This is my entry to the Zero series, and from both the style of gameplay and the praise this has gotten it felt like something I should like. Unfortunately it started out mediocre and only went downhill from there. I'll mostly focus on the gameplay here and why I think that doesn't work, but I'll briefly mention some other aspects of the game. The story is fucking abysmal, and I get that jumping in at the third game I'm going to miss some stuff, but I felt like it really wasn't much of that causing me to dislike it but just amateur edgelord writing and flat trope-like characters. The visuals are pretty solid, though marred somewhat by the extremely zoomed in camera. I get that it's a GBA game, but it still felt like a bit too much. The music is alright at times, but some tracks are pretty grating, and I've heard much better from GBA games.

The main gameplay loop is classic Mega Man, except the stages are for the most part much easier, and the boss fights are meant to be harder and more intricate. This along with expanded movement and a bigger focus on melee weapons seems like something I'd enjoy a lot, but I ended up hating the combat by the end of the game. Early on a big problem is that your weapons aren't very effective without charging them, particularly vs bosses when you really want the knockback/stun from fully charged attacks. This leads to the optimal strategy being to hold down both of your attack buttons all the time while also moving, jumping, and dashing. Even on controllers much more comfortable than the original GBA, this is very rough on the hands. You can get a power up a bit into the game that automatically charges your weapons, but this is easy to miss and even when you have it it takes up an upgrade spot that could otherwise be used for other abilities for what feels like an essential feature.

Kind of similar to other Mega Man titles, the difficulty curve is also very strange. It starts out very difficult, then gets easier as you go except for some absurdly large spikes in difficulty at the mid point and end of the game. I should also note here that I played with the optional checkpoints in the newer release, without which this just seems insanely tedious to complete. Even with them, the time it takes after dying before you get back into a boss fight is needlessly long and adds a lot to the frustration of the more difficult parts of the game. The bosses aim to be more difficult through more complex movement and patterns, which sometimes works but often doesn't. I get that people have mastered these games and done no damage runs, but it still feels very unfair for a first playthrough when a boss's movement is unpredictable and unreactable and you get cornered in a very small arena. I feel like better air movement would help a lot with this, but your dash is limited to use on the ground. You can get some more distance by dashing then doing a wall jump, but that's awkward and can take too long to dodge some things mid-boss fight. You also do get a double jump pretty late in the game, which helps a lot, but like I said it's pretty late. With how little health you have, and how different the boss patterns can be from attempt to attempt, I felt like many of my victories weren't satisfying but felt like I just finally got lucky with an easy pattern. I'm no stranger to difficult boss-rush type games, but this still felt like a very un-fun kind of difficulty.

Once you get past the first handful of bosses, the game mostly gets much easier. You start to breeze through the stages with your upgraded abilities, but you'll notice that many of the enemies are reused and once you have all the elements unlocked and find a boss's weakness the normal ones are kind of a pushover. The only time the normal parts of the stage are challenging at all aren't very fun either, they're either easy to run through in a single attempt or they're in the handful littered with one hit kill spikes and crushing moving blocks. The spikes are especially egregious with the overly-zoomed-in camera I mentioned before. The biggest spike in difficulty though is at the final level. After doing a typical boss rush through repeats of the entire game (ugh), the final boss was easily my least favorite part. There are three phases, the first is fairly easy but the latter two are totally new and are difficult to learn and for each attempt you have to play from the beginning of the fight again, and with no healing between phases. The third phase in particular was pretty awful, with a wider arena that the camera couldn't fit, you take a lot of offscreen damage or get cornered by the boss's quick movement that you can't see the start of. There's also very few opportunities to safely get damage in. All 3 phases of this boss have more health than a typical boss in the game, and it overall was a huge slog that I felt more relieved than accomplished to be done with.

Overall the concept for this game could be cool, but it desperately needs some quality of life changes to the camera and controls, and some rethinking on how the bosses are made difficult. As people somehow hold this up as the pinnacle of the series, I don't have much hope for any of the others and doubt I'll try them.

Reviewed on Jun 14, 2022


3 Comments


1 year ago

I adore Zero 3, but it’s always refreshing to hear different onions on the game. It’s nice to open my mind and understand issues people have with a game I have a perfect time with.

1 year ago

I'm curious, what makes you despise the story so much? It's filled with tropes, but it doesn't strike me as the edgiest thing in the world. Plus, if you're a Mega Man fan, it's a real treat since it goes full circle and closes Zero's character arch.

1 year ago

I wouldn't really pry deeper into the story takes of a guy who skipped the first two games in the series with an overarching story and could only muster a "there are tropes" for a scathing critique of it

but yeah as far as the rest of the review goes, i guess it really just isn't for you. the zero series has some of the best designed bosses in the franchise, so most people enjoy learning how they work, which should be even easier with the more generous checkpoints and functionally infinite lives of the collection.

And I don't know how many times I gotta say it. These games were designed specifically for the GBA, and the developers accounted for the screensize, such that there's maybe at most ONE set of blind jump spikes in the entire game.