Vital Stats

Genre: Platformer
Players: 1
Online: None

Developer: Inti
Publisher: Capcom
ESRB Rating: E
Release Date: 9/12/06

Platforms

• DS

Mega Man ZX slaps another coat of paint on to the paper-rock-scissors gameplay that has nurtured the franchise through dozens of repetitions. The tweaks are minute as ever, so standing fans and longtime critics needn’t think very hard when deciding on a purchase.

Echo
It’s easy to criticize a series game for failing to sufficiently innovate. Publishers and developers run a businesses after all, so when they strike gold they tend to keep digging in the same place.

Why shouldn’t they? Nobody goes rushing to the latest Mario Kart sequel to see if they’ve added the highly anticipated mahjong system. There’s something to be said for cleaving to the formula that transformed a handful of games into a successful franchise.

However, it’s one thing to take a formula and stretch it across five games, or across ten games. However, stretching a game of rock-paper-scissors over twenty years with one or more releases every year–giving Tetris a run for its money as most serially plagiarized game ever–is something else entirely. Just as a hive is something more than a swarm, so too is Mega Man something more than a franchise. It’s unsurprising, then, that if you’ve played pretty much any other game from the greater franchise, Mega Man ZX should feel very familiar.

For those uninitiated to the cult of the Blue Bomber (and completely skippable for acolytes), the core formula is simple. A 2D platforming robot cuts and shoots his way through about eight themed stages to find the boss at the end of each. Once there, he confronts and overcomes a similarly themed boss, inherits his themed power, and then turns its destructive force on the remaining bosses. The rock-paper-scissors thing comes in because each of the bosses is especially susceptible to a weapon conferred by another boss. So, Mega Man takes his default weapon, breaks into the volcano, kills the fire boss, and gets a lava gun. He then turns that gun on the glacier’s ice boss, and takes the ice gun into the sea to overcome the water boss, etcetera.

So there’s sort of a flow chart that’s a big closed circle of bosses. The gameplay that isn’t strictly platforming mostly comes from figuring out the best place to break into the flow, and which arrows point where (the chart is a little different for each game).

While ferreting out the secret weaknesses of each boss is reasonably compelling, it’s usually built on top of rock solid platforming action. Tight control, fast action, and (mostly) fair and challenging level design are series hallmarks. Not every game quite reaches this lofty ideal, but enough do that it’s reasonable to expect the same of each sequel (and to be annoyed when they fail).

Get Equipped With…
Happily, ZX rates fairly highly in terms of the core series attributes. Of course, if you’ve ever so much as heard of Mega Man before, you’ve come here to find out about the game’s deviations. ZX diverges from the core formula in four ways: a continuous world, mission structure, the biometal system, and dual-screen capabilities.

The first and most obvious difference is that ZX takes place in a continuous world. Gone is the outdated stage select screen, and in its place is hub city Innerpeace. Hopping out one of Innerpeace’s many exits and winding your way through intervening spaces is the only way to reach (wait for it) the themed levels and their bosses.

Honestly, having a continuous world is a charming idea. It can add a sense of place. The ocean level could be connected to a beach. The dig site could include a wandering trek underground complete with subterranean hazards. Heck, noticeable changes in the terrain could offer a naturalistic guide for where to go and what to expect from different destinations.

What we get instead is a series of themed areas with a haphazard connectivity that acts more like an obstacle course than a contiguous world. There’s some joy to be had from exploring these intervening areas and extracting their secrets the first time, but you’ll be required to retread old territory often enough that these areas transition from gameplay to padding. It’s like traveling via major airline; whether you’re flying to San Francisco, Seattle, or Las Vegas, you always get to see Denver.

It’d be a bit less cumbersome with a good map system, but the map in ZX is abstracted unto meaninglessness. All the connected areas are coded with a letter and number. Strip out all the topographic information and connect the nodes like (again) a flowchart, and that’s the map. There aren’t empty lines indicating unexplored paths and you can’t edit the map, so it’s not even much use in tracking your exploration.

Fumbling blindly through the continuous world results in more than combat, however. Innerpeace (and a connected military cell) is chock full of innocent citizens, many of whom have ideas about what to do with encroaching threats. So, objectives are dished out by selectable mission–a dozen core missions that emerge as the story progresses and a number of side quests. The mission you’ve taken is listed on the map screen along with the target node’s index code. This doesn’t really resolve the map’s problem with offering guidance through the world, but at least you’ll know when you’ve stumbled into the right neighborhood.

