YMMV / Mega Man Zero

Works with their own YMMV pages:

• Mega Man Zero
• Mega Man Zero 2
• Mega Man Zero 3
• Mega Man Zero 4

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• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The game more or less spells it out that Ciel has feelings for Zero short of actually confirming it. Fans have then speculated that the final line of the series might have actually been an Anguished Declaration of Love.
  • Whether Zero is aware of Ciel's feelings, doesn't feel the same way, or doesn't know how to approach them due to his nature as a Living Weapon. The fact he's both The Stoic and a Master of the Mixed Message doesn't help. Although if "Clover" is to be believed, he reciprocates.
  • Dr. Weil, even from the start, had pretty warped ideas of right and wrong, blaming the entire Reploid race for the crimes of the Mavericks and intending to make a way to control them all. It's entirely possible all the suffering and destruction around him at the time (going through the main Mega Man X series alone: the Maverick Wars, the fall of Dopple Town, the Sky Lagoon Disaster, Repliforce's rebellion, Sigma hijacking Final Weapon, a colony drop, the emergence of yet another strain of the Maverick Virus, the Red Alert rebellion, and a large-scale rebellion by the New Generation Reploids, all in his lifetime) left him severely unhinged.
  • Another point for Weil is that the Colony Drop he was planning might be the only means he believes he has left to finally die, and his Villain Ball during the final act of the game is actually goading Zero into finishing him off.
  • Is Copy X in Zero 3 helping Weil entirely of his own accord out of gratitude towards the one who revived him and a desire to prove himself, or is his obedience purely due to having been tampered with by Weil when he was resurrected? Early in the game, he remembers his initial defeat from Z1 and expresses his desire to make a mark over Zero as the "hero", lending credence to the first interpretation, though the stutter in his voice and the bomb revealed to be inside him when he attempts to access his One-Winged Angel form makes it clear that he was most certainly altered in some way from how he was originally. It could also easily be both, with Weil altering his personality subtly to ensure he was always receptive to the doctor but otherwise allowing him free reign.
  • Another just as plausible interpretation for the above is that Copy X's programming was left intact...or at least as intact as could be. Depending on how one views Weil's expertise in DNA resurrection, Copy X MK-II isn't so much the "real deal" as he is a copy of a copy, meaning his data very well could have degraded, leading to him being even more unstable than the Copy X of the first game. And considering that Copy X was already a naive Psychopathic Manchild, it wouldn't be out of the question to say Weil deliberately chose to revive Copy X for this reason, knowing it'd make it even easier for him to play the Evil Chancellor to a Puppet King (with the booby trap simply being extra insurance).
• Broken Base: Whether the original plan to have X himself be the villain of the first game rather than Copy X would have been a good idea or not. Some fans think it's a good thing it didn't happen and that it would have derailed his character, not to mention it would prevent the entire ZX series from being a thing. On the other hand, a lot of people feel that it was an instance of wasted potential and would have been much more interesting and emotionally resonant than what actually happened (especially considering that foreshadowing for it exists in the X games themselves, with one example even coming in a game released after Z1).
• Catharsis Factor: You get to cut enemies and bosses in half. Why stop at just shooting them dead?
• Common Knowledge: Zero's drastically different design (and by extension, everyone's designs in the series) is not supposed to be a literal, canonical redesign of his armor from the X series. Instead, it's merely a different depiction of the same character. The team wasn't satisfied with how Zero's usual design looked in Toru Nakayama's Zero art style, so they let him completely revamp it.
• Complete Monster: Dr. Weil, Dr. Vile in Japan, only appears in a few games, yet is notable for being one of the evilest characters in the entire franchise. Following the peaceful resolution of the Maverick Wars by the sapient super program, the Mother Elf, Weil decided that Reploids needed to pay for their crimes. Weil corrupted the Mother Elf and her children, triggering the Elf Wars, which resulted in the deaths of 90% of all Reploids and 60% of all humanity. Defeated, exiled, and transferred into an immortal mechanical body for his crimes, for no execution would sufficiently pay for the suffering Weil had caused, Weil eventually returned 100 years later, consumed with a thirst for vengeance directed at all life for the perceived crimes against him. Weaseling his way into becoming the supreme ruler of Neo Arcadia, Weil turns it into a dystopian hellhole. When he breaks his citizens to the point where they're desperate enough to risk escaping into the wastelands to form their own colony, Weil decides to obliterate their new home with a Kill Sat called Ragnarok. When Ragnarok is disabled, Weil attempts to drop it upon the colony so he can kill everyone in the region. Even death doesn't erase Weil's blight, as his spirit lives on in Model W, manipulating both Serpent and Master Albert into subsequent campaigns of Armageddon.
