First Game Syndrome - Mega Man Zero Review and Story Breakdown 

I thought this video was presented really well, the small edits here and there to add some memes and whatnot definitely added a lot. I already love your analysis videos as is, so the comedy sprinkled in-between the serious lore discussion and discussion about actual flaws and everything is refreshing. I was surprised it came out to be a whole hour long, but more content is always good! See you on the streams, John! Thanks for your hard work!

A lot of the plot isn’t introduced until the sequels.

I've noticed something that would help your gameplay. You might want to go into the controls settings and change the weapons controls so that you can charge your sub weapon by ONLY holding the R button meaning that you can charge both the saber and buster at the same time and when you use either of them you will still have the other one charged which increases your dps a lot against normal enemies.

Really enjoyed it, I know the video is long and probably felt to you unwieldy but it’s not like you kept reiterating the same points / info over and over, you kept it moving and interesting, summing up everything important there is to know about Z1 I’d watch 3 more of these no question, subbed already so I see them when/if you decide to do so; if not I’ll be interested to see what’s next from the channel, MMZ or not

Everytime you say "this boss only has 2 moves, it's underwhelming" I chuckle because you weren't playing on A rank, which allows bosses to have one extra desperate attacks. Harpuia creates two tornadoes, Leviathan summons 2 ice dragons, and so on. With that said, for a second playthrough you did pretty well. Good video

I say give it a shot if you want to give the series a go. The save assist feature option in Zero 1 in particular is a god send in my book cause it means you don't have to worry about retry chips.

I have it bc I've been a HUGE fan of this series specifically since I played the first one on gba when I was 15 or 16. Then I bought each successive gba entry in the series as they were released. When ZX/Advent released I wa sover the moon and loved those games as well. Then my brother got me the zero legacy collection with all the zero games on one card. It's well worth putting time into its an incredible piece of gaming history.

Do you know that Ciel was voiced by Lacus Clyne's voice actor, Rie Tanaka, who is on youtube and streams a lot. ru-vid.com%E7%94%B0%E4%B8%AD%E7%90%86%E6%81%B5%E3%81%AE%E5%A7%90%E3%81%95%E3%82%93TV

bro hasn't played the peak of the franchise damn

Well, I take it as the Guardians are very much bored. They are watchdogs over the single remaining hint of utopian civilization without any excitement or something to really drive them in their mundane existence. They see Zero as the rival they all want to beat, as the Resistance are just cannon fodder for their mechaniloids otherwise.

Which games mention his desire for battle? It's been a bit since I've played them, so the details are a bit fuzzy.

It's been my headcannon that the original reason why X was asleep for 30 years was to prevent this. Wily didn't have Zero sleep for 30 years and he went bloodthirsty. Ciel probably didn't Copy X sleep for 30 years and just like how Zero was made from X's schematics it would make sense.

@@KuchiriDr. Light understood something that almost NO ONE else in the entire series caught onto: sentience takes years to properly grow and develop for any intelligent being, and is the true key for ensuring that robots and humans would live together as equals. Handing an individual significant power (in any form, such as knowledge, money, or physical) before they’re mature enough to handle the responsibility of such power will often make the individual more violent and more likely to resort to force to solve problems. Sentience is pain. Life is suffering. When X woke up, he had the emotional intelligence of a moral, empathic human adult thanks to Dr. Light’s 30 year test sequence, and thus normally hesitated on using force despite being able to otherwise overpower all of his enemies easily. Human children are physically weak and take 25 years of growing to fully develop their brains, but their lack of significant intrinsic power by default teaches them to solve problems without resorting to violence. Conversely, Reploids are often handed knowledge, industrial power, and sometimes weapons the day they’re born to fulfill a certain job. Their purpose in life is pre-defined by their hardware and uploaded knowledge but they’re supposed to have free will to choose their path in life. This means a lot of them likely suffer from acute existential crises. Is it any surprise that many of them will then become more susceptible to the Maverick Virus compared to someone like X? It’s like handing a troubled teenager a gun. Violence will happen. This is the true secret to X’s immunity to the Virus: his well-developed sentience that took decades to nurture. No one else across all of Classic, X, Zero, and ZX understood this. This is why the wars just kept persisting across centuries. The original Megaman and Roll started out as children. After Protoman ran away, who was Dr. Light’s first experiment with robotic free will (and definitely did not start out with the sentience of a young child), Dr. Light then always saw his creations as his children and raised them like humans. This includes X, who Dr. Light gave a morality training spanning decades despite knowing that it would mean he’d never live to see X awaken. Everyone else just saw intelligent robot companions. Dr. Cain literally created a reploid based on X and activated it immediately, too fascinated by its human intelligence to appreciate the full scope of Dr. Light’s warning. Reading between the lines with Dr. Wily, you get the idea that he also did indeed understand all this, and that’s why he was able to convince so many robot masters to follow him with just words alone, and why he was able to create something as potent as the Maverick Virus.

