The Legacy of Red

Despite being a connoisseur of all things Megaman, I am ashamed to admit that I had never played any of the Megaman Zero games. It was mostly due to the fact that I never owned a Gameboy Advance, and even though I later owned a DS that could play GBA games, I didn’t take the time to delve into the backlog of the console.

So, when I learned that Capcom would give the same Legacy collection treatment to a batch of Megaman games I’ve never played before, I thought this would be as good of a chance as any to see what I’ve been missing out on all time.

The presentation on the menu is clean and to the point.

MSRP: $29.99
Platforms: PS4, Switch, X1, PC
Played: 10~ hours

Starting with the very first title in the series, I was caught off guard due to the harsh difficulty and lack of quality of life features like the ability to fully customize my buttons. While I could wrap my head around jumping with the Circle button, 20 years of muscle memory of playing Megaman games made this more obnoxious than I would have liked.

It was also more challenging than any Megaman game that I’ve played in recent years, as I often found myself dying and having to start a stage over after using up all of my lives. The collection included a casual mode which was a bit too extreme in the other direction, making the game feel trivial, so I settled with enabling additional save points, which did wonders in saving time in backtracking. While the save points are a nice touch, the lack of save states for such retro games is an odd omission.

The standard suite of visual options included aspect ratio and a filter that didn’t look particularly great, making everything look blurry and over saturated with colors. I ended up sticking with the original pixel art and despite the pixels looking jagged enough to cut my irises to shreds, my eyes adjusted after a little while and I was able to appreciate the visual design of the game.

Some may prefer this to the original pixelated format but I do not.

Megaman Zero 2-4 fare much better, with fully mappable buttons, and felt much more polished and balanced. If it wasn’t for the fact that the world building and events that take place in MMZ 1 wasn’t so important, I would recommend newcomers start with MMZ 2. The story arc that follows in Megaman Zero takes place a century after the events of Megaman X, and given that I adore most of the X games, I found the story to be quite interesting.

Megaman ZX and ZX Advent were released for the DS instead of the GBA, and it shows in the visual improvements as well as its various new gameplay additions, but I personally found them to be less interesting due to the overly large overworld maps, which led to more downtime between action packed missions. I’ve always appreciated the simplicity of choosing a stage and going directly into the thick of things with a clear objective in mind. Still, they’re not bad games by any means, and the flexibility of changing forms on the fly made for some fun moments.

The DS’s second screen can be represented in different ways and is fully functional.

As for the additional content, there are the usual suspects for Legacy collections such as artworks from each game and a music player, but there is also a brand new mode called “Z Chaser” which is a time attack mode with leaderboards that had a playlist of stages for me to get through as quickly as possible with varying levels of difficulty. It’s a nice addition, but I didn’t find myself compelled to go for better times after completing some of them once. The collection also includes versions of the game from other regions like Japan, which actually shows blood during gameplay/cutscenes, but I would’ve liked it if they went the extra mile and allowed for language selection so I could play the Japanese version with English subtitles. There are also game link special bosses for ZX, which were a neat inclusion as it adds replay value.

Mega Man Zero/ZX Legacy Collection provides a compelling package for those who never had the opportunity to check out a piece of lesser known Megaman history.

Fun Tidbit – Megaman Zero 2 is my favorite of the bunch and I can see myself playing it again in the future.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.

Good
  • Six games in one, including versions from other countries
  • Challenging and fun
  • Extra content
Bad
  • Filters don’t look too great
  • Megaman Zero 1 has aged poorly
8
Great
Written by
Jae has been a gamer ever since he got a Nintendo when he was just a child. He has a passion for games and enjoys writing. While he worries about the direction gaming as a medium might be headed, he's too busy playing games to do anything about it.