• Continuity Lockout: The four games are so continuity-heavy that they only really make sense story-wise when played in order back-to-back. Both re-releases thankfully make this a lot easier.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: Some fans are taken aback by how Nintendo Hard it is, even by Mega Man standards, but this series is generally considered to have the best story in the franchise. Luckily, the Compilation Rereleases have the Casual Scenario mode which eliminates the difficulty altogether for those who just want to enjoy the story.
• Evil Is Cool: Copy X's armor would spectacularly break any Mega Man X game, essentially being X5's Falcon Armor with extra firepower and Charge Man's weapon thrown in for fun.
• Fanfic Fuel: The ending of the series. The fans don't seem to accept Zero's death, and as Dr. Weil cannot die, they "know" he's still out there. There's also the fact that there's around a century or two of Time Skip between this series and Mega Man ZX. The general agreement across different fan groups is that Zero perished in his Heroic Sacrifice but was successfully resurrected by Ciel in ZX as Model Z.
• Goddamned Bats: The spiked wheel enemies. They are inordinately tough (two saber slashes when one will do in most anything else that moves), coming rolling from offscreen towards you (or occasionally from behind) with no warning, do a ridiculous amount of damage (more than virtually any other normal enemy), move just fast enough that it would take split-second reflexes to dodge them, spawn again if you move mere pixels backward from where they appeared, and are sometimes dropped in by lifter robots for added cheapness.
• Good Bad Bugs: The Orbit Shield. Basically, there are two flavors. The first is where you throw the Shield Boomerang, then rush forward and start jumping over it so that you don't catch it and it goes in a circle indefinitely, and the other is the "automatic" version where you jump and throw it against something it'll bounce off of, allowing you to stand idle and let it do its thing (orbit around you, hence the name). While its utility is pretty limited, it makes for a fantastic method of leveling up the Shield Boomerang by making it so you don't have to charge it over and over, as you can do the automatic version in both Zero 1 and Zero 2. (In Z1 on the infinitely recovering tower enemies in the overworld version of the second stage, destroy one block of them first and bounce it off the top, and in Phoenix Magnion's stage in Z2, off the infinitely rising lava buckets.) The manual version can also be used to farm kills in Burble Hekelot's stage for the Defense Form without wasting precious time charging it over and over (on the pair of enemies that jump up from the bottom of the screen together and spawn infinitely, before entering the temple portion).
• Growing the Beard: While the various Mega Man sub-series have all been celebrated, Zero is often recognized as the one with the most developed themes and narrative out of them all. The first Zero was a pretty standard Mega Man story, but starting with Zero 2 the games became much more mature and original than any of their brethren. The fact that Zero is the only series in the Classic timeline to have a proper conclusion is indicative of this.
• Harsher in Hindsight: During the Alouette's Good Day audio drama, Rouge and Joan starting going at each other over the names they've chosen for the two baby elves. It's mostly meant to be funny, but during the discussion Joan points out that Rouge's simulation for Operation Righteous Strike would fall apart under even minimal scrutiny. Joan is proven tragically correct halfway into 2 where the entire operation gets every participant besides Elpizo killed, and reduces Elpizo to something much worse.
• He's Just Hiding:
  • Since even official materials go back and forth on whether or not Zero died on Ragnarok and he has a history of doing this, a common fan theory is that he survived somehow. Made even more confusing in Mega Man ZX since Zero does reappear, but as a Biometal. Because of this, it doesn't give either argument anything to work with.
