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Mega Man Zero

by Jonathan Metts - September 17, 2002, 10:13 pm EDT

Whoa. Mega Man Zero is a Symphony of the Night for the Mega Man series. Get the scoop.

Forget that Battle Network stuff: Mega Man Zero is essentially a traditional Mega Man game spliced with some basic but solid RPG elements. The result is a surprisingly fresh game in an increasingly stale franchise.

In case you weren’t tipped off from the title, Mega Man Zero puts you in the shoes of Mega Man X’s old buddy, Zero. Unlike his friend, who seems to actually be the main boss in this game, Zero doesn’t gain new weapons from bosses, and he prefers a beam sword to a blaster. However, in this game you’ll have the option of using either, along with two other cool but not quite so useful weapons that you’ll acquire later on. Oddly enough, Zero no longer learns new skills from defeating bosses, as he did in Mega Man X4. He’ll generally obtain an elemental alignment, which are only marginally useful, or a Cyber Elf.

The Cyber Elves give a Pokemon-like trading aspect to the game, although it doesn’t come off as too contrived. Basically, you can equip up to three at a time, and when you use one from the pause menu, it will sacrifice itself to give you some benefit. Most of the commonly found ones will just fill up your health bar or give some other temporary power-up. However, the bigger Cyber Elves, which are often obtained from bosses or difficult-to-reach ledges, can afford permanent bonuses like a longer health bar or a Sub-Tank. The Cyber Elf system is not nearly as corny or as dispensable as I assumed at first, but I still prefer finding the major upgrades. Now you not only have to find things like Sub-Tanks, but you have to collect energy crystals and feed them to the proper Cyber Elf for quite a while before it will mature and become usable.

Anyway, back to the main gameplay. Zero controls beautifully, as you would expect from any Mega Man game. Some of his moves are a little sluggish at first, but it turns out these have to be upgraded before they’re up to snuff. Just like X, he can climb walls, dash, and charge up weapons. Zero’s blaster works exactly the same, although it looks pretty stupid since he’s holding the gun instead of having it built into his arm. The sword is naturally the highlight, and it works incredibly well. All of Zero’s weapons can be leveled up with frequent use, adding combo skills or better charged-up shots. It’s a simple but very effective way to add an RPG feeling to the game, although it’s very easy to hang out near a regenerating enemy and level everything up to your heart’s content. The same goes for gathering energy crystals for the Cyber Elves, although this process is so slow that you’ll probably just prefer to get them through the course of the game.

Mega Man Zero sports a pretty unique game design for its pedigree. Rather than selecting your level from the famous Brady Bunch-style screen, Zero has a home base and he simply talks to a certain person to initiate a mission. There are many other people standing around who will offer you advice or just chit-chat. This base area is actually quite large, with plenty of room to explore. And, as it turns out, your missions all take place within this one unified world. So once the roadblocks are opened up, you can simply walk to any level you played before to find stuff you missed or to go rack up more experience. Sometimes new sections will even open up if you go back between missions.

The missions themselves work mostly like traditional Mega Man games, with a long gauntlet of enemies and platforming challenges capped off by a boss robot. I haven’t found the levels themselves particularly difficult, but some of the bosses are extremely hard if you haven’t acquired the correct skill, element, or Cyber Elf yet. In classic Mega Man fashion, your success really depends on which order you tackle the levels. You’ll experiment and die plenty of times before finding the next least difficult mission and seriously taking it on. Zero generally has at least three missions to choose from, and new ones will open up as he completes others. Some missions even revisit earlier levels, although they are usually significantly altered.

So far, I’m having a blast with Mega Man Zero. It’s especially cool to see the classic Mega Man gameplay combined with Zero’s own fighting style and the various RPG elements. Any fan of the series should be thrilled to have a game of this caliber on Game Boy Advance.

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Genre Action
Developer Capcom
Players1

Worldwide Releases

na: Mega Man Zero
Release Sep 09, 2002
PublisherCapcom
RatingEveryone
jpn: RockMan Zero
Release Apr 26, 2002
PublisherCapcom

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