Retronauts - 743: Mega Man Zero 4

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

Nadia Oxford, Victor Hunter, Stuart Gipp, and David Oxford talk about a rare definitive ending for a video game saga with Mega Man Zero 4 for the Game Boy Advance.Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts 

This week on Retronauts, Zero and a Half Shell. Hello, and welcome to this metallic episode of Retronauts. I am your host, Nadia Oxford, and I'd like to talk to you all about the fourth and last entry in the Mega Man Zero series. With me today to do this really cool, metallic, robotic, et cetera, task are my guests, who should all be familiar if you've listened to at least one episode where I've just kind of scrounged up other Megamine experts. So let's go around the table. First, it's our own Stuart Gipp. Hi, Stuart. Thanks for joining me.

Oh, hello. Hello, it's Stuart Jip, actually. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. No, this is the thing. My name spells that and is also stupid. It makes no sense. So it's fine.

I'm the one who's in the wrong for having the name. Hello, yes, I'm Stuart Jip. I never cared about justice. And it's not for me to call myself a hero. That's for others to do if they choose. Thank you. That's a good reference. I approve of that.

Thank you. We have another long lost loan hunter called Victor Hunter, hey. I'm hungry. E-crystals. Give me more. No, absolutely not. Are you supposed to be the fat reploid or some other? I'm the cyber elf. I'm a little whiny baby. Feed me so I can grow up big and strong. God, there's a lot of things that eat e-crystals in that game. Everyone's just begging me for something to eat.

And finally, I think that's why there's a crisis. Yeah, well, there's my husband, David Oxford. Hi, David. Hello. Tell us more about this crisis. Um, yeah, it's basically the kind of backbone of the whole series, isn't it? It really is. Yeah. And to the point that like in Mega Men 02, they reference literally concentration camps that RepLaser put into. It's just like, that was a, those were two words I read in a Mega Man game. Anyway, we're talking about Mega Man 04 today, not Mega Men 02.

I don't even know if I've done a Pantheon 02. I feel like I must have talked about it somewhere. But yeah, thank you all so much for joining me. always thrilled to have you all on with me when we talk about a Mega Man thing. I think you did a general Mega Man Zero episode with Jeremy a few years ago, but I don't. There was one I was definitely on as well. They all blur together, all the Mega Man games and all of the series, all the same, smushed together. Oh, they're all the same. We all know that.

As I'm sure you know. Yeah, one thing you kind of grew up with when you grew up as a Mega Man fan is just everyone telling you, these games are all the same. and if you like them, you're stupid. I remember vividly it was game informer. What was the sassy one, David? Was that game informer? Game players.

Game players, yeah, saying Chris, Chris, what's his face, saying that like, Chris Slate, saying that I used to call myself a Mega Man fan, now I just feel like Capcom sucker. That was by Mega Man 7. That early, good Lord. It makes me think about basically every UK magazine and after like the PS1, just being like,

this has got 2D graphics. It's a new. Doing that exact voice for some reason. Yeah, the states were pretty similar in that regard. Oh, okay. Most of the magazines. It was an awful time to be alive. There really was.

Unlike 2026, which is off to a great start. Everything's Rosie. Everything's comic a roses. So happy I'm going to be in America. in a couple of days. Hey man, I'm risking it for the Protoman. I'll risk anything for the Protomen. God understand.

Threatening to annex Canada? Who cares? I got to see the Protoman. Anyway, speaking of Protoman that aren't Broteman. Mega Man 04 came out for the Game Boy Advance in 2005. And Wowie, Zawi, when I was doing the research for this, I had forgotten how late it came out. That was a real late-ass Game Boy Advance game. Like, that was one year after the DS release.

so I'm not mistaken. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, this game still, it's at the past the threshold where I still think of it as just having come out, which is really stupid, but unfortunately it is what it is. Yeah. Mega Man used to be the series that would always be one of the ones to turn out the lights, like on a console.

Right. And after the Super NES, there were like three more Mega Man games. Super NES, I guess the timing kind of worked out more or less. Well, Mega Man and Bates was a pretty, pretty late release. Yeah, those were like, I think, 95. Yeah. Legends 2,

like that came out like the day before the PlayStation 2. Oh, gee, we can't make more Mega Man Legends because Legends 2 didn't sell. I wonder why. I actually bought Legends 2 because it was in a, it was sitting in an EB Games. And you know the EB games, actually, David. It's one in Yorkdale, same one. And some guy came in from a store.

I was working as a janitor at this mall at this time. And there was a guy who worked at the store, I think it was the champs, which was a sports store. And I knew this guy because he used to drag the garbage from the store across the mall, which would leave a goddamn trail of coffee. And I'd follow it back to that store. And I'd say, your stupid coffee trail led me here, stop doing that. It's not me.

Well, anyway, he came into the EB games. I was there, and he said to his girlfriend, I'm going to buy this game after work. And I was already planning to buy Legends 2, but then it decided right there and there. Oh, you know what? You're going to buy it? Well, no, you're not.

going to buy it. Oh, don't dump out your coffee before you throw it out, asshole. Are you sure it was Legends 2? Yes. You bought Legends 2 out of spite. Yeah, basically. What do you mean what happened to?

I have Legends 2. We only have one copy. No, we don't. Listeners, my dear husband and I have been married for 25 years. We've combined our game collection sets. That was our dowry, I suppose. So I swear to God, we've got to have two. We'll discuss this later.

This is a marital issue. anyway. It's kind of the paradox of Mega Man is that it's so iterative so that by the end of a console generation, in context, people are tired of it. But outside of context, if you just take these games in a vacuum, there's these incredible games that a team has spent, you know, half a decade with the hardware, sometimes closer to a decade with the hardware. And invariably, they start getting really good at certain things.

So it's such a bummer that the later Mega Man's of any generation are always kind of hand-waved away as like, oh, yeah, I guess that one came out too. When in reality, they're usually pretty good. Yeah, I think the back half of the NES ones are probably the better games overall. I love them. In all honesty, I mean, I love Mega Man 2 and Mega Man 3. don't get me wrong. Sure.

Those have some pretty rough edges on them. Sure. That the latter ones kind of lack. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I was actually surprised when I played Mega Man 4, and this came out in 92, as I recall. Of course, the S&S was way out by then. But 4 looked so good for the NES that I was just, wow, this has got to be 16 bit as it is, which of course, it's not.

But Mega Man 5 also looked fantastic. But by then, magazines were saying, oh, it's another Mega Man game. And, you know, by then. I know how the game critic brain works now and you've moved on. You have to move on. You don't really have time to look back at the greats on the consoles that you kind of had to left behind, leave behind. I will say in fairness, most of the complaints I saw about the later NES games at the time were, but where is super Mega Man already?

Which, you know, fair. We'd already seen like Mario, Zelda, Contra, Castlevania by that point. You know, so it's like, okay, I get it. even in our recent pantheon of the blood god episode check out patreon dot com slash blood god pod where we were talking about megaman battle network and and like six people forget that six is just an incredibly good video game that's right yeah that's we're actually thinking about just going back and playing six at some point because two is great but six is that that chance they got to refine the formula and gave us a really good game for it.

And the same with, frankly, 04 is my favorite of the Zero Series. I think it's the most fun to play. I think, and this is something I want to cover as much as I can here, I think it is by far the most interesting Mega Man Game story-wise. I think it has like a lot of story content that explores a relationship between Reploids and humans. and that is just not a subject that gets explored very deeply in any any Mega Man game, even though it's supposed to be kind of at the forefront of this conflict, you know, humans versus robots.

We see the robots all the time, but don't really see humans that often unless you're getting squished. And not even then. Yeah. That's usually a fake out. That's one of the things that drove me most crazy when we finally got a Mega Man RPG. And I don't mean the Battle Network ones. I mean Mega Man X command mission. Right.