  • Likewise, the fate of X and the Four Guardians as of the end of Zero 3. The former indicates he's just about out of time thanks to the destruction of his body in the previous game, complete with a final Take Up My Sword speech; Phantom is hanging out in Cyberspace after his Taking You with Me moment in Z1, having learned the truth about Zero and daring him to confront his destiny; and Word of God originally stated (via the Complete Works book) that the other three Guardians died shielding Zero from Omega's explosion...only for Inti Creates president Takuya Aizu to later revise that answer: their names were removed from Neo Arcadia's register in the aftermath of the game's events, meaning the public believes them to be deceased, but it's possible they're now fighting for humans somewhere outside of Neo Arcadia's surveillance. ^note This version of events actually matches U-CAPCOM's response to a fan letter in 2005 (translated here), wherein the dev team noted that the Guardians more or less ended up as Sequel Non-Entities but probably were off somewhere protecting mankind from Weil's oppressive regime. Furthermore, "Vile's Incident"^*a story featured with the Remastered Tracks Rockman Zero: Physis soundtrack that recaps the events of Z3 and Z4 and serves as a "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue two years after Z4 contains an image of X and the Four Guardians seemingly observing the fall of Ragnarok during the final moments of Z4. While confirmed to be little more than an Easter Egg on the part of series illustrator Toru Nakayama and thus difficult to fit into the timeline, this led to the widespread Fanon assumption that the Guardians became Cyber-elves just like X and live on in Cyberspace along with him.
• I Am Not Shazam: Despite the series' name, Zero is still just "Zero", yet "Mega Man Zero" has become a widely used term. This was made fun of in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and officially used in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate to differentiate this version from the X series design. (Meanwhile, Mega Man X DiVE refers to the Zero series version as "Zero (Z)", likely to avoid further spreading any misconceptions.)
• It Was His Sled: Dr. Weil and Copy X's very existences are common knowledge by now. Also, Zero's body being a copy of the original Zero along with Omega's true nature and Zero's Dying Moment of Awesome in the Grand Finale.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: Regarded as this by some, to the point that the DS Compilation Re-release includes an "Easy Scenario" with includes lots of 1-ups and all of the cyber-elves. You can still die even in this mode, given how Nintendo Hard it is.
• Love to Hate: Ask any of Weil's fans and they'll say how horrifically despicable he is (and how he never suffers Villain Decay unlike previous Big Bads) is what makes him such an effective villain. Omega gets this as well, because of his sheer coolness.
• Magnificent Bastard: Hidden Phantom is the leader of the Zan'ei Army and the most professional of the Four Guardians of Neo Arcadia. Before encountering Zero in front of an old factory, Phantom scatters bombs throughout the building in an attempt to further hinder the heroes. As a ninja, Phantom makes use of several different tricks and tools during the fights against him, showcasing his skills. His desire to help others while destroying Mavericks is strong enough for him to make a final attempt to kill Zero before he dies. After being encountered in Cyberspace over a year later, he decides to test Zero's resolve after having learned that Zero's body is a weaker version of Omega's. Upon defeat, Phantom reacts with dignity, urging Zero to show the world what he's truly capable of.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "WARE WA MESSIAH NARI!! HAHAHAHA!!" ^Translation"I am the Messiah!! Hahahaha!" ^{Explanation (Spoilers!)}Said by Omega when confronting Zero after the latter learns his body is a copy of the original, which is currently possessed by Omega. The delivery of the line (courtesy of Jun'ichi Suwabe) with the dramatic music is what sells it.
  • "Megan Man Zero." Once pre-orders for the Zero/ZX Legacy Collection went live, a few fans noticed that physical stores offering pre-orders (with placeholder cases on the shelves) all had the same hilarious typo on the box. People took the name and ran with it.
• Moe:
  • Ciel, with her looks of a child and her big eyes.
  • Alouette, who is ridiculously adorable, and with the chassis of a young child, even more helpless than Ciel.
• Padding: Zero 3 retroactively makes almost everything from 2 but establishing a new Resistance Base, the ending and Harpuia's seeds of a Heel Feel Turn feel like a Filler plot. Knowing the larger background material does a lot to tie characters like Elpizo into the grander scheme of things, but just going off of the games themselves, it can almost come off as a waste of time were it not for Inti Creates using it as a stepping stone in learning how to refine their game design by the time of 3.