The story missions drive the theme level/boss/weapon game structure, while the side quests mostly involve hunting down random knickknacks in the world and delivering them to local citizens. The core missions are consistent with the Mega Man formula: fast combat, tight control, and well-tuned challenge. It’s not even slightly fresh, but it’s the kind of competently designed gameplay that has sustained the series for twenty years. The side quests, however, are more in line with the padding that marketing departments like to call RPG elements. These fetch quests invariably retread old territory, and without the rewards would have nothing compelling to them whatsoever.

The rewards are important, though, because anything shy of perfectly expert gameplay incurs a cost in ZX. The biometal system presents a new riff on the old weakness-driven gameplay model. In addition to whatever elemental weakness plagues a particular boss, some body part (head/arms/chest/etc) has been invested with the source of the boss’s powers, the biometal. Even though the biometal is particularly vulnerable, if Mega Man hopes to inherit an uncompromised new weapon, he’ll have to avoid dinging it up during the boss fight. Less dexterous players and those who want to use the biometal’s weakness for a speedy win will have to dish out their short supply of cash to repair it or suffer through depleted ammunition reserves. Compromised biometal isn’t a dealbreaker, especially at the lower difficulty settings, but punishing sloppy gameplay with steeper difficulty definitely leans the game toward hardcore audiences.

When Mega Man receives (steals is such a dirty word) a biometal, things run a bit differently than the typical, “new gun” style of reward. Instead, each biometal changes Mega Man’s default attacks and confers a charge ability that’s more in line with the traditional reward system. It’s much like the different equippable weapons in the Mega Man Zero games, but ZX marries boss rewards with those weapons into one streamlined package.

While most of the action in ZX takes place on the DS’s top screen, most biometals make some use of the bottom screen. Most of the time, this manifests as some type of map of the immediate area, but one or two do something innovative with the second screen. Particularly interesting is the flame biometal, which provides a pair of guns and a grid map to customize the path of your shots. The ability to fire upwards, let alone along a snaking wiggly path, is rare enough in Mega Man games, and this biometal is refreshingly flexible.

Fighting for Everlasting Peace Never Seems to Stick
Pretty much all of the Mega Man games actually belong to a DC/Marvel-class ret-conned cannon (though you’d probably be hard-pressed to squeeze Mega Man Battle & Chase in there with a straight face), and ZX bravely fights on some years after Mega Man Zero leaves off.

ZX follows the selectable exploits of Vent or Aile as they discover biometal and leverage it to protect humanity against homicidal robots called mavericks. Both experience slightly different storylines, but the gameplay differences are vanishingly small. Most of the plotline consists of anime angst and shallow promises to defend humanity for justice, but the text is mercifully skippable.

The game’s graphics stick as closely to the norm as its gameplay. Characters are colorful, fluidly animated sprites and they populate a reasonably rich and detailed world. The resolution on the DS limits your field of view somewhat, but the game has been competently designed so that the worst consequence of that is the occasional enemy who pops onscreen a bit closer than is strictly comfortable.

The music also sticks to the modal Mega Man electronica. It’s not as catchy as some of the early NES tunes or as distinctive as the music from the X series, but it sounds like a Mega Man game while retaining some sense of identity. The voice work has gone unlocalized, though it sounds as though it consists of a small group of repeated phrases, so that’s probably for the best.

Eating Leftovers for Twenty Years
ZX is like every other Mega Man game, right down to the tiny differences that keep it from being precisely every other Mega Man game. The game doesn’t do much to reach out to casual gamers, who would be served better by an earlier franchise game. Genre fans will probably enjoy the extra 5-10 hours of Mega Man (it’s practically its own genre at this point), though series detractors will find nothing to sway their opinion here. Hardcore gamers may find something to love in the potentially steep difficulty and the demanding character of the biometal system. Mega Man isn’t for everyone. Please consult your favorite game critic before trying Mega Man. Side effects may include: glassy eyes, depleted weapon energy, and drymouth.

What It Costs: $20

What It’s Worth:

• To The Hardcore: $10 (buy)
• To The Genre Fan: $10 (rent)
• To The Casual: $0 (go find a different Mega Man)