And they like literally This was the perfect opportunity to show the whole You know human side of things And no they went out of their way to get the humans out of there So that once again nothing but robots So yeah Yeah zero four was a bit of a pioneer there We have Dr. Kane who might be alive

We have Schrodinger's Kane going on Because no one really knows if he's alive or dead He's definitely dead by command mission He must have withered away He must be dust by then but I'm just thinking, well, they retconned it, so Kane might have gotten nuked, I don't know, but anyway, yeah. What is you all's experience with Mega Man 04 in particular?

I feel like maybe I reviewed it for someone. If I did not, I at the very least played it. As I said, I really enjoyed it. I don't have any special kind of memory or anything like that behind it. So what about you, Victor? I was this is the height of my Mega Man fandom. All right. Game Boy Advance era.

I was playing the battle networks. I was playing the zeros. I was also working at EB games at the time. So I'm pretty sure I picked this one up from the used pile with complete box and instructions for like $10 or whatever. Nice. Because, yeah, no, I played the crap out of all these games. I think three is the one that I got the best at because it demands a little more from you and is more interested in getting good at stages and perfecting your score and doing all that stuff.

Four is a little more lenient. It gives you a lot more room for error. And I don't find that it's rewards for getting good are as interesting. But I'm sure we'll talk about that later. But yeah, I've played these all a dozen times. How about you, Stuart? This is slightly a repeat because I would have mentioned this. in previous Mega Man Zero episodes.

But I didn't have a Game Boy Advance. But, Nortally, these games were coming out on a ROM site very, very early immediately. And they were very playable. I remember things like Marriott. They launched GBA games before they even launched over here were being played on Visual Boy Advance. Yeah, good.

So I played all of the Rockman Zero, then Mega Man Zero, in order. Like, I want Japanese, then English, which is quite difficult in some of them. The only ones, oddly enough, although they weren't the RPGs. So Mega Men 03 was huge for me. Like, I love that game. It's still one of my favorite Mega Man games. And it did actually feel very final, I thought, when you destroy the original body.

And it's like, well, this is where we're going now. Sorry for the spoilers, by the way. For those who don't know that. And then 04 would have been around, I swear I'm going somewhere with this, would have been around the same time as Sonic Advance 3-ish. And Sonic Advance 3 is a game that came out and was so weird. that I thought it was fake. And the Mega Man Zero 4,

because I didn't know how this worked, really. Mega Man Zero 4, a Rockman Zero 4 drops. And I remember playing it and getting these vibes of like, this is really weird. This is not like the other games in the series. This is kind of a lot brighter. And the art looks a bit different, because I'm pretty sure they changed sort of the series artists for this one,

or at least in part. And everything's just odd. Like the Zero Knuckle is odd. The bosses are odd as like a chicken, and there's a cockatrice. No, he's a cockatrist. Yes, I know that now, you see. But even like the fact that when you first meet them,

you see all of them standing there at once. Yeah, I love that. You know, just jump him now. You got this. Stomp him. For real. Lunar Edge and Minor and Magnus can probably do this themselves. Just like drop him.

But the whole thing has this vibe of just kind of like, it's the last day of school. everyone just bring in your fun ideas and we're just going to do all of them and it comes together I think in a really strange and odd game but it is when I've played lots and lots and lots of times especially because it's the only again sorry for the spoilers it's the only Mega Man series that really definitively has an actual conclusion which at the time I won't say that it hit me hard but it did hit me

it's like oh you know and I'm sitting there for years like, well, I'm sure that's not really the end. ZX comes along and you're like, oh, it was. Oh, that's a shame. Once I put the J-pop song in there, that's the end of that. But that's actually a very nice ending. We'll get to that, I'm sure. It is, but that's my experience with it is it's great, but it is kind of odd.

It's weird. It's a weird game, I think. David, do you have anything to say? I can't remember what our story was with Zero4 if I'm being on to The Beyond I might have reviewed it for someone. I you know strangely it's probably the one of the series I've played the least I don't think I've even actually finished it I think that owes a lot to you playing it so much but yeah like zero three like I played repeated like I mastered that game like I would be trash at it if I picked it up right now I'm gonna have to it's gonna be an interesting stream when we get there on Mega Man Mayhem but yeah at the time I mean I like S liked everything. Like, you know, I was just repeating it. I just could not stop with that game.

Zero four never quite grabbed me the same way, but it was still a pretty neat finale for the series, which wasn't even supposed to be the finale for the series. Yeah, like, it's kind of strange how, like, okay, X5 was supposed to be the end. Oh, no, it wasn't. 03 really did feel like the end. In fact, I was reading on either fandom or Wikipedia, how it speculated that they definitively killed off Zero's intercreates could just stop

doing Mega Men's games already to move on. I'm not sure that's speculation. I think they said it in an interview. Okay. The same way that after Zero-3, they wanted to do something set

in that one-year span between 01 and Zero-2. And Capcom's like, no, no, no, you, no, we want you to do something after Zero-3. And I think the speculation is that they, like the reason Zero-four is kind of weird is like they were kind of salvaging ideas from that, like not having the resistance base.

Oh, yeah, because they're riding a caravan in this game and following a caravan of humans who have fled near Arcadia. It is an interesting game story-wise. I'm glad that even though the game is kind of a bastard that shouldn't exist, that they gave it a decent story. The 1.5 ideas were it would get revisited pretty recently by Udon Comics or Udon Comics, on entertainment with the Mega Man Zero Timelines number one comic by Ian Flynn who wrote the Archie Mega Man series. So that's been a very popular point. Good to know.

Good to know. Yeah, that's out now, right? Yeah, that one's out. The ones that are not out are ZX and Legends, which come out this Wednesday. Which is by you. Legends, yeah. Plug, plug, plug. Wow.

Cool stuff. Anyway, this game. Oh, go ahead. I just wanted to say, Stuart brought up the, I believe, brought up the part where, like, you know, you actually can see all the bosses together, which I don't think that has ever been done before. I don't remember if the ZX games ever did it. I only remember one other time, like anything like that was done and that was Mega Man 11, like at the start where Wiley's conveniently kidnapping them all in one spot. But, yeah, that was such a, oh, they had such an easy win right there. And honestly, if they weren't spending so much time talking about it, Mino Magnus, his slow cadence, notwithstanding, if they hadn't spent so much time squabbling about it and Kraft being like, no, no, we don't have time to do that.

They could have killed them already. Yeah, craft alone is not exactly a pushover. It's interesting that I do totally understand where you're coming from, Stuart, that it's, it's, it's. feels like a bit of a weird one. But replaying it is also kind of like it's a bit of a regression to the Mega Man mean as well. Like when I think of, I always forget how weird zero one is.

You know, it's got these connected zones and it's got this mission structure and it's got these, all these things where you return to areas and, and this big like sprawling hub base thing. And it is a totally, like, that is a weird experimental Mega Man. I feel like as the series goes on, there are a lot of elements that sort of regress back to standard Mega Man Fair. You know, like this is, I think even three, are you able to pick all, between all eight judges from the beginning? Or is it a four and four?

No, it's like four, three, four, isn't it? Yeah, there's a weird structure to it. Totally. They bring back some of the bosses, like around the middle or like in different points, but that you've got the like, I think, first four and then the second four. Yeah. So this like zero four is straight up the only one that just has a traditional structure of here's eight bosses, pick which one. But yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I haven't thought. I forgot about that. This one actually does let you do any of them rather than staggering them like that. That is kind of weird. I guess I'm thinking among the lines of like, no hunter base, that's gone.

I mean, they were different in each game, but that's gone. All of the rest of the sporting cast, apart from like two guys gone. We love Herondel, don't we? Good old Harondel.

Andrew's not here. Andrew's not here, man. No stories from Andrew about his human life, or his life with humans. I like Andrew a lot. I think he's really interesting character. Did two not let you pick all, eight?

