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.