​@@ziqi92something i hate about the X games is that they focus so much on the VIRUS, as if the only reason any of the people you fight are bad is because they "turned" evil because of an infection. sigma even mentions this in MHX/Day of Sigma; Vile is necessary because he doesn't need to be infected. sometimes the reploids can become "maverick" of their own will; they can simply choose to rebel. the series is obsessed with free will, but then blames every instance of wrongdoing on a virus, so it wasn't REALLY their fault they were evil, they had a mind-altering virus! so there's no free will at all.

Dude, it's even better in the full context of the scene. Copy X is trying to flex, using what he foolishly believes is the full extent of the Legendary X's power and thus is trying to take pride in his first *REAL* fight ever and Zero's only reaction is basically asking "Where's the real final boss?" It isn't even *just* an insult directed at Copy X, Zero is just so damn unimpressed with Copy X's abilities that for the slightest of split seconds he doubted X's abilities. *Copy X sucks so much he almost made a convincing argument to Zero that X was as much of a weakling as well.*

@@heartnet40 And while Copy X goes full giant angel of death, Zero just battles him while deep in thought trying to figure out how strong X is then saying X was not as simple as Copy X is

I remember zero says after the fight that his body remember that the real X was stronger than that

@@wanolox9975 Then again the drama CD's and the Game dialogues are a bit different, and it's hard to put both of them together especially with the rough translation and pacing of these dialogues in-game. But yes. I do wish the Zero series had a Remake but meh, Capcom wants money, and they will milk anything until they kill the series, I'm actually surprised that they didn't kill Resident Evil... YET.

Flashback to X2 where X bodied Zero so hard that it turned Zero from being evil back to good again. Even if this was non canon it still shows how powerful X is.

No clue why they didn't scrap it in Zero 2 honestly

@@symphomaniac Considering the games came out on a yearly basis, I think they just didn't get the player feedback data they needed to see the problem until after 2 shipped or it was too late to change it.

honestly though my favorite growth for both the weapons and elves is in Zero 2. It takes way less time to level weapons up and Elves take like 1/4th of Crystals they needed in 1

That's why Z3 is my fav to 100%. Getting all the chips is streamlined, cyber elves required fewer crystals, no need to farm for fluff. Also, tonfa jump.

The problem is that the game is designed with full upgraded weapons in mind. If you don't grind and try to level up the weapons naturally, eventually you will hit a brick wall because some boss will be waaay too difficult without maxed weapons, so you'll be forced to grind. You can delay the grind, but you can't skip it.

Oh god please don't call GBA games retro I can feel myself aging into dust as I remember these games are 20 years old

@@UniGya ok grandpa take your meds

The fact that my childhood games were being called retro 2 years ago hurts my soul in a way I was not prepared for

Actually its from the audio dramas

It doesn’t force you to do the entire fight again, you lose the life but the battle is over

Also, you can move out of the explosion before it happens.

@@Xeno-The-Wanderer if you have checkpoints on in the collection it does force you to redo the fight

I was a little mad when it happened to me.

What I'm more mad about is the cancelled phantom armed phenomenon if he lived to be in 2

Especially since not only was he and X struggling to build a utopia during their time but Zero himself is a reformed Maverick. He broke from the intended role given to him by Wily. So to have this new X hold a zero tolerance policy towards potential mavericks must've been extremely insulting to him

@@elevate07 Well worded!! Zero could have had like a vendetta against X, until he finds out that the tyrant running neo arcadia is a copy, it could have been a deeper story i swear!

Not a bad plot point at all, memory fades over time in statis, you literally see his body in disrepair...The rest I agree with, but first game syndrome.