• Polished Port: The Zero series has the fortune of receiving two great Collections:
  • The Zero Collection includes an Easy Scenario for players who want to dip their toes into the series' infamous difficulty, improves the music quality to be on par with the DS hardware, allows customization of the controls, and features artworks of characters in the lower screen at appropriate moments (for example: Harpuia's artwork appears when you fight him). The Japan-exclusive E-Reader function is also included as unlockables.
  • The Zero/ZX Legacy Collection has almost all the same features as the aforementioned Zero Collection. The lower screen artwork has been reworked into a dedicated Gallery menu. A new Save Assist system is introduced, removing the tedium of losing lives. The Legacy Collection also features original music and remixes of the most iconic tracks of the series (with the PC version allowing you to play the game with the Remastered and Mythos arrangements, thanks to it gaining a small modding scene), as well as a speedrun mini-game in the form of Z-Chaser. Finally, you can switch between the Japanese and Western versions of the games as you like.
• Robo Ship:
  • Ciel with Zero. Thanks to the large amounts of Ship Tease between them, many fans warmed up to the pairing better than the original (and doomed) Zero/Iris.
  • Neige with Craft and Andrew with his wife, some of the most blatant examples in the entire series franchise. And unlike the above, both cases are definitively canon, with the former driving a lot of the fourth game's plot.
  • Some fans ship Zero with Fairy Leviathan. Leviathan's overall rather playful and (later on) obsessive attitude makes it very easy to interpret it as her having a crush on Zero. Dating Catwoman probably helps in this case.
  • As with the last series, people ship Zero with X a lot.
• Saved by the Fans: X. Not from death per se, but from being an Ax-Crazy dictator. Similar to what happened to Axel, this resulted in his inaction with regards to the Guardians' attempts to kill Zero. The sequels give him other things to worry about and the issue really doesn't come up again. Ultimately zig-zagged in that X does officially retire to Cyberspace at the end of the third game due to his physical form being destroyed by Elpizo in Z2 and his cyber-elf form steadily running out of energy, which effectively serves the same purpose as if X had suffered a Plotline Death, but he's given a few moments to shine in his last on-screen appearance and goes out on his own terms.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Some fans aren't too fond of Zero's new human-like design, or at the very least feel that Omega's final form should have resembled Zero's X appearance instead of simply being a Palette Swap of his redesign.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Even if Capcom and Inti Creates abandoned the original plan where X was the villain of the first game in favor of having Copy X, they still could have made it so that some of the foreshadowing from the X series didn't go to waste. After X4 had Zero be visibly uncomfortable when X wanted him to promise to kill him should he become a Maverick, Zero finds out that the X he will fight is a copy right before the final stage and thus has no qualms about fighting Copy X because he knows that he is not really his former best friend, and Copy X freely admits that he is a copy instead of following through with the masquerade that he is the same Reploid and using it to try to break Zero. Even then, much of Zero and Copy X's dialogue concerns how Zero feels that Copy X doesn't live up to the original without exploring how the latter is a Shadow Archetype representing a path the real X could have taken (and was going to, which dialogue from the real X confirms was something he was very close to doing after fighting for so long and the reason for why he chooses to leave the rest up to Zero). Partially justified by Zero's status as an Amnesiac Hero; although his experiences seem to bring some old memories back to the surface (notably the aforementioned exchange where Zero notes Copy X is inferior to the real deal), it's never confirmed how much of his past life her remembers so it's entirely possible Zero didn't recall that particular moment.
  • Harpuia, Fefnir, and Leviathan all died when Omega's body exploded at the end of Zero 3, but unless the player paid attention to Word of God (which was only made available through an artbook and has since been called into question by later Word of God; see He's Just Hiding above), they'd assume they simply disappeared with no explanation. All things considered, some believed they should have had a better sendoff, either in Zero 3 or Zero 4.
• Viewer Gender Confusion:
  • Harpuia's voice is provided by Megumi Ogata, a woman. Plus his name is derived from the legend of the Harpy, half bird, half-women. It does not help that he's wearing the exact same clothes as Leviathan (the lone female Guardian) with a Palette Swap (what appears to be a midriff-baring shirt and panties).
  • Cubit Foxtar is based on a kitsune, which can change genders, hence his androgynous appearance.
  • Anubis Necromancess (boss in Zero 1 and 3) is confirmed to be male. His name in Japan is Anubistep Necromances, with one "s".
  • Polar Kamrous, despite the matching build and deep voice, is female. Weirdly enough, the Complete Works book refers to Kamrous as male.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: The entire series qualifies, for the reasons listed on the Nightmare Fuel page for the entire franchise. There's also the fact that the Neo Arcadian government basically performs systemic genocide on Reploids to "solve" an energy crisis. And the game was rated E in its original release (it was bumped up to T with the release of Zero/ZX Legacy Collection, most likely due to inclusion of the Japanese versions, which had bisected enemies bleed out red oil).
• The Woobie:
  • Ciel. On two separate occasions, she thought that she was doing the right thing, but it only ended up giving rise to worse problems. The first one would be for creating Copy X, who went insane and started a genocide against the Reploids. The Resistance is partly her effort to make amends for what she's done. The second time was successfully researching an energy source that she believes would put an end to the war, only for it to be a catalyst to a new conflict. Mind you, this is a person who longs for peace as much as X, and she is very young at the series' start, and also human. And then there's the fact that, at series' end, she is waiting faithfully for Zero to come back, when it was completely impossible.
  • Alouette is implied to have gone through a Break the Cutie livelihood, and might have suffered even worse, if Ciel hadn't found her.
  • X. The only cure for the virus that they had worked tirelessly in looking for for well over a century is weaponized into a living Maverick-maker. His best friend's body is stolen and converted into a mindless weapon that wipes out most of the planet's already perilous population, with Zero going into an intended eternal stasis, leaving X with basically no shoulder to lean on for moral support. He's forced to manage the virtual entirety of the world's remaining population and all Maverick activity by himself and effectively kill his body in order to seal the aforementioned corrupted cure which not only leaves him off, but leads to his soul then being split into fifths. X is forced to watch as the copy made to take his place ruins the haven that he had so desperately fought to create and preserve and his "offspring" are then tricked into being assassins and strongarms for the sociopathic copy. Finally, X is murdered in his comatose state by a villain who just wanted the Dark Elf in a screwed-up and misguided attempt to save all Reploids from further retirement and destruction. X did not even get a chance to fight back against his assassin. He finally spends the rest of the following game slowly, slowly dying and using every precious ounce of power for the sake of others.
  • Almost all the tragedies in the X series are inflicted on Zero, and even more are piled on here. Like the fact that he wakes up seeing the current state of the world, and freshly awoken, he has to continue fighting, again, and he was able to finally return the world to a peaceful state, which was what he and X have been fighting for a long time, only for him not to see it come to fruition, seeing as he's dead...
  • After looking at Harpuia's motives, personality and the situation he's in, it's pretty easy to feel sorry for him. First introduced as a loyal right-hand man within the Neo Arcadian power structure, he quickly establishes himself as a Noble Top Enforcer and the closest to the original X in temperament and ideals. Come Z2, he's now in command of a moderately more benign Neo Arcadia, willing to spare enemies like Zero and Elpizo, and expressing doubts about the administration he's dutifully served since birth...just in time for Dr. Weil to swoop in during the third game, reinstate an even more flawed incarnation of Copy X as a Puppet King, and pretty much wipe the slate clean—including destroying an entire city full of innocent lives—when all Harpuia truly desires is peaceful coexistence between human- and Reploidkind. At this point, Harpuia defects in the name of protecting civilians and ultimately dies so that Zero can live on to finish the job. All in all, a Tragic Hero who spends most of his screen time fighting for the wrong side.
• Woobie Species: Reploids, who are subjugated and oppressed by Copy X's forces. By the start of the first game, countless Reploids have been unjustly branded as Mavericks and killed to preserve power for humans.
• Woolseyism: Some of the boss names are changed overseas. In particular, Dr. Weil's name was originally Dr. Vile. There's already another guy who's named Vile (who is originally called VAVA), so the name change was to avoid confusion. If pronounced in German, it can still be read as "vile". There's also the fact that it's quite meaningful in its own right (being the Big Bad, Dr. Weil is the Dr. Wily of the Zero series).

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