No, I think it was four by four, wasn't it? Yeah, two, I think two is like, yeah, you do, isn't there only like six in that and then arrest to all the guardians or something? They're all weird. All these games are strange. The count is weird. Yeah.

No one can count to eight in this series, except for when we've got to four. So, zero four was released in 2005. This was actually supposed to be a 20th anniversary episode, but it got kicked down the line. So a happy 21st anniversary to make. Command 04. We love you. This is another game by Intercreates, of course. It's considerably less difficult than its predecessors, thanks to a weather system that lets you alter level effects.

There's just a straight-up easy mode, too, isn't there? In the original release, there is. I think it's gone in Legacy Collection, though. I think it's still there, but it's effectively, like, kind of merged with the easy mode they made for the other three games. Yeah. Rookie mode, I believe it's called. Yeah, and the DS1 had easy scenario where you play through all four games in a row. Yeah.

And then the new one has rookie hunter mode. Yeah, I think it's called that. Yeah, that sounds about right. Directors, first we have Riotta Ito. His Moby games is empty after Gunwold. Where did he go? Did you write that, Victor, or was that Stewart? Oh, I did write that, yeah.

He's on IMDB for having worked on Azio Stryker Gunwolt 3, but it might be a different person. It's probably not, though, like, probably him weighted sort of you know the probability is it's probably the same way well one of the other rioda idos that intercreates yeah yeah someday i'm gonna just like get all the deeps every drop of tea about the split between capcom and inti like is it is it juicy is there a story there or is it just kind of that's what i'm trying to figure out i feel like i feel like muddy number nine really sour things badly between them

Well, they were already split off and doing their own thing by the time Mighty Number Nine rolled around. Yeah. But they were still doing things. I feel like they were still doing things with Capcom until then. And then just all of a sudden, they just don't anymore. Well, here's what I understand the situation to be is Intercreates was founded by a bunch of former Capcom employees who worked on, I believe, the Mega Man X series.

Right. And of course, like, you know, I think if I'm not mistaken in Japan, something like, like, you know, leaving your company is kind of seen as a big no-no. Yeah. But I guess Inafune maintained ties with them and put them on the job of making Mega Man Zero and a few other odds and ends. Like they also did Battleship Challenge for. Oh, right.

Yeah. And then it's when Inafune up and left the company, it's like Capcom's probably like, you know, whoop, screw you guys. We don't have to do with you anymore. Oh, good. Yeah. I imagine over time as people leave, they just have fewer ties. with Capcom. Capcom's less interested in doing

2D side-scrolling action platformers anyway. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Except for Strider, Megamette 11, Ghosts and Goblins' resurrection. Sure. Another director, Yoshinari Kawano, of the Dead Rising series director

and the, I guess, the director for Resident Evil 4 remake? The separate ways, the DLC, I believe he was there. director of. Well, that's fantastic. Well, there's some context for what these people do now. No, absolutely. I'm just trying to, I'm thinking, like,

how do I link Dead Rising and Mega Man Zero in my head? It's a little difficult. I mean, there happened. Inafune did make Dead Rising, and there were plenty of Mega Man cameos throughout the series. Yeah. You could even actually be in a Zero Mech in the fourth one, I think. Sweet.

Or was it the fifth? Yeah. Whatever the Xbox One. one was. Frank's big package. Say its name. Oh, damn it. Oh, cool. Hey, that's Vancouver's claim to fame is making those dead rising games. Oh, was that a Vancouver joint? Yeah, yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, I think they made all the once after two or three or something. Oh, that's right. Yeah. I think the studio got shut down,

didn't it? It did. Yeah. Yep. Because they called it Frank's big package. Yeah, we want to make a new Dead Rising, and we want to name it after his dork. Is that okay with you? Like, what? Sorry, we weren't listening. Oh, it's out. What is with the Dead Rising naming? Why is the remaster called Derder?

Dürder. It's the Deluxe Remaster. They had a regular remaster, and then they went, hey, deluxe remaster. Dead Rising finally got it, stopped at. Dr. Doctor, yeah, okay. Dr. Good, Ryan. Dr. Dead Rising. My foot hurts.

Help. Let's move on and talk about the artists for the games. Victor, you love yourself, something to create art. Why don't you talk a little bit about the artists for 0-04? Boy, okay. So like Stuart was saying, there is a shift in who does a lot of the main illustrations as of 0-4. Now, Toru Nakayama is sort of known as the guy who established the Zero-Series style. It's chunky, it's geometric, but still smooth.

And I've talked about this regarding bachtai, but I think there is no other series, I think, that has such a, an art style that is so bespoke to the Game Boy Advance that translates so well into. Oh yeah, completely agree. Yeah, yeah. I think these games are absolutely gorgeous, and Nakayama's style is to blame for that. I don't know if this is the first time that Capcom hired a porn artist to be their main illustrator. There it is. I can say no. But, yeah, great.

Certainly not the last time into this. Yeah, it certainly wouldn't be the last. Yeah, I think Nakayama's style is huge. for this series and is just so perfect for the Game Boy Advance. Those hand-drawn backgrounds, I don't have the background. There were a couple background artists. Nakayama also did a lot of the background art, but there was a couple others as well. But transitioning into 04 and the, I keep wanting to call them Mavericks.

No, they're fighting Mavericks. What are they called? I know. I call them Mavericks because, come on, they're Mavericks. I know. It's brutal. They're the Mavericks. Yes, we are the Mavericks. Because Maverick is just a political designation to determine who you as a people should. They started exploring that in Megaband X4 and just dropped it.

It's not caring. It's purely a tool for fascism. Yeah. But Hirokatsu Maeda, who did also work on the. previous games does the main illustrations for 04. So the Einherjar have really bold colors and a more high contrast color palette than a lot of the previous games. I know we talked about Mino Magnus and he's just got these like the bright yellows and

these bright purples. It's a really different look for. from the previous games. It does kind of set it apart. And like you say, Stu, also kind of makes it feel like a ROM hack, like a fan. Like when you see those Fire Emblem ROM hacks or the Pokemon ROM hacks where people make their own characters and you're like, this, yeah, I get it. You're going to go in the style and it looks a little weird.

I'm probably going to get this wrong because I will mention the character, but I always call them nage because of the word beige. Okay. I don't know if it's meant to be like. It's nage. Nage. No. I'm going to call them Nye.

And Nej, right. Because when you first meet her in the game and you see her sprite, it's just more defined, it has more of an outline and darker than Seal or Zero standing. I'm always going to call them what I called them when I'm a Seel Corp. I'm sorry. I'm never going to get it right. That's why it's still right. The thing is, I think Capcom calls them that too.

They'll use French names, but not the pronunciations. I'm just going to get it wrong forever. and everyone can keep calling me Stuart Gipp and then we'll be square. I've been Nadia a lot recently. I looked at like my official, like I have a Simon and Schuster page for some books I've done for inside editions. And it's like Nadia. Like, oh, okay, cool. Nice to meet you all.

Sorry, Victor. Go on. I didn't mean to interrupt. Oh, I think that was it. I think that was just the natural flow of a conversation. I think you're right. Yeah. And I see where you're coming from.

But, oh, go ahead, David. Oh, I just wanted to say one thing I did like about the Zero series is the evolution of the art over the course of it. The Zero One art is neat, but it was also a lot kind of grainyer and sketchier than I used to from Mega Man. And it just felt gradually like more and more polished, like as the Zero Series went on and on it word into ZX. Yeah. Yeah. I know what you guys are talking about, kind of like the Fisher Price colors. it almost reminds me of the days when developers were still working with the vanilla Gameboy Advance

and we're making their like just painting up your games like a $5 troll up to kind of help it stand out amongst the lightless screen of the Game Boy Advance. But I think given the mythological pantheon we're dealing with here, it kind of works for me. Oh, I don't think it doesn't work at all. I think it looks great, and it does kind of set it apart from the rest of the series. I just think that, yeah, you really see the subtleties of Maeda's style over Nakayama's. Right. Yeah, I think it works great.

