Mega Man Zero - Review

Title: Mega Man Zero
Release Date: April 26th, 2002
Original Platform: Game Boy Advance

I believe Mega Man Zero has flown under the radar over the last eighteen years, and not in a good way. This is not some diamond in the rough, but rather a pretty bad game that no one really notices because its two immediate sequels are considered some of the best Mega Man games of all time.

By lumping MMZ in with them as part of the greater Mega Man Zero Tetralogy, the goodwill earned by its successors transferred onto this game like colors bleeding in the wash¹.

It is hard to describe the ways in which Mega Man Zero screws things up without doing a deep dive, but for the sake of this high level review, let me take a stab at it. I believe the root problem with this game is that, either due to budget constraints, or due to their limited familiarity with the Game Boy Advance, the developers at Inticreates ended up making a game that was extremely small in scale. As a result, they needed to come up with some ways to add content and extend its average playtime.

Their solution involved making the game exceedingly difficult, as well as introducing a whole bunch of extremely opaque systems and secrets for players to accidentally stumble upon. To put it another way, the game tries to be a good “value” by being punishing and unintuitive, and encouraging the player to throw themselves into the meat grinder again and again. It is about as fun as it sounds.

This is a game with an invisible experience point system that levels up your weapons. It is a game that boils the classic “exploit your enemy’s weakness” trope of Mega Man games to a literal case of “rock, paper, scissors”, by letting you imbue weapons with three - and only three - elements. It has a ranking system that is exceedingly strict, but which unlocks a number of useful powerups. Most new players are advised to ignore the rankings, not by the game itself, but by fans. The game itself never tells the player anything.

There’s more. The game allows you to fail missions, at which point you can never reattempt them again. It has also a strange continue system, such that losing all your lives will sometimes cause a mission failure, but other times it will lead to a true “Game Over” that spits you back to the title screen (in which case you better hope you have a Save Game to reload). You never can tell how this game will try and screw you over.

Heck, you can’t even tell if it will screw you over. As hard as MMZ can be, its difficulty is extremely uneven. There are some boss battles that are absolute pushovers, and some of the stages are so short that they don’t even get a chance to try and wear you down and chip away at your health. The most dangerous thing about this is that it risks making the player feel safe and confident. Sooner or later they are going to get to a part that ramps the challenge back up, leaving them confused as to what they did wrong and how they can fix it ².

Perhaps the greatest sin is that the game just doesn’t have much stuff to it. There are only a handful of environments, which the missions force you to revisit multiple times. MMZ makes a half-assed effort at mixing things up to make these levels feel fresh, but it isn’t enough. This is what really convinced me this game must have been made on the cheap. The simplest, but most effective thing they could have done to recycle a level and make it feel fresh would have been to populate it with brand new enemies. That it fails to even do this leaves me to assume that it was too expensive.

Beyond this simple reuse of content, there is also the fact that the sprite work is largely boring ³, the soundtrack often repeats itself, and the story is extremely threadbare. The concept of the story is intriguing, but it doesn’t do enough to justify the scenario or its eventual conclusion.

Final Thoughts

There just isn’t enough to Mega Man Zero, and what is there is just not good. There is a difference between a game being “challenging” and a game being “punishing”. The best Mega Man games are in the former category, while the worst - including this one - fall into the latter group. Play it if you want to be a completionist, or if, like me, you are interested in it from an historical standpoint. Everyone else is better off staying away.

Other Thoughts

If you don’t expect to ever play this game, and/or you don’t mind spoilers, watch this Youtube video of the final boss and the ending sequence. This is one of the comments I came across:

I’m not exactly sure how an ending with such little content could be considered one of the greatest of all time. If this is the threshold people have for quality, no wonder this game is still held in high regard.

Lastly, this game does have a handful of excellent boss fights that invoke my memories of the original Mega Man X. They are not reason enough to play through this game.

Deep Dives

This post is menat to be a general, high level review. I have also written a number of deep dives that put the game under the microscope:

• Story Deep Dive
• Weapons Deep Dive
• Misc Systems Deep Dive
• Deep Dive on Environmental Storytelling
• Deep Dive on Everything Else