Mega Man Zero is certainly a good start for the series, but there are some blatant flaws here that can’t be ignored. I’ll start with the Cyber-elves. You’ll find them throughout the missions and most of them give you a temporary boost of some sort (stunning enemies, healing Zero, etc.), but some others will provide permanent upgrades for Zero. However, you’ll need to feed them each some Energy Crystals before being able to use the permanent Cyber-elves. This sounds fine, but the problem is that the necessary amounts of Crystals are staggeringly high. You will really have to grind for these things, and that’s not fun. I suppose they didn’t want to make it too easy to fully upgrade Zero, but they definitely didn’t have to go that far with the Energy Crystal costs. Next up, we’ve got a big one: the lives system, and I have one question about it: who the fuck thought it was a good idea? For those who don’t know, this game really broke the mold by not giving you some extra lives back after losing all of them, therefore you can only get more of them as they’re scarcely scattered throughout the levels or very rarely dropped by defeated enemies. This issue is coupled with the fact that you are locked out of a mission if you fail it without any lives left. Yeah, I guess you could say it makes sense in terms of story, but you could apply that logic to so many other games, just about all of which don't have these kinds of features! Thankfully, this bullshit can be avoided in the Legacy Collection with the Save Assist feature, which gives you checkpoints throughout the stages. You’re automatically sent back to the most recent one upon death without any lives lost. While such a feature might not be necessary for the other games in the collection, it’s absolutely essential for at least your first playthrough of this one. Once you have Save Assist enabled, you’re in for a fun action platformer. It has the same fun, fast-paced movement of the X series, pretty good music, and generally solid level design. The bosses are kinda hit or miss (The second phase of the final boss is an absolute miss), but I felt like the good outweighed the bad. Also, while the story is rather simple in this game, it provides a nice foundation for what’s to come and has some really cool moments (rot13 spoiler: V ernyyl yvxr Mreb erzrzorevat ubj zhpu orggre gur erny K jnf hcba qrsrngvat Pbcl K) Overall, despite its blatant issues, Mega Man Zero 1 is absolutely worth playing if you enjoy challenging action platformers.