Megaman ZX Advent

The newest Megaman on the Nintendo DS is a mediocre game at best.

I decided that it would be time to try some oldschool Megaman action about a month ago and we bought Ninja Gaiden DS and Megaman ZX Advent with a friend of mine. Turns out the Megaman series has changed a whole lot and not for the better. The difficulty still tries to be there though.

The first thing a player like me, who missed all the Megaman games since Megaman 3, notices is that things have gotten a lot more complex. It's no longer the simple jump and shoot affair. The Mario games have kept their simple appeal still after all these years even though they too have had some ingredients added to the cake. Some things have been kept the same like the levels being split into smaller areas with doors and sliding through those doorways when the camera pans to a new area. It looks silly now when you run up to a doorway that's on the X axis so-to-speak (the ones you press left and right on, not up) and your character remains in his or her running animation and if they're coming down from a jump they remain in the air.

You get to choose one of two characters to play with and generally all that really does is changes the graphics of who you're using. They have different stories but it's not that different. Still, a nice little addition but hardly one worth mentioning on the back of the box. The characters also talk during the important story scenes which is nice for a DS game, the problem is the voice overs suck. Everyone sounds like a childish little whiny kid. I wanted to kill Model A in real life, and I'm not one to complain about Jar Jar Binks. There is one extremely odd thing about speech though and that's the fact that it pauses every time 1 "speech bubble" of text is shown on screen. The game waits for you to press a button to continue. This would work fine if it was just written text but when there's speech as well it's odd when it pauses in the middle of a sentence to wait for you to press A. I would've just scrolled the text inside the speech bubble and finish at full stops, then let the player scroll up and down through the text if they wanted to check back on something. OR have the option to remove speech for that matter..

There's also way too much boring cut-scene crap in the beginning. This is something I feel strongly about, unless your game is the next GTAIV (and even in those cases possibly better not), it's good to let your player control the character within the first 2-3 minutes. And I don't mean moving to a door and then have another 5 minutes of cut-scenes. There is a very simple reason for this: the player doesn't have an emotional bond with the game yet. You can't start talking about love during the first few minutes when your player doesn't even care about your lead character. You have to let the player learn to love your game for what it is, and this is one of the things ZX does badly, it starts off with boring in-game 2D animations and long speeches. If GTAIV: San Andreas starts with Niko Bellic as the lead character, you can have a good 5 minutes of cut-scenes and people will still feel excited, but if there's Long John Silver as the new hero who's an Irish sailor just released from prison, I don't think people will want to sit through that 5 minutes as eagerly.

Fighting in ZX is another low point. It should be interesting and fun because that's basically what the whole game is about, but it's not fun. The problem is that when you start out you wonder why the stylus isn't used to aim or something, and why you can't shoot in other directions than forward. As the game progresses you get different forms that you can change into. The good thing is that changing into these forms pauses the game so you can do it in peace, the bad thing is your character says "A Trans!" and does a small animation only after you've scrolled through your menu of available character forms (and there are too many) and thus wasted too much time. The worst part is that all your basic character movement needs are spread over all these different forms and thus if you want to crouch you have to change to a certain form, if you want to shoot up change to another form, if you want to swim change to another form.. this is definitely NOT how you handle additional skills.

In addition to that, some of your different forms have silly abilities that are used in maybe 5 parts of the entire game briefly. Skills such as climbing up a vine. In later Super Mario or Ratchet and Clank games this was done very well by giving you abilities later on that you could use to get to areas you saw before but didn't know how to get past, like getting the bee suit to fly up to a high ledge. The difference in ZX is that there are way too many abilities of which 70% are totally useless and should be included in your basic Megaman form. The rest of the abilities aren't used very intuitively. Stuff like the queen bee form in which you can lift certain blocks is a good example of this. They need to narrow the abilities down to maybe 4-5 and have each of them play an important part in the game. There can be different weapons like in Megaman 2 (or Ratchet and Clank for that matter) of course but things that change the way you play the game drastically need to be thought out well. I understand the idea of ZX is to have the different forms but you can't force it, you have to have some real reason to have those forms, not just because "we wanted different forms".

