For someone who loves their Castlevania and Resident Evil, I’m weirdly skeptical of franchises. I’m attracted to games which have a unique flair or an idea that hasn’t been explored elsewhere, so when I see people asking for a third or fourth iteration on something, my reflex is to roll my eyes a bit. The first thought that pops into my head is how they should be hoping for the sort of originality that got them excited in the first place, but that really is an unfair perspective for a variety of reasons. While I can praise Resident Evil’s boldness in reinventing itself, my favorite entry is a remake, and the best classic-vania is the eighth one. Castlevania is a particularly good counterpoint to my insufferable attitude, since I perfectly enjoy the first game and would hardly change anything about it, but it was the years of iteration on the series that made Rondo of Blood such an artistic triumph. It proves that something that’s good could always be refined a little more, and refinement is a quality that’s impossible to fake. A similar, unfakeable quality that you get with a franchise is that of history, which is harder to describe, but it’s one that Yakuza fans deeply understand. The first time you play Yakuza, you run around Kamurocho without thinking too much about it, but a few games later it’s hard to turn down an alleyway and not remember a pivotal moment that happened nearby. A developer can throw a novel’s worth of backstory at you, but personal attachment won’t exist without actual time and investment. It’s both of these qualities that I think make Mega Man Zero 3 such a unique experience, being the result of refinement across roughly twenty games. The platforming and combat are as good as a platformer could ever have, and I can’t even think of any critiques. Analytically, I find the mechanics to be a perfectly smooth wall, so rock solid that I have nothing to grip on and have hardly anything to say. The history aspect has been more on my mind, with its bleakness contrasting so much from where the story began. Mega Man was a series about an innocent robot boy fighting a cartoon Albert Einstein, and by Zero 3, you have a devastated planet, torn apart by global warfare and factions desperately trying to survive with limited resources. Doctor Light used to seem like jolly old Saint Nick, but by the time of this game, you could make an argument that going back in time and killing him before he could make any robots would be the best conclusion to the franchise. If the Zero series had been its own original thing, I don’t think my imagination would have been sparked in the same way, if at all. Without the slow development across the main games and the X series, it would probably feel like a fairly standard post-apocalyptic sci-fi experience, but by being a natural growth of almost 20 years of development, it held weight with me in a way most other games don’t. So, a game like Zero 3 simply couldn’t exist without a Zero 2, a Zero 1, an X5, an X4, an X3, and so on. Through repetition, something totally unique emerged, the same way it did for Resident Evil 4 or Symphony of the Night. While I wouldn’t say Zero 3 quite lives up to those monumental games… it actually comes pretty close.

Reviewed on Sep 02, 2022


Comments