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)
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)