It's just it contributes to me to that change, this sense of like, this is different. This is different. Yeah, yeah. The heat Gensblum's green is not a color you ever see in any previous games. I know that's a weird pull, but like, it's just, Yeah, there's colors that are never in the rest of the series. I don't know if the colors, palettes and things are a holdover from when it was the going to be 0.1.5, if any of that was kept. But I think there is a certain thematic, like, appropriateness to it because 04 really marks, like, kind of a turning point in this whole timeline.

Everything had been so, like, grim and dark, like, up to this point. and now people are like, you know, kind of coming around to, oh, okay, maybe being Neo-Arcadia is not such a good thing and fleeing and rediscovering nature. And, you know, you've got the path to the more brighter future of Mega Man X. And this is kind of like a midpoint between what Mega Man Zero was in one to three and that. That's a good point, yeah. The more optimistic, let's say, color palette feels like it could be a part of that. Yeah. And even the origin of the Einheryaar as this like, well, where have they been?

You know? Like it does seem like they were written for a mid-cool. Because especially with the judges in three Wiles' numbers, those were supposed to be like, ah, these are Wiles' right-hand men. So no wonder they are sort of our final gauntlet. And then these assholes show up. Well, I think there's soldiers of craft. They're not necessarily answering directly to while, although.

But they are Neo-Arcadian reploids who have control over massive ecological systems. Like, they're, there, then where did they come from? If they're this strong, if they're this elite soldier unit, what were they doing before? To your... Go ahead, David. I just got to say to your point, I think the ones in Mega Men Zero 4 meant to be more like soldiers of Neo-Arcadia, whereas the well numbers were,

I believe they were called the, what was it, the eight gentle judges. They're like part of the hierarchy, the like, you know, authority of Neo-Arcadia and like passing judgment on like, you know, reploids and that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, there's definitely different dynamic. between the two that, you know,

it kind of helps explain the disparity there. Now, how do you guys feel about the soundtrack for this game? Because we have Ippo Yamada on the, I guess the main composer on this, who also did the music for

Mega Man X2 and Mega Man 7, which Mega 7 is a great soundtrack. Oh, yeah. Mega Man 7, Burst Man Forever. It's a great tune. I have mixed feelings, to be honest, personally. I think the compositions are great. And I like a lot of the tracks from this. I really, really like them. I love both of craft's themes. I love falling down is amazing, obviously. But the whole thing, it has this kind of guitar tone that sounds a bit like, I kind of going, and it's a lot of that. And I kind of feel like I might like this better if they use the same instrumentation as they did in like three, maybe. It's a shame because the first, when you, the opening prologues, stage when you land on the back of the truck, the convoy, it thumps in and you're like,

oh my God, this is going to be amazing. And then the main like, like, look comes in and they're like, oh, oh, dear. Maybe not. Yeah, we, we sort of talked about this in, in the Battle Network 2 episode, again, patreon.com slash Blood God Pod, about how the Battle Network games really embrace the Game Boy, like the DMG sound chip that is still present in the Game Boy Advance. Mega Man Zero really tries to make use of samples. And some of these samples aren't great and I don't love. There's a reason

they don't release the OST in its Game Boy Advance form for the Zero series. They always release a range album. Yes. That I think do a better job of capturing the sound they're going for. Does that make it extra tragic that the Zero Legacy Collection doesn't let you swap in the Arrange soundtrack like the Star Force Legacy Collection is going to? Yes, that makes me really, really sad.

Because I love Ipo Yamada, and I don't think he did any composition for Mega Man 7. He did sound design, but I think the composers are different people. But I like his work. I like his stuff at Inti creates since, especially there's some great stuff in the Gunvolt games. I can't hum an Iepo Yamada tune for you to save my life. But like, yeah, there's nothing from the Zero series or, you know, speed power gun bike, as much as I love love and destroy, which I think is the best Inti creates video game, I really can't, I couldn't tell you, I couldn't tell you a tune of his,

which is kind of a bummer. You mentioned him doing sound design for X2, and it's a funny thing you mentioned that because, and I'm usually in the minority on this, but I always felt that after X1, the sound quality on the Super NES games, particularly in X2, I think it came rebounded a little bit next three but I always felt like I don't know something about the sound quality um for the music just wasn't as good as X1 like it wasn't as rich or something you have me I agree with you on that it's interesting because as soon as X2 got mentioned I thought that's another game where I think the choices of sound or are what kind of spoil some of the compositions it has this kind of almost yappy dog kind of br-bo-bo-loo-b-b-b-b-b-dh

Some of the tunes are great, but I just wish they sounded, they were executed nice. And that's kind of how I feel about some of this. But don't get me wrong, I really like a lot of zero-four soundtrack. I do. I just, I feel like, yeah, I mean, I'd still rather listen to the originals than the arrangements most of the time. But that's, yeah, maybe not so much there. Yeah, I think Holy Land, the theme of the hub, like the caravan bass in core. I do love that theme.

Fantastic. I think probably the best, like, hub world tune. I think it's amazing. There's the, the samples in it are great and really suit the zone. Mega Man X2's composer was Yuki Ui. Just for reference. Did Yamada do Mega Man Zero 2? Yes.

I think he has been involved in all of them. Because there's one song in that one that lives rent-free in my head, power bomb. Which one was that? That is like the like I believe like kind of a midstage thing where Neo Arcadia just decides to root we're going to nuke the resistance

space. Oh right. Zero has to go up the air fleet and Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Set things up so. Silk and disarm it. Every version of that rocks.

Masaki Suzuki, Luna Umagaki, Tsutomu Kuriara were composers for Zero 2. Ipo Yamada not even listed. There's a lot of composers on these games. There's tons. There's tons.

Yeah. Is there any specific reason? It's just intercreates, I guess, values music that much? If I had to guess, I would say it might just be a progression of the technology. Like, you know, you probably have one person back on the NES because you could only do so much, like, you know, for chip tunes there. But as like, you know, the technology allows you to do more, it takes more time to create, like, you know, these like, you know, fuller compositions. and they probably need more people, especially when they're coming out like nearly annually or sooner.

Yeah, yeah. I think there's probably probably something to do with the quick turnaround on it, I would say. Too many cooks, but that makes sense. So going on to the story for this game, did you add the scenario right here, Victor, Lakota Yabe? Yeah. Yeah, they did the scenario for ZX and Advent, didn't they? So kind of writing into their new scenario.

Totally. Yeah. Handy. Right. So as we kind of mentioned earlier, this game is disconnected in other way, stories-wise, as it really deals with themes of nature and the natural world versus the metallic, kind of sterile world of New Arcadia. We get actually some good insight into what life is like in New Arcadia a little bit in this game.

But when we start, Zero Shil and some mobile resistance members are saving a caravan of humans who fled the former paradise, new Arcadia. Turns out Dr. Weill, is it Wile or Wheel or Wheel? It's Wairu. Wailu. Wailu is such an awkward ass name. Bairu. I usually go wild because in Japan, he was Dr. Vile, but we already had vial, so they had to change it here and get people emailed when they said. start talking about his evil deeds?

Yeah. Can we talk about how, yeah, in Japan, the character we know as vile is called Vava. Yes. So Dr. Wyle is called Dr. Vile in Japan, but he's called Dr. Wile here, which is confusing because he does look like a zero interpretation of a Dr. Wiley. He does. So you have two different character confusions depending on which region you're in. It's a mess.

What a mess. It's also there was a doctor Andrew Weil who, did he die? He might still be alive. I don't freaking know. But he wrote to was it the Mega Network saying stop calling me an evil scientist? Because you wrote an article for Megamon Network saying, oh, the evil scientist, Dr. Wilde is in Megamon. Man 04, blah, blah, blah. And this dumbass is like, excuse me, I'm not an evil scientist.