Another thing that causes the abilities to be so boring is the level design. The levels look nice mostly with the clear and colourful graphics but their design isn't too exciting. They're missing so many things it's hard to list here. One level in a sort of city environment has a nice idea of protecting civilian drivers in a traffic jam from an enemy ship attacking from above, but the rest of the levels are quite boring and unimaginative. There are no real puzzles to speak of and the music, which was fantastic in Megaman 2, is complete shit apart from the Tower of Verdure theme which is fairly good. The levels have boring themes mostly and not enough interesting platform sequences or such.

The checkpoints and save points in the levels are terrible. You can run up to a checkpoint and open it with a form of currency (or get it open for free on the easier mode) and you don't get to save. The thing is, why the hell doesn't it save your game? I understand that it doesn't let you teleport back to your base because the idea is that teleports are one way only, but when it doesn't save it's almost useless. You don't want to run all the way back to save and in most cases you can't because some door gets locked behind you. The only reason I see for these is if you die you get resurrected at one (sometimes you get resurrected at a doorway and not the checkpoint so I don't get the logic in it, and when your lives end it's game over anyway and the checkpoint is lost because you have to start from your save location), and possibly so that you can go back to a certain part of a level to open up the secret areas or other areas unlockable later on with the abilities you've acquired. The game is so boring that you don't feel like going back anyway.

Speaking of difficulty, there are 2 choices in the beginning. Either beginner mode, which is too easy, or normal mode, which is ultra hard. The difficulty is totally messed up. Normal mode tries to stay true to the Megaman series' difficulty level but fakes it by not giving you enough lives and making checkpoints cost money to activate as well as when you die you go way back to where you last saved. The game even tells you to "save often!", how is that possible with the save points few and far between and behind locked doors? The bosses take a hell of a lot more beating on normal mode and you have to know what's coming in order to beat anything, it's improbable you'll beat anything on your first 5 tries, and with 3 lives you're back to the save point again. I beat the game on beginner mode because I got stuck on the first boss on normal. In the end you get to face all the bosses again in a classical Japanese "fuck you" moment as well as an end boss with more than 1 form to kill. The bosses themselves are fairly interesting fights but the save system and lack of a true "normal" difficulty mode make them either pushovers or demons sent from hell to annoy gamers the world over.

Then we get to the map itself that stays on the lower screen mostly throughout the game. There are 2 modes, either a weird blocky representation of the current area you're in, showing the exits in the area, or then a world map with levels inside strange circular blocks which is incredibly hard to understand as well as almost totally useless. Stick to the classic world map view with an island drawn from a bird's eye view or something next time please. This new crap isn't informative enough or fun. It gets worse, the map disappears when playing some character forms because they have their own little features. You can't even turn the map on yourself because there is no option for it. Character features include showing a close-up view of where you are currently with a little orb showing you items, it's cute and all but if you want to have a look at the map you have to change your form to something that allows it.

Finally, if all that doesn't get you bored enough there's the side missions. Who would really want to do all of them is beyond me but it's a good idea. Just not something suitable for this game exactly. You can get missions from people around the world which adds nice immersion, gives you more to do in the world as well as makes it feel more like an open world. You can move around pretty freely when you've open up an area but with the level design as it is, you don't really want to. You want to go forward and see if the game has anything interesting to throw at you but it doesn't. A good example of a dumb side mission is the digging aspect. You meet up a few people along your travels who are standing in front of a pile of rubble blocking a passage. If you pay them some of the game's currency they'll start working on opening up the path. You have to come back later and pay more so they'll continue working and so on until they reach a door or something. The problem is that the path just keeps getting longer and longer and you keep running deeper with no real prize, until you've ended up paying a lot for this one tunnel and realize your prize is a new NPC with another quest with mediocre rewards. I would've made the tunnel shorter and added different coloured rubble at different layers near the entrance so you don't need to run a long way inside every time you come back. The system itself for determining when you can open more of the tunnel is quite classic, it checks how far you've progressed into the game and decides if the person digging the tunnel has gone past the current section of rubble. The thing is, once again, if you go in at a later time, you can run out and back in again to get the digger to progress his digging operation because you've already progressed through the required parts of the game. Maybe consider using the DS's time feature of the game's played time.

I'll be waiting for Megaman 9 for the Wii's Wiiware service. That's one brilliant idea, make an oldschool Megaman 2 looking game and release it on a download service. I'm waiting for Megaman 9 more than most other games coming out with higher production costs. Megaman ZX Advent isn't designed well with it's boring levels, crappy voice acting, spreading of core 2d platformer abilities that have been default since Contra over too many character forms and simply trying to make things more complex than they need to be.