In megaman X6, zero goes to sleep in a debug mode because of the zero nightmare. His memory being incomplete (if this follows X6) makes sense because the elf awoke him early before debugging was finished. Also his casule being beat to shit didn't help either.

​@siege_sensei The time in which Zero is awakenined in this first game, it is his second time being sealed. He is awoken in the elf wars to fight with X, then decideds to seal himself away, again. That is what the drama track is from.

Oof.... only did the double HP elf? Yikes, that'd explain a lot. The animal elves can be handy, assuming you pay attention to what ability works for you. For example, Buffer stops fallback when being hit and costs only 400. There's also Shelter, the big main animal elf, who costs only 2000 in total and doubles your defense, basically acting like the the main nurse elf for 1000 less. Combined, they make things more manageable. I'm saying all this because I played the original GBA version, so I had to put up with all this... ...and I didn't know about the easy level up trick... seeing that kind of destroyed me on the inside when I realized how much easier it could have been.

Hey it's that guy who floods my feed with lewd stuff

@@brightonic Who?

@@FlameSoulis :/

Except that, if you want to unlock Ultimate Mode (where all weapons start maxed out and all permanent Elf effects are applied with no score penalty), you need to collect all the Elves, grind out nearly 27000 E Crystals (you can only carry up to 9999 at a time) to fully upgrade all the Elves, then beat the game without using any. After the credits, you save your beaten game, you load it, you beat the game again in new game+ (after murdering Aztec Falcon, you can just quit the "Find The Shuttle" and "Duel In The Desert" missions to skip to the end), but now you have to use all of the Elves (you get a -100 point penalty for this), and then you save after the credits again. Finally, you can hold R when starting a new game to play Ultimate Mode.

Cannot agree more. The Megaman Zero games are probably my favorite Megaman games. Zero 4 was definitely a step down after Zero 2 and 3. But it's still a great conclusion for the series and ended the games on a high note. It's definitely more enjoyable than Zero 1. As much as I appreciate the first game, it is not easy to come back to. Especially if playing on GBA.

and thats a depressing thought when you think about it, really wanted the megaman saga to live up to his potential but it doesnt

Seriously, Z2 and Z3 are great sequels to the first one

The zero series is my favorite game series, and mmz3 Is my favorite game of all time.

To be fair, the ranking only becomes a problem in 2 and 3 where they lock new moves behind the ranks

Yeah it's not a huge pain in Zero 1 but it's still dumb. Why give the player an upgrade system and then punish them for using it

@@train4292 tbf THERE IS 1 CYBERELF behind an S CLASS LOCK in zero 1

Well yeah. Cyber-Elves are kind of broken and trivialise a ton of the challenges the game throws at your way. Considering how heavy of an emphasis the Zero series places on your performance (it's basically a 2D character action series), it only makes sense the game would penalise you for taking the easy way out instead of mastering its levels and mechanics. Plus, EX Skills are mainly useful on higher levels of play anyway, once you know the enemy patterns well enough that you can start experimenting with all of your crazy combos. A new player can get through the game just fine with only charge spam so they wouldn't be missing out on too much. And even still, the games are nice enough to give you some leeway in spite of all of this with the Hacker Elves that can alter your rank for the next stage and Satellite Elves and Croire that allow you to make limited use of the elf upgrades without penalising your rating.

@@caellanmurphy4751 Wait, there is?

lol foreal. as a 5/6 year old kid in 2005/6, this game was fucking impossible for me to beat…. but i thought it was so cool and interesting

Shame the DS ports which the Zero/ZX Collection bases itself on further censor the Zero titles, more specifically on the dialogue.

You here, of all people. That was unnexpected, and so is that you're also a Megaman Nerd

@@SuxMenner Capcom gba games are known for their translation errors so that probably is not censorship but a better translation

@@catantcha99 Nope, if you compare Harpuia's transformation sequence in Zero 2 with it's DS version they replace the word Kill Me with I think it was finish me, something along those lines. Plus Zero 1 and 2 had some of their dialogue censored as shown in the review like replacing killing with retiring and the omission of the blood from the JP versions (Applies to Zero 1-4) but that's the most well known censor.

Someone else in this comment section mentioned that it could be a reference to Mega Man Zero's character designer also moonlighting as a hentai artist online.