Introduction

Spanning the Bridge [Classic to X to Zero]

Four Mega Man Zero games were developed by Inticreates and released for the Gameboy Advance, starting from the year 2002. In 2010, a collection of all four was brought to the Nintendo DS, featuring a few minor changes and some extra content, mostly in the form of artwork and little easter eggs. Looking for fodder for my then-new DS, I got them on a whim and fell in love pretty quickly. The gameplay is incredibly engaging to me, and the way they handle their (considerable) challenge just pushes all the right buttons. I'll try and give you a small idea of what I love so much about those games in this LP of the first, with possibly more to follow.

The Format

As the Zeroes are pretty story-driven games, with a great number of wordy dialogues and cutscenes, this is going to be a hybrid LP. All of the stages will of course be presented in video, but exploration and talking to NPCs is going to be in screenshots.

Every main stage of the game will be presented in two videos:

• Normal: An informative playthrough on the standard mode. I'll take my time, explain everything I think relevant, and won't worry about the rank the game gives me at all. In those videos, I'll get 100% of the collectibles, which mostly means Cyber Elves.
• Hard: A skill run of the stages in Hard Mode, which is a reward for having finished the game once. I'll detail changes later. The videos will still be commented, but with a focus on what you have to do to achieve a high rank. My goal is to get an S-Rank on every stage, though I won't go out of my way to get 100 points.
Actually, I did fail with that goal, the last three stages were too much for me. Luckily enough, Ragny stepped in and 100-pointed them! Big thanks and my imaginary hat off to you.

Pictures link to posts, meaning those giant walls of text oh my God why does he write so much. I'll provide a few more thoughts I couldn't cram into the videos regarding stages, boss strategies and music comments in them. Also, for screenshot updates, that'll be the update, of course.
Videos are hosted on baldurdash and YouTube for your viewing pleasure, and also directly linked. Some will be slightly different; whenever there's a long dialogue segment in the video itself, I'll cut it out and summarize it for baldurdash, but keep it in with an annotation-link to skip it in the YouTube version.















































As with pretty much every Mega Man game, the soundtrack of this series is something that was clearly important to the developers. Every one of them features an impressive track list, and most of them are very good. Many, many soundtrack CDs were released by Inticreates, featuring remixes, re-imaginings and even radio drama style scenes. You can find most of them on the channel linked below.

The soundtrack for this game was composed by Ippo Yamada, with the sole exception of Zero's theme which was taken from Mega Man X (composed by Setsuo Yamamoto). I think it the weakest of the four games by far, with many tunes just not up to what I'd expect from them; less action, more easy listening, for lack of a better word, and definitely not as memorable as what is to come. Still, it's nowhere near bad, of course.
Music uploads, as always, faithfully supplied by Bean.

Intro Mission

• Crash -Short Loop-
  
• The Ruins of Lab
  
• Captive Legend
  
• Cyberelf
  
• Theme of Zero (MMX Version)
  
  Resistance Base
  
• Intermission
  
  Disposal Center
  
• Resistance
  
• Guarder Room
  
• Crash
  
  Retrieve Data
  
• Deadzone
  
  Find Shuttle
  
• Scorching Desert
  
  Destroy Train
  
• Express UG
  
  Occupy Factory
  
• Hell Plant
  
  Protect Factory
  
• Infiltration
  
  Neo Arcadia Shrine
  
• Enemy Hall