This post is an analysis of Mega Man Zero’s weapons and combat systems. Here are links to the rest of the deep dives:
Mega Man Zero is, at its heart, a game in the style of Mega Man X. You can dash and wall climb, you have multiple weapons, and there are elemental weaknesses to exploit. There are also upgrades to find that will boost your max health, or grant you a Sub Tank that can refill your energy meter.
However, it introduces a few additional layers atop these systems. As far as I can tell, these additions are largely in the name of increasing the game’s difficulty. In reality, they just lead to frustration.
Weapon Experience
Weapons in MMZ can be leveled up via an Experience Point system. At first, each weapon is at level 1, and is extremely limited in function. The level 1 sword, for example, can only slash once (or is it twice?), and the level 1 gun cannot perform a charge shot. To unlock new capabilities, you need earn XP.
How you obtain XP is entirely invisible to the player, though diehard fans have pretty much figured out how it works. It goes something like this:
- You only earn XP on attacks that deal a killing blow.
- How much XP you earn depends on the type of the attack you use. For instance, the first sword slash in your standard combo nets 1 XP, while the third slash nets 3. This means the speed at which your weapons level up can depend on your fighting style and strategy.
- Level ups are nonlinear. For example, both the gun and the Triple Rod can perform either a standard attack, or a charged attack. Both attack types receive upgrades. XP earned using the standard attack will go towards standard attack upgrades, and XP earned using charged attacks go towards charge attack upgrades. Meanwhile the sword has four attack types, each of which can be upgraded. If you want to level a weapon up quickly, you need to be mindful of what attack types need upgrading, and you need to force yourself to use those attacks as much as possible.
- Certain weapons are more effective against certain bosses, so it pays to work on leveling all of them up.
- This is not a fact perse, but since each weapon is pretty crummy at level 1, this leads to a weird contradiction in which you must first make things harder (by forcing yourself to use a crappy weapon) in order to make things easier (by unlocking the upgrades).
Let me reiterate that none of this information is explained to the player in any way by the game. If you tried to play this game blind, and you adopted a “use the weapons I want, ignore the rest” approach, you could find yourself in a world of hurt. Even if you tried to use all the weapons equally, you might still find each one leveling up slowly, depending on how you go about it.1
One solution to this poor design is to do like a jRPG and level grind. There are areas you can go to farm XP and get your weapons into tip-top shape, but of course you’d have to consult the Internet to find them. Again, depending on how you go about this, you can max out your weapons in as little as thirty minutes, or as much as an hour or two.
Compared to an actual jRPG, this is not much time at all, but for an action game like this, it feels excruciating and unnecessary.
Cyber Elf System
In-game, Cyber Elves are tiny little fairy/pixie/sprite/software things. They look cute and they want to help. However, invoking their help causes them to die.
From the perspective of the player, Cyber Elves are essentially one-time use powerups. Some of them give you a temporary boost, while some grant a permanent upgrade.
Actually using Cyber Elves can be complicated.
First, you have to find the little buggers. Some of them are random drops from enemies. Some are dropped by bosses. Others are hidden away in each level.
Once you find one, the next step is to figure out which one it is. As you can tell from the screenshot above, the faces of the elves blur together, and there is no indicator that tells you which one is the new one. You just have to memorize the position of each one you already had, so you can spot the one that wasn’t there before.
Next, you have to determine whether it is ready to use or not. Some Cyber Elves can be activated right away, but there are some (mainly the ones that grant permanent upgrades) that are need to be “fed” and grown before they can assist. You do this by feeding them Energy Crystals, an item that is occasionally dropped by enemies, or found in the world. As with most item drops in Mega Man games, Energy Crystals come in “small” and “large” sizes. I don’t remember their specific values, but I believe even the large ones are worth less than ten EC.
For reference, some of the Cyber Elves need anywhere from 800-2,0000 EC to fully mature. That’s for just one of them.
You might be thinking that earning that many crystals is a extremely tall order, but the truth is that the reality is even worse than whatever you are imagining. If every enemy dropped EC, these figures might be more reasonable, but item drops in MMZ are as infrequent as they are in most Mega Man games. Furthermore, there are some enemies that only drop EC, and others that never do.
Is there any way to get around this dilemma? Just as with weapon upgrades, the obvious solution is to grind for crystals. There are certain areas where enemies drop them most frequently, and you can run back and forth killing them until you get your fill. Of course, this is mindlessly tedious, and depending on how many elves you want to feed, this process can take a while. Is there any faster approach?
