YMMV / Mega Man Zero 4

• Breather Boss: Hell the Giant. He's more difficult than the intro bosses, but anyone with even a small degree of skill with Zero's mobility will run circles around him, especially considering he comes after Commander Craft.
• Broken Base: Should the series have ended with Zero 3 as originally intended? Or was Zero 4 a fitting finale that gave much-needed closure to Zero and Dr. Weil's stories?
• Catharsis Factor: FINALLY killing Dr. Weil after he escaped justice in the last game and continued his villainy throughout this one.
• Contested Sequel: The opinion on whether Zero 4 matches the quality of the previous two games varies. Some consider Zero Knuckle, the chip system and having only one Cyber-elf major innovations, while others don't think they quite match the part system and the Satellite-elves of Zero 3. However, almost everyone can agree that Zero 4 wraps up the overarching storyline of the saga in a very satisfying way.
• Fridge Brilliance: The final boss fight against Weil seems to spit in the face of everything Dr. Light stands for…unless you understand the nuances of the Laws of Robotics. See Genius Bonus below.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The description for Croire's Hacker level 5 ability states it makes enemies drop items more often, which really means they will always drop an item upon defeat. This means it's trivially easy to fill up all your Sub Tanks and farm E-Crystals to level up Croire further if you can find a suitable place for farming - such as the miniboss room in Fenri Lunaedge's stage, where destroying three out of the miniboss's four hatches causes the infinite enemy spawns to only come out and move in one direction from the remaining hatch and be destroyed all in one go by a charged Buster shot.
  • Two of the game's four Sub Tanks are obtained just by trading two S-Crystals to Hirondelle, with the S-Crystal's parts being easy to find if you know the recipe or look it up. Most stages have V. Fire and Ceratanium in them already, so at minimum you just need to complete two stages for the Faital and Mechamesons needed which trivializes the rest of the early game.
• Genius Bonus: The finale makes much more sense when you understand the Zeroth Law of Robotics. That law is in place precisely because of people like Weil.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • Pegasolta Eclair has a clever but annoying tendency to fly up to avoid your attack. He can only be attacked if he's attacking, which you'll have a hard time with since spends most of his time far from the ground.
  • Mino Magnus is annoying: He's weak to ice attacks, but he has Hitbox Dissonance due to his invulnerable shoulders. His magnetizing Grapple Move will cripple you and make you more vulnerable to his magnetic attacks, and his Detachment Combat attack needs quite the timing and fingerwork to avoid.
• It Was His Sled: Probably one of the most famous cases in the entire franchise of this, because anyone familiar with the series knows that Zero dies at the end.
• That One Attack:
  • Fenri Lunaedge shouldn't be that bad. Sure, if the weather is in his favor he has an icy floor that can make dodging his wheel jumps a little tricky, but he constantly leaves himself open to punishment from the buster. The fight might take a while because it just simply isn't safe to be next to him and combo him with the Z-Saber (he has an attack with very little wind-up where he just stabs you if you're too close), but it should be easy, right? No. Fenri has two attacks that are pure and utter hell to avoid:
    • The first, Tenrō Shikku, is described on the actual wiki as looking impossible to avoid, mostly because it absolutely does. Fenri leaps diagonally towards the wall away from him, letting out an energy slash in front of him, before dashing to the other wall unleashing two more slashes, before jumping to the opposite side from where he started while throwing out another energy slash. There is no way a player will ever figure out how to dodge the attack short of looking up a video of Fenri's fight online, because the 'solution' to it is so backwards. You have to dash towards him during the first attack, which looks like it's the absolute last thing you should be doing, dash back, then dash jump between Fenri and the last attack. Good luck figuring that out on your own. You won't.
    • The other is his EX Skill, White Fang. It's deceptively simple; he unleashes two Sword Beams, one from the ground, one from the ceiling. All you have to do to dodge it is climb the wall and then fall. Problem is, falling from the wall can be a little finicky to do given it's more than likely you'll hug it again as you go down, getting yourself caught by the second beam. Not only that, Fenri can spam it as many times as he wants - it's not unusual for him to use it three times, and there's no real tell for when he's going to do it again and when he's going to stop.
    • The worst part about all this is if you fight him at a rank where he'll decide to use White Fang; both Tenrō Shikku and White Fang have pretty quick wind-ups, meaning you need to begin dodging them almost as soon as you see the tell. The problem? The tells for both attacks are almost identical. The only difference is that Fenri will lift his head slightly for Tenrō Shikku. This sounds like it should make it easy to preempt the attack, but in practice the player will be so on edge about getting the actual dodge for each attack done correctly that it can be easy to choke and begin the wrong dodge for the attack Fenri uses. Mercifully, Fenri is incredibly fragile, so if you take out Sol Titanion first you might be able to whittle him down quickly enough to where he doesn't use these two attacks often, and Fenri won't actually enter a stunned animation from getting hit with fire if he's about to use Tenrō Shikku, so that makes the tell a little more obvious.
• That One Boss:
  • Heat Genblem. One of his strategies is to walk slowly towards you, then quickly defends with his shell if you attack. Keep attacking and he'll counter with an Elemental Punch. Another of his hard strategy has him floating next to one of the walls, then firing a continuous laser beam while spinning; you have to follow through or you'll get hit. He's rarely open to attacks, and when he is, you'll have a hard time dodging him to actually attack. To top it all off, thunder attacks (his weakness) are rather weak in this game, due to one of them relying on absorbing shots for its power and the other being a dashing stab, which is worthless against an opponent who's invincible from the neck down. ^Except...The key flaw in his strategy is that it's completely possible to sting him while he's doing his laser spin, as the open hatch on his body across from where he's firing is totally vulnerable. If you have the Junk set, you can even tear him apart before he can finish spinning in the first place.
  • Also Craft; he has a plethora of attacks that will limit your space. Especially, his bayonet attack deals quite some damage if you get hit (and it bypasses Mercy Invincibility, too), and his sniping laser would need a split-second timing to dash under (unless you have the Double Jump chip), and a thrown mine that will give you hell if you don't know you can smack it to detonate it before it splits. He also has an evasion move where he can go through you. In the second fight, his EX Skill is a Macross Missile Massacre that can cover the entire screen unless you can slice a few of the missiles. While it's not a miracle cure for the battle, it is helpful to know that he stands around long enough after his bayonet charge that you can triple slash him from behind, which is notably more powerful than a charged slash. It's a little safer to set your Elf to Hacker-2 so you can use the slightly faster upward slash, and get moving again sooner.
• That One Level: Crossing into That One Sidequest. The Artificial Sun stage is tame enough on its own, but the time requirement - three minutes and forty seconds - to get full points for a score run is almost comically tight given the sheer size of the stage, even knowing it backwards and forwards. Most levels besides the final one have pretty generous time constraints when going for S rank, but Artificial Sun will force you to rush constantly, which isn't helped by the detours you have to make to complete the side mission and the times you need to pause to cool off and avoid damage.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The Cyber Elf system is generally considered a downgrade compared to the one in Zero 3. Instead of collecting multiple elves which would be more understandable to why you'd be penalized for using Fusion elves, you get a single elf to use for the entirety of the game that never perishes but you still lose points anyway if you go past the level limit. Not only that but changed an innovative mechanic to something much more standard.
  • Elemental Attacks being exclusive to EX Skills. The first three games allowed you to use elements with any weapon and you only needed to charge it in order to use the element. Here you have to collect the skills first and do a certain move to use the elements making them harder to use in battle.

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