fighting against the same hunters that he used to call himself a part of. You are the ones labeled as defective, the ones that need to be disposed of. Now you know what it was like to be hunted in the X games and it's handled brilliantly.

In many ways, it reminds me a lot of Final Fantasy II. Something incredibly palpable about that game is the sense of fruitlessness all of your actions as a group of rebels truly has; that regardless of your actions the conflict will continue on without you. You blow up the Empire's greatest weapon, a gigantic warship known for decimating entire cities, and it barely even affects their progress. You find an incredibly powerful piece of ancient magic, the classic Ultima spell, and find out that it's so antiquated in its damage output that it can't possibly be of any help to you. In Mega Man Zero, there's a similar relationship with the enemy - your rebellion does little in the grand scheme of things.

A particularly striking moment had to do with a factory that Zero takes over pretty early in the game for the resistance to find a substitute fuel source. Immediately after taking back said factory, it is nearly blown up by one of this game's robot masters and you have to save it from exploding. One step forward almost becomes two steps back. A hidden base of theirs you capture nearly has all its data wiped from it by them in order to prevent you from accessing it.

The game ends with you killing a copy of X, one that represents the original X series, and leaving all of the baggage that it has behind. Though the revolution is far from over, the game ends with a large modicum of hope that things will get better in the future. Things have already gotten better, even if only in a small way.

Though it's been centuries, the right steps are finally being taken.