Stop calling me that. He just has the Google Alert for his name. Something like that, yeah. If I remember correctly, I think it was after the Zero series it ended too. Either way, that was a weird day when we were trying to figure out what the hell is going on. And we're like, oh, okay, he's being a boomer. I get it. You want to hear this podcast and get pissed off with you again.

Listen, this time exercise your observational skills like a human adult and you'll be okay. Put that doctor to good use. Exactly. Come on. Did you print that out on a laser printer or what's your story? So Mega Man Zero 4. An interesting point is that there were consequences held over from Mega Man Zero 3 when even though X was the head of state and he wasn't exactly. legit because he was a copy, he was dispatched. And that made Dr. Weill kind of invoke like,

oops, I guess the terrorists are going to do terrorist things. And I guess we got to do martial law now. And so Neo-Aracadia apparently sucks now. It was originally intended to be a paradise for humanity to live in safety from Reploid Mavericks. But now it just all blows. And that's why the humans are trying to flee in this caravan. But wheels chasing them while it's chasing them, because he doesn't really want anyone to exist outside of his control, human or reploid. And that's kind of where you come in as zero. You save the caravan. You meet Nej, the reporter, who's a human, and you find out there's this human settlement they're going to.

And this is what I think is interesting because they have a link back to Megamon X5 when the Eurasia colony crashed. And apparently there was some kind of nature system in there. I imagine there's probably some biospheres or whatever. and it's spilling out into the wastelands of Mega-Man 04, because, yeah, by this point, the world is mostly a wasteland. New Arcadia is one of the only safe places for humans to exist. I think it suggested that some of the wars that they went through, which are referenced in this game,

really just nukes the crap out of the surface of the Earth. Sorry, just to say the elf wars that kind of preceded the thing wiped out a good chunk of humanity, and an even greater chunk of reploids. So, yeah, I can imagine that really doing a number on the environment. I think the numbers are something like 60% of humans and like 90% of reploids. It was just wild. Yeah, thereabouts.

Yeah. So these refugees are trying to set up a new life in Area Zero. They don't like zero because they don't like Reploids because they're humans. They don't really have a good reason to like reploids at this point. So I'm glad they kind of finally address that. Victor, you look like you want to say something. I love this. Me too.

I love a colony drop. I think it is maybe my favorite thing a sci-fi villain can do is drop a space. Like, it's truly, I cannot think of a more horrific thing. And it rules. I mean, we're talking Sharr's counterattack. We're talking Sonic Adventure 2. Anytime you're going to tell me you want to drop a colony, I'm here for it, which is why X5 rules. And the fact that X5 is also dictated by R&G so heavily, whether, like, you are, there's this timeline to it.

And you have a ticking clock that is a game. mechanic and you are assembling parts to stop this colony from falling. And there is a chance that when you build your cannon properly, you shoot it and it blows up and it's fine. There's also a not insignificant chance that you'll only destroy a chunk of it. And then depending on R&G, the rest of the game is going to play out a little differently. So the fact that then with X6 and on, they sort of had to canonize the events of X5 and decide, okay, it is canon that at least part of the colony Eurasia did fall and hit the earth and devastate the region. The only thing that could make me love zero four more is if they had canonized a different X5 ending. I would have loved what that would have done to Mega Man fandom for years to come.

But I think this is a great setup. I love that it's just using a set piece from a previous X game to set this all up. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, go ahead. Oh, I was just going to say, incidentally, I remember the first time I played Mega Man X-5, which actually, I believe, came out later than Legends 2 when we were talking about, like, Mega Man being the one to close the door, that next six, like, we're just really at the end of the PlayStation 1 era after the PlayStation 2.

But back to my point, yeah, the first time I played it, I remember the first thing I did, basically was like after saving my game of course was I wonder what happens if I just fire the laser immediately and it destroyed the colony right off the bat and like end game was open and I'm like oh my god it's impossible to fail I would learn otherwise later but it was a little while like I was just thinking like oh well there's no fail state here yeah it's uh that game is a speedrunner's nightmare but um it's a it's a real beauty to behold what a bold choice. God, I wish anyone would do anything that

cool anymore. There was a real boner for dropping shit on shit in the 90s. There was deep impact. There was Armageddon. Megamon X-5. Meteors are different. Meteors don't count. Yeah, but the meteors got everyone horny for just throwing shit into the earth.

Like I said, Megamon X-5 literally has an unused song called Armageddon. And when you listen to it, it's goddamn Aerosmith. It just is. It was just, everyone just had this, I guess, idea that eventually something was going to slam into us. And that's funny because everyone kind of guessed this paranoia at the same time. Like, oh, suddenly, super volcanoes.

Oh, suddenly it's sharks and tornadoes. And just for some reason, everyone just started obsessing about comets and other things. Comments and colonies, though. You got to, it's Schar's counterattack, man. It's one of the best movies of all time. I need to watch that then. Now I'm just imagining in Mega Men Legends, if like, you know, instead of firing a laser, swarms of riverbots or whatever,

if like Eden just like, you know, after pausing like above the island, if it just starts slamming down into the island repeatedly, leaving these like holes along the coastline where it's like, you know, kind of looks like something round went there instead of just like, you know, firing at it. That would take care of some of the population at least. Anyway, Zero then meets Kraft, aka Croft Dinner, aka Kraft with a C. in the English translation because they didn't want to get too close to the Croft Dinner Kraft.

He's the cheesiest. So as we said, Kraft is surrounded by his homies. How do you pronounce it, Ennyar? Ehneriar. Inheriar. It's Norse. I should know this. I'm Icelandic.

I'm not. I'm way too squat to be Icelandic. But as we said before, these Enayar, whatever, have, have a neo-arcadians. The Neo-Arcadians, thank you, have a mythology, a mythological, sorry, theming to their designs this time around. We have, first of all, Fenry Luna Edge, Victor added here, fun use of the zero knuckle,

stealing a card key from an enemy and using it to open a door to a sub-tank. That's really cool. I figure as we address these all, we can talk a little bit about their stages because there are some really good gimmicks in this game. But I think that throughout Zero, like, I think what sets the, the Reploids in the Zero series apart from things like your Duff McWilins or whatever is that they are not just based on animals. They are all based off of mythological animals or folklore or whatever. Like Fenrir is Fenrir.

Yeah, even going back to Zero One, you know, you have, you have. this theme throughout. There's actually, yeah, canonically, that was Neo-Arcadia's decision to make humans more comfortable with staying in the, in the Arcadia.

It's addressing different religions and cultures and whatnot. And that they... I didn't know that. Yes. Yeah, that they are, they're also protectors. So they are meant to be, they're meant to evoke divinity.

So you're like Hanuman in zero one. Hanuman, Ganesh. Yeah, yeah. But how do I not, Peace that together. Jeez. Yeah, it's good. It's a nice little touch. It's, again, something that just sets it apart from the X series, gives it its own flavor. But yeah, Fenry Luna Edge's stage, when do we want to talk about weather?

Sorry, before you go into that, though, it's like, okay, in like manga and certain things, X has been like a Jesus analog. Oh, yeah. And now I'm just imagining, like, you know, that this whole Neo-Arcadian thing is basically, basically just like the Avengers of Religions with like X, like, you know, being the Captain America, I guess. Well, X, even, even like at Ghost X, he's got his, his robe. He's, he's got his halo. Like, he's truly, yeah, absolutely. He's absolutely Jesus, especially in the Mega Man X manga, sorry, Rockman X manga, is by Iwo Moto.

Literally, the one story that became kind of a breakout meme with the bit screaming Mary. Christmas as X who is crucified is like he thinks he's killed but no he he's he's resurrected because he's X and it says clearly blatantly in the manga that like we celebrate X way we celebrate Jesus Christ on the birth of you know just it's quite literal but yeah oh that's why it's called X-mas oh X died for your sins oh put the X back in X-Miss. Yeah, I agree with that. Stop talking about this Christ guy. Who is he?

So I'm sorry I have to say this because it's in my head and it won't come out. So when the X died for our sins, they like hammer one of those one hit, kill spikes into him. And then he just explored. And that was his blood, showering us with salvation. I'm sorry, we just lost all Christians on this podcast. Let's go on. Let's talk more about Mavericks, especially Luna. Just Jesus was a maverick.

He kind of was. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, no, I guess actually, I don't know. I guess maybe Adam and Avor, but I don't know. I'm not going to. He said that, Stu, with a real youth pastor energy.

Turn your chair around. Turn your baseball cap back. That's where I'm planning to pivot when this whole retronauts thing doesn't work. Okay. Okay. I want to bring up. With regards to this level, the Zero Knuckle. Yes.

So this is our new weapon for this game. The Zero Series in general has a bit of an issue with introducing new weapons and then kind of not giving them much utility outside of a few special cases. That's very different if you're a speed runner because then these get used in wild ways. But the Zero Knuckle kind of replaces what was it the? The triple rod. The chain was a chain. There was the chain. There was the shield,

spinny bayblade. Oh, I thought the shield was still here, no? No. But there was the, oh, shoot, I forget what they were called. They were like the tauntfa type deals in, oh, yeah. Were those in four?

Those were three? Recoil rod. Those are all gone. Those are all gone. It's the saber, buster, and zero knuckle. because what the zero knuckle does is on specific enemies, you can just grab them and you'll steal their weapon.

Yeah. I freaking love that because it is just, did you ever watch the Ruby Spears Mega Man cartoon back in the day? Of course. No, I got your power. Exactly. It is finally that in like game form in the truest sense. Just like reach out, grab an enemy, and take their weapon.

And I freaking love that. Not to mention giving zero finally, you know, putting a little more Mega Man in the Mega Man Zero, as it were. Yeah. Put the Mega Man back in Mega Man Zero. You heard it here, folks. Yeah, it's a really natural sort of, I mean, you do have the sort of the EX skills, which were basically about as close as you could get to that in the previous ones. Although they're here too as well, but, you know, we'll talk about that eventually.

Yeah, I think those are more like the kind of X, Megamonix series zero stuff where you'd like get the different yeah yeah yeah we also have a soul titanium who is titanium the fairy queen and also a butterfly

I think that's a really cool design it mentions that her there was a partner like she has she controls a satellite a weather satellite and can make her levels is she the one who yeah she makes the levels really hot

and you have to shelter in place in certain like areas to lower your temperature kind of like cloud in Final Fantasy 7 when you're climbing the cliff and you have to warm yourself up a little bit of the reverse going on there. Yeah, even during the bus fight

like half of the screen. Oh, that's right, yeah. 80% of the screen is unusable, more or less. And I think you can visit the level when the weather is rainy and that makes things significantly easier. But I feel like there's also a mention of Oberon. Is it pronounced Oberon? How is it pronounced?

Oberon. Oberon, yeah. Oberon, yeah. I feel like there was a mention of Oberon in this game, but for the life of me, I can't remember where it was. Well, it just mentions that she runs the artificial sun. She controls it with a counterpart so that she has a partner that she does it with. And through context clues, we could assume that this reploid would have been the Oberon to her Titania. Which I think is also really interesting.

It would have been nice to have confirmation one or the other because that's a really clever story design, a story thing to do. this is a good time to talk about weather because this is like a this is a stage where it is very very clear what the weather effect is yes um go ahead sorry yes sorry just before you get into detail on that i just wanted to say that like you know the what you're talking about there with that stage uh it really reminds me of wire sponge and x2 except because like sometimes like it would get brighter and look hotter and like i think you'd have like the waves or like it would like turn to rain or whatever None of it, except I think the rain, I think, might have had some pushback, like some wood or something. But yeah, like, there was not a whole lot of effect or anything on it. Like, you know, you won't need to get safety. But I do kind of wonder if maybe this idea wasn't like kind of a, you know, a carryover from that.

And like, you know, them were using an old idea they didn't get to flesh out or something. I have strong thoughts about the weather system. And maybe we'll get to them a little bit later. and what I think could have been implemented from older X games to make this more interesting. But I'll save that. Did you want to talk about weather now? Because as you say, it is a major part of this stage. Well, I do want to talk about, yeah, because Soul Titanian stage is what you can do when you're selecting a stage is you can hit the change weather button.

And it alternates between one of two states. And if you go in during a detrimental, weather pattern, it means it's going to be a harder challenge. The weather will be on the boss's side. They'll have access to an EX move and the game will just be a bit harder. But it's also the only way that you can acquire the boss's EX skill is by defeating them when the weather is to their advantage. Or like Nadia was saying earlier, if you want the sort of dietic, Eugenetic easy mode, you switch to a weather that is beneficial to you, which in the case of

Soul Titanian is the heat isn't as strong. So when you're standing in sunlight, your heat gauge rises slower and you don't have to take damage as often. Because if you get to 100% heat, he'll take damage. So the weather system is sort of taking the focus off the high ranking the game. if you don't feel like you want to, I guess. You can now get the X abilities just by clearing the stage on the more difficult mode rather than doing so and keeping your ranking up, which is much harder to do. Yeah. If you don't have anything to prove, then you can get through Mega Man 04.

Not that the boss patterns are that much easier or that the stages aren't still difficult compared to plenty of other games. Right. But it is our little dietic easy mode. For sure. Yeah. I wonder if it's like, okay, we're releasing this game after the Game Boy Advanced Successor came out. Maybe punishing the players relentlessly isn't such a good idea.

Maybe we should throw them a bone. I wonder if that was a thought behind this. Yeah, I wonder. So our next Maverick or Neo- Arcadian, if you like, is the chicken. Chicken, Poplar cockapetri, a cockatrice. And I love this little asshole. He's just like a little squabbling little... He's that little goblin character that always shows up in anime's.

I'm telling you, he's a chicken. A robot chicken. I think Poplar Cockapetri is maybe one of my favorite boss names. It's close to Childra Inorabita. I love Children in a Rabita. But this is... What a great name. And yeah, he's such a little dingus.

I mean, Stuart was saying, well, I guess it's a chicken, but we actually did get just a straight-up chicken in Mega X-8 with Burncock. Oh, yeah. Yeah, this is one of the, I guess in a way it makes me think of, like, how I didn't get to play the X-4-5 until much later when the X-Collection dropped. So all of those bosses seem weird to me as well, like Cyber Peacock, really a mushroom. He's cool.

He is cool. I know that now. But it helped lend to this game's sense of oddness that suddenly there is this, I don't know, it's just not that imposing. Is this little chicken fellow who lays eggs at you? It's just not that imposing, really. There's actually quite a few Mavericks who cross over, at least design-wise, in the series and the X series.

And it's interesting to see who does it better. And most of the time, frankly, I feel like Intreates does it better. like Mega Man X-8 had a mantis maverick. I don't remember his name. There's a dark mantiske or something like that. But then in X, sorry, 02, I think it was. He had Death Tans mantisks. Zero-3.

He's one of the judges. Such a cool design. Oh, well, he's amazing. That looked like a thing that could take off your head after having sex with you. Yeah. Victor, just logged on. Going on. That's female. That's female mantises.

That's true. Actually, one thing... Kill the human, guys. One thing I was actually going to bring up is we have a couple of female mavericks in this game. Titania, of course, is female. Noble Mandragal, who is our next Maverick, also female. More Zero Knuckle fun. Plucking Mandrago out of the ground to combo her. I did not know you can do that. Yes.

So I find Zero Nuckel. I tend to not use it. I'm also a very, when I play a zero game, I'm a Z saber forward kind of guy. That's just where I'm going to gravitate. So unless I really want to play around an experiment, I don't find myself using other weapons that much. And especially because Zero Knuckle seems pretty situational and whatever.

But this fight, when she pops out of the ground, just zero knuckle her, pull her out, like a little potato or whatever. Potatoes out of the ground. Some kind of tuber. And then you can just mess her up. It's super fun. It's really smart and not something I think I figured out

until like 10 years after it came out. That's great. I am really fond of how you use the zero knuckle and some of the boss fights. I mean, right at the beginning, when you just rip the wires out of the first boss, the prolog boss. So all it can do is this one quite easy to avoid attack.

I just think that's a really cool way of implementing that. What? Yeah, zoom right up to it, and there's like wires connecting it to the machinery. If you use the zero knuckle, I think three times, you just pull all the wires out, and then it can only do one attack. It's dope.

Take it back. I love the zero knuckle. Incredible. That rules. That's so fun. Yeah, you were mentioning like your play style on the Sabre and Buster and whatnot. Yeah.

And it's like, I think normally in the other games, yeah, that's how I usually am. I think part of the reason I never did quite finish this one is because I couldn't quit screwing around the zero knuckle. Oh, yeah. Yeah, to my detriment in a lot of cases, probably. But yeah, I was just having too much fun. Yeah.

This is a good stage for it, too, because everything's plants. So you, rip it up. Yeah, you could try to, you know, do a combo on some of the flower enemies that pop up, or you can just rip them out by their roots and throw them. I love that. Just picturing this, like, plunge. that boss, stop that, stop that. Stop that. Stop that. Yeah. Am I allowed to be annoyed that Capcom or Intech Creates made a sequel to Super

Mario Brothers 2 before Nintendo did? I guess technically. Yeah, yeah. Moving on, talking about another crossover Maverick here, Pegas Sulta Eclare. Of course, it's a Pegasus with war amps going on because it has like spark. It has It didn't Explain yourself

Go on I just made I just made Victor's eyes grow like 10 sizes Basically if you're in Canada There's an organization called Waramps And it has this robot named Astar And it's A robot from Planet Danger

A robot from Planet Danger And Astar kind of like Plays in this really weird CGI world And his arms are so are sought off because, like, you know, he's in the plant. He lives, he's living in Planet Danger and fucking around on Planet Danger. Of course, it's going to happen.

Is Astar a he? I thought Astar was a he. I thought Astar was a woman. What? I thought Astor was a robot. Oh, wow. Makes you think. Either way, yeah, so both his arms came off.

And the idea is that Astor attaches his robot, his arm and says, I'm a robot from Planet danger. And I can put my arm back on. You can't. So, play safe. So Pegasolti Claire has spikes where his arms should be and it makes me wonder, well, anyway.

I think he's just got big sword arms because it looks cool. Oh, okay, it's swords. I never thought of that. They're like lances. He's got lances on his forearms. Right. It looks weird, is what I'm getting at. Okay. It looks like one of those, okay, so maybe it doesn't

have anything to do with Astor and the robot from Planet Danger. Maybe it's more like those fur suits people wear where they make their the forearms really long and the back legs are just like normal fur suits where people make their forearms really long

yeah yeah and they're like portraying like a gibbon or something like simian fur suit you know either way he's he's a very like proper like oh I'm I'm better than you blah blah I'm so noble and great and I'm a Pegasus

And I do like Pegasai. So I can't say anything bad about this. Yeah. Yeah, I like him. His stage is the design of the stage is odd. It's a lot of platforms that are like jagged and really interrupt your momentum. It's a strange one. I don't know if I like it.

Also, if you go in with the detrimental weather, there's a storm going. so the wind is blowing you back and really messing with your jump trajectory. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it sounds like a pain in the ass, but it is interesting. Yeah.

Can you pull anything from this from this Pegasized butt? I don't know. Stu, can you? Is there anything to pull up at its guy? You know what? I never tried. That's the one boss who's butt

I didn't try to pull anything out of. He's a bit fast. He, and he floats up. in the air and I find that knuckle is pretty useless against him in general. Yeah, yeah. We have Mino Magnus, who's a Minotaur. God

damn it, I love me a Minotaur, especially a minotaur with a big ass axe, which is actually a specific kind of axe from ancient Greece. I actually did not know that called a Labris or something like that, Labris. He has a huge one. His axe is very big. He speaks

very slowly to the point that other people will interrupt him to finish what he's trying to say. And Zero himself will tell him to shut up. Because that's the only time, apparently, where he will do that to another Maverick, except like Frost Walrus from X-4. I always love it. Go ahead, David. I was just going to say, now I'm just imagining Zero, just like, sighing and rolling his eyes

as he, like, you know, gradually talks before telling him to shut up. can you grab this that's cow's meat can you grab meat from this cow i don't know Stuart do you know if he can grab the cow um i i don't know i really don't know you think you know others though there would be a good like if they could have worked that in somehow that would have been pretty good sure yeah can you cheese this burger yeah uh yeah can you can you milk me Greg oh no it says rated m for your mom it's it's a meat the Fucker's reference. Come on.

Come on. What would be fun is if like you could like, you know, use the Z knuckle and just steal his axe and hit him with it. That'd be like piss him off. So he just like wax you against the wall or something and takes it back. That's the thing is I feel like there's there's wasted potential with the zero knuckle in terms of getting getting some like boss weapons or something. You know, there's there's something cool there that that they kind of missed out on. This stage drives me a little bit crazy because it's all about the magnetism affecting your jump height, either stifling it to the point where you just have to do like tiny, tiny wall jumps up the side of even a tiny little cliff side. And it's just kind of finicky.

Oh, I seem to remember hating that. Yeah. And there's a bunch of orbs that are floating around. and you really have to understand the physics of it because as they get closer, they're magnetized to you more. So there's like this exponential thing where they move closer and closer. And it's, I don't know.

It's a lot to deal with on a tiny Game Boy Advance screen. They could have done like a maze stage. Sure, yeah. It's adhered to the Minotaur theme. Yeah. And then there is Tech Crocken, who was formerly in Phantom's Unit, which is a classic Storm Eagle slash Storm Owl relationship that flavor that I love in these games, says Victor, I'm assuming. Yeah, yeah, of course. This is my favorite thing.

We talked about this in the X-4 episode. When you've got a Maverick who is there to seek revenge on you for the last time you slaughtered a platoon. of elite soldiers. Yeah, I love this one, especially because Phantom has a special place as just a guy who actually died. Even though we do kill all these guys, Phantom decidedly blew himself up

and is very, very dead. To the point, actually, that there is artwork of what happens after Ragnarok blows up at the end of this game. And you see, X along with the generals. And I think that Phantom is, I don't remember if he's transparent.

He has some indication that he's dead. And the others are actually alive in their own weird way. Yeah, I was going to bring that up later. But yeah, that was something they released, I believe, with the soundtrack after 0-4. But it's since been retcon, apparently. Oh, has it? Well, yeah.

I mean, look at ZX. Like, you know, they aren't around then. So basically, I believe they, I can't remember if it was officially stated. I think it was, but I'm not 100% sure. But the idea being that the explosion of Omega basically took the other three out and only zero was saved. Yeah, they're dead. Yeah. Oh, the generals are dead dead.

Yeah. Oh, they're dead dead. Yeah, yeah. Can I mention real briefly just like, I feel like it hasn't happened as much in the previous games. I feel like this game goes quite hard on the sort of non-standard boss arena. because like, I mean, even someone like Fenry Lunar Edge to me is one of the toughest in the series because A, the room is so damn small, he's so big and also you're on ice, right? Like, that's a rough boss fight.

And then when you fight this guy, Tech Crack and you've got a non-standard shape boss for him, you have the same issue with Pegasolt Eclare where there's death pits all around. it just seems like they kind of leaned into that a bit more on this game. The gimmick stuff, yeah. A lot of the time in the previous ones, it's just, here's your square room, here's your boss. I mean, not always entirely, but it's an interesting, another reason why this game feels kind of unusual, right? I'm just saying it's really stacking up. Totally.

And the fact that Tech Cracken, part of the fight is also the fact that he shoots things that then rebound off the walls. So the fact that you have an asymmetrical stage, means that you are that much less likely to be able to predict what the pattern is going to be for these trajectories. Not like, say, Armadillo, where, like, when he bounces, it's a square room, you know exactly where he's going. Before we move on, I want to bring up one other thing. Kind of actually commonality here between two themes that Nadia and Victor were talking about. Tech Cracken would be another one of those extraprisals because there was Volt Cracken, aka Squid Appler and Mega Man X-5,

who had a connection, as I recall, to Octopardo or launch octopus from X-1. Yeah, I love a robot cephalopod. So you must love Mad Nautilus from a command mission. Yeah, love him. He does have a cool design, I have to admit. Actually, one that's overlooked when you talk about connections in between the Mavericks and characters

in Mega Man X and Zero. In Mega Man X-5, if you crash a colony or if you spread the zero virus so everyone goes crazy and you talk to Pegasus, Spiral Pegasus, you get the impression that he loved Iris and didn't tell her. And it's kind of talking to her while he's in his weird-ass state. So that's an interesting little bit, I think, a little chewy bit for you. Yeah. I love, this is, you're totally giving away what you love the most about zero for by bringing up all of these instances where the flavor text implies a relationship between two characters. Hell yeah.

I am who I am, as the sailor man says. This is very on brand. What am I zero for? The last Maverick is Heat Gumblin. Genbu, who is like a giant turtle but also Genbu, the, is it the south? The, what? Oh, I think so. Because that's the direction.

No, south is Suzaku. I don't remember. They're Chinese deities, right? Like then they command directions. Yeah, yeah. You have the dragon, you have the turtle. You have the kitty cat or the tiger. It's the north side, right?

protects the north or something? I think so. Yeah. Gengbo. Yes. Tortus of the north, dragon of the east. Phoenix of the south, tiger of the west. Genbu is also, if you are an SMT fan, also a decent early game summon a lot of the time. I think he has Bufu, but anyway,

he doesn't have Bufu here, which is an ice spell. He has fire here, which is a fire spell. Maybe one of my favorite hide from the laser at regular interval levels, says Victor. Oh, yeah. Well, on the topic of Heat Gamblum, he also follows the long tradition of turtle enemies who use Gamera moves. Yes, spin, spin, skinny. Yeah, I was going to make a friend to all the children joke, but.

Yeah. We love it when a turtle tucks into his shell and spins around. We do. We love it. It's fun. We support that. This is, this stage is, is fun because at the beginning of it, they say, so, so heat Gamelum is running this big, like, particle laser. Yeah.

That is, is raising the earth. Because I don't know how much we talked about how Wiles' plan is that he's going to destroy all of nature because he wants a monopoly on it so that no one can survive outside of Neo-Arcadia. Imagine that trying to control natural resources. So sending your invading army out to raise the land. Interesting. It could never happen. So Heat Gemblum has this particle laser. At the beginning of the stage, they say,

Zero, it's going to take some time for us to get the door open. And Zero says, whatever, I'm going to run through the barrel. As he does. So it is, of course, a. dodge the laser that fires across the screen at regular intervals by ducking into nooks and crannies kind of stage. What I love about this level is that it is constantly screwing you over in fun, tiny little ways. Because you will see that as you run through the main corridor, there are pits in the ground that you will want to jump into to avoid the laser. eventually you'll you'll come across pits that have enemies in them so you're like okay well i got to

get into there so i'm going to you know kill this enemy which is going to take a few more frames but hopefully i can still get in there in time then eventually you'll run into enemies that pop up and that you can't really easily kill from above so you'll jump into this little pit to hide you'll realize you're standing on an enemy and then it will pop up and you'll get popped right up into the laser as it's going. That's just comedy. That's funny. That's trolling. But then the other thing it does is it uses enemy spawn patterns in a really sort of meta way because if you spawn an enemy, you know, the enemies will spawn if they're a few feet off camera. So you'll you'll spawn an enemy in the path of the laser

and it will get destroyed. Implying that the laser is constantly just destroying its own spawning enemies as they are being created by the solipsistic zero that you are that is

able to spawn these enemies. It's like there's a weird epistemological thing going on here that is frightening. There is a point where one of these rising enemies is in the main path of the laser. You can, if you spawn it too early, it will get killed by the laser. If you hang back enough, you can run up to it, jump on it,

and then jump off of it to get up to a secret that is hiding up in the ceiling. Then the laser will come and destroy that enemy. then as you keep moving to the right, you will discover that there was another better secret further to the right if you had just taken a leap of faith to the right off of that enemy. So then you go back and if you walk off screen enough, you can make that enemy respawn and you can try it again. But every time you're risking a one-hit kill from this laser.

So it's constantly taunting you with all of these little, Little things that it teases, but dangles in front of you like a carrot on a stick, unless you want to risk getting hit by this laser over and over. That's actually extremely similar to a stage in Cave Story, the Egg Corridor, where you have a little hedgehog dude running the area, and you have to kind of take that risk to go down and get like the upgrades and stuff like that, which is one of my favorite levels in a video game, just the music, the pacing, really great.

Yeah, I just think it's so fun that they use respawning enemies by running off screen as a mechanic. Yeah, that's pretty fun and clever. So anyway, it turns out,

getting back to the story, because once you defeat the Mavericks, like, of course, you go through the usual shenanigans where maybe about, I think it's with the halfway point, like someone comes around and says, hey, you stop that.

And they try to destroy, the camp that the humans have set up because, again, wheels want anyone who doesn't want humans or Replites us out of New Arcadia. So things are complicated here because it turns out Nege was crafts squeeze at one point, which makes ship between them complicated, and it's craft who is following wheels orders to destroy Area Zero under quote unquote Operation Ragnarok, which is supposed to be the decimation of anything natural on planet Earth. So he eventually kidnaps Nez,

so she'll be safe. And soon enough, while reveals that, okay, I'm not even like destroying nature of the slow way here. I just have a,

I just have a cannon called Ragnarok. That's where the name Apparachian, Ragnarach actually means. I'm going to, I'm going to just blow up everything from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. And, uh,

Kraft, ever the nihilist gets fed up with being led around by wheel, goes full Joker and nukes Neo Arcadia with Ragnarok. He had basically turned the, weapon on while who can regenerate, which is a pretty horrific story point. And boy,

oh boy, it sure does fuck up New Arcadia. Millions live in that city, millions of humans and reploids. And the body count is not insignificant. Thank you, Kraft. Very nice. I do like, I can't remember if it's Herondel, who says in one of the little

Kodak conversations, he he says, like, evacuation complete. thanks for buying us time. Like, really? You got, in a matter of hours, you got millions of people out of a massive city? I feel like somewhere else there was, it was intent. It was like pointed out that there was a huge body count because it makes sense.

Of course there would be. Oh, yeah. Of course, some people evacuated, but not everyone. I think others like were already like evacuating besides Nesh's group, too, weren't they? Like, before all this. Yeah. But there's no way. Like, they actually show you a cutscene of the destruction.

And things look pretty messed up. Like, they're carrying people out who are like hurt pretty badly. It's okay. We can see their parachutes. Exactly. That's kind of what it reminds me of. And I'm just wondering. Good thing is a Sunday and everybody's at the game.

Is that the excuse they used in Britain? Everyone's in the game. It was like Dragon Ball or something. Dragon Ball Z. Yeah. Yeah, they used that one. It's amazing. No, no, no, it's a good thing it was Sunday.

Otherwise, those buildings are for the people. That's it. Yeah, yeah. And man would sound like Triple H there. Yeah, really. And, yeah, I'm just like imagining, like, just like the corpse, like, you know, inserted corpse of like the parachute guy from Attack the Killer Tomatoes, just the parachute deployed on the ground.

It's okay. See their parachutes. Interesting thing, Ragnarok was also the name of the cