Mega Man ZX plays like Capcom attempting to give its old-school mascot character a contemporary makeover. This probably seemed like a great idea in the design stage: a free-roaming game world, different missions scattered around it, and a bit of a story to string it all together. It’s not a million miles from Konami’s newer Castlevania games, which aren’t a poor model to follow at all.

In practice, the results are mixed. The problem is meshing these new ideas with older design elements that have always stuck with the series -- elements like an unforgiving checkpoint scheme and a merciless difficulty level.

It’s too bad, because what is old about Mega Man ZX is generally very good. It has the looks and the basic gameplay of an excellent handheld side-scroller. Its designers deserve credit for trying to update the franchise, but they haven’t gotten it quite right the first time.

Alpha and Mega

Mega Man ZX makes a fine first impression. There’s hardly any 3D involved, except for a few accents in spots like the main menu screen. Instead, it has the polished 2D graphics of a first-rate 16-bit game – big, colorful bosses, scaling sprite effects, and lots of parallax scrolling.

Some of the prettier stages have as many as three background layers, adding depth to murky forests and shining sci-fi skylines, plus great background music in the catchy Mega Man style. Others show off using cool foreground overlays, like animated rain or a fuzzy iris effect for a dark, claustrophobic area.

Like any Mega Man game, ZX starts with a limited set of character abilities, but it doesn’t stay that way for long. Once the prologue is over, you’ll have short-range attacks, chargeable long-range weapons, a speedy dash for distance jumps, and that’s without snatching any new skills from defeated bosses. The controls are as tight as you’d expect from a company that’s made games like these for 20 years.

The interface could have done more with the second DS screen. It would have been a great place for a detailed level map, or cheat-sheet information on different character abilities. As it is, the bottom screen still displays some handy details (like a health meter charting the status of enemy targets), but too often it’s just wasted space.

My Kingdom for a Map

That detailed level map is what the game needs more than anything. While ZX controls like a classic Mega Man, it isn’t laid out like one. It doesn’t use separate worlds or levels, and there’s no simple menu of Robot Masters to pick from. It’s all one big game map, like Metroid or Castlevania, and the “levels” are missions that begin when you choose to trigger them.

There are some advantages to this way of arranging things. You can pick and choose from several different missions most of the time, or just look around for power-ups in hidden corners of the world. The problem isn’t the free-roaming layout itself -- it’s the trouble most players will have finding their way around it.

Metroid and Castlevania always show exactly how each part of the game world links up with every other. There’s never a problem finding a place you’ve already been, and the map usually shows a path to unexplored areas as well. Mega Man ZX doesn’t have that kind of map, though – it shows which general areas connect to which others, but when it comes to specific layouts, you have to trust to memory. That’s a pretty raw deal given how many areas share the same general theme and visual style.

Are We There Yet?

So it’s hard enough finding your way to somewhere you’ve already been. Finding the route to a new area (since new missions regularly take place in uncharted territory) throws even more trial and error in the mix. The map doesn’t reveal a location unless you’ve found it already, and areas don’t necessarily connect in logical order. Area C leads to area D, for instance, but D doesn’t connect to E, nor does E link up with F.

Transport checkpoints around the game world help a little bit, but there’s still far more backtracking involved than there ever needed to be. There’s also a mean little glitch that erases any map progress made during an aborted mission. Quit a mission halfway through and you lose access to any checkpoints you found before giving up.

Once you’ve managed to find a mission, the vicious difficulty doesn’t help matters. What ZX calls “normal” is any other game’s “brutal,” and even the easy setting has some nasty jumping sequences. Mega Man veterans may not find this a problem, but casual players are probably going to be frustrated. Running out of lives means bouncing back to the beginning of a mission, or at best to the nearest save point. Either option involves another long hike over familiar ground.

Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda

ZX could have saved itself an awful lot of trouble just by automatically sending the player to the start point of each mission. Trudging all over hell’s half-acre without a clear idea of which way to go doesn’t seem like it ought to be anyone’s idea of fun.

The fun part is running and gunning and finding new abilities. That’s been the Mega Man formula for two decades, and the best parts of ZX are proof that it still works. Adding to the formula is a fine idea in theory, but what’s new in this game simply gets in the way.

Article by: D. F. Smith
Video produced by: Tim Jennings