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.
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.
PKMudkipz
3 years ago