As it turns out, there is. Some NPCs in the game will gift you with 500-800 crystals if you talk to them. However, as I pointed out here, MMZ is structured like a jRPG, where NPCs say different things at different points in the story. If you want to get these big lump sums of crystals, you need to know who to talk to, and when to do so. If you do get them all, and as long as you fight a decent amount of enemies throughout the game, then you should have enough crystals to unlock one or two health upgrades, and maybe a Sub Tank. If you want to get all the upgrades, however, you will still need to resort to grinding.
This brings us to an interesting conundrum. If you want (or need) upgrades in order to beat the game, your time playing the game is going to be longer, and contain much more busywork as compared to someone who just plays straight through. Depending on your tolerance for grinding, this can significantly damage one’s opinion of the overall experience.
There is an argument to be made that no one is forcing you to grind. If you don’t like the prospect, you should simply play the game “naturally”, and accept whatever upgrades you manage to acquire. If that isn’t enough to help you win, then you should be thankful you at least have the chance to make it easier through grinding!
I acknowledge that argument can be made, but I don’t buy it. If you play it “naturally”, you will barely earn many crystals through combat, and unless you are a very thorough, borderline OCD kind of gamer, it is unlikely you will obtain all the crystal bonuses from the NPCs. This means you are unlikely to unlock any health upgrades, or maybe only one.
This flies in the face of previous Mega Man games, which not only encourage you to find upgrades, but design certain encounters based on the assumption that you will seek them out.
It ignores the fact that Zero’s base health is pitifully low, and that asking players to defeat bosses while only withstanding roughly three or so hits is a level of challenge that is abnormally high even for a Mega Man game.
It ignores the fact that asking less skilled players to waste their time grinding looks an awful lot like punishing them for not being good enough.
Lastly, I must point out that as difficult as the game is, it is possible to make it too easy by obtaining too many health upgrades. Based on my own experience, if you were to obtain all the permanent health boosts, and all the Sub Tanks, you would have enough health that you could defeat some bosses by simply going blow-for-blow against them. That is extremely boring, and would easily ruin the experience. But how do you know when you have obtained enough upgrades to make the difficulty “reasonable”? How do you know when to stop? You don’t really. You just have to experiment with the game until you figure out what’s right for you.
This is all a roundabout way of saying that Mega Man Zero proves my theory that asking players to adjust a game’s difficulty via self-imposed restrictions is a cop out used to paper over bad design. Asking a player to adjust their own experience by having them not use certain features, when they don’t reliably know the impact of these limitations until after the fact, is a hot load of BS.
At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, it sounds a lot like victim blaming. “It’s your fault the game isn’t fun. Maybe you should try doing things that don’t make the game angry” (or in this case, replace “angry” with “boring”).
When Weapons and Cyber Elves Meet
In order to grind Energy Crystals to feed to the Cyber Elves, you are going to need to attack stuff. Attacking stuff will inevitably level up your weapons. In other words, while you can play through the game with maxed out weapons and no health boosts, you can’t easily play it with maxed out health and baseline weapons. This is another knock against the idea of being able to fine tune the difficulty through self-imposed limitations. It only works if the game can accommodate the particular restrictions you want to enforce2.
Conclusion
I understand the desire to increase the game’s challenge, as do I understand the desire to make the difficulty configurable. But the absolute worst way to achieve these goals is to take cues from RPGs, which are notorious for confusing the idea of “challenge” with the idea of “wasting time with BS”. This is a game in which the only way to figure out how you like playing it is by figuring out how you don’t - and then hoping you stumble into an approach that works better. It is entirely hostile to the player, and I cannot abide by that3.
- Remember that this game was published in 2002. The internet was a much different place back then. While there were FAQs and Walkthroughs, they were not available immediately. People weren’t breaking down and analyzing a game’s systems and exploits within days of release. If you bought and played Mega Man Zero when it was new, you were likely going to flail around a bunch before even having a shot of figuring out what you were doing. [return]
- There are ways to upgrade your health, but not your weapons. You could grind for Energy Crystals using just one weapon (in which case it will be the only one that gets maxed out). The other option is to obtain all the crystals you need by collecting the Large crystal deposit that occasionally regenerates in the Resistance Base. Remember that a Large Crystal is worth less than 10 EC, so this approach would take days, if not weeks, to work. In other words, it’s insane. [return]
- On a related note, no one should have to do copious amounts of research in order to essentially plan how they are going to play a game. You can, but you should never feel like you have to. If a game cannot teach you what to do - either through tutorials or its systems - I consider that a knock against it. [return]