New ability to destroy enemies with your hand and steal their weapon from them or to get weapons in the environment, can be used as a straight upwards attack but weapons grabbed usually aren't that useful. Removed your other weapons other than the sword and gun. Stage rankings no longer do anything but give bosses an extra attack if you keep an S rank. A weather system where you can set an easy or hard weather for the stage with hard giving you a boss attack if you beat it and both altering the stage. One elf that grows many times and equips three abilities one from each class of former elf. No longer any elemental effects other than by using EX attacks. Crafting parts for head, body, leg chips, your options are much less interesting and the guessing nature of what makes what was poorly thought out. Narratively seems like a complete afterthought, even removing characters that they later decided died in the previous game for no real reason. Normal length like Zero 2 not with more bosses and stages like 3 or shorter like the first. Better than the first but disappointing after the third.

I appreciate that they tried to go for more gimmicky stages to keep things fresh for the 4th installment but a lot of it just ends up being annoying and the bosses are more similar to the unfair nature of 1 with attacks that are really difficult to dodge in the small space they give you. I generally liked what I saw of the writing in this one more than the others but the humans in the settlement are pretty obnoxious. The changes to the elf system seem cool enough but the weird crafting system feels stupid.

It feels like they resorted to some X5-tier stage gimmicks that are kinda annoying and assholish but not impossible, in fact 2 stages are literally the same gimmicks from that game, noble mandrago's is like axle the red's and heat genblem is like mattrex's. It even has ziplines but slightly worse because you can't slide across them, you can only jump, and there's some where it's a platform too but you have to fall through it while timing it right to still grab on to the zipline as it's also moving itself because there's also spikes that'll kill you if you keep standing on the platform and you can tell from the way I'm describing it I really did not like the 2 or 3 parts of the game that had that. Other stages felt like they had a little less interesting design overall too, but combat and movement is still good and they didn't ruin it with any annoying new enemies, I even cried a little at the ending (this is normal for me) so I can't really hate it, I was just not expecting this game to remind me of X5 in some ways and that's really fucking funny to me.

MMZ4 is more of less the same as what you'd expect from the last 3 titles in the series. It ditches a lot of the weapons that you might be familiar with especially from 1 and 2 such as the Chain Hook and Spear etc., in favor for the Z-Knuckle which is an interesting and somewhat gimmicky mimic system item that is used to steal powers on the spot after killing an enemy with the Z-Knuckle.

Aside from this you can expect the exact same gameplay as it was from the previous entries which is more than serviceable. Much of the story is hard to recall for me after so long however I do remember enjoying it and learning about the Resistance faction that plays an important role in the fight. This game is the last of the Z saga and Ultimately Zero's curtain call before the ZX series, and I more than enjoyed the feelings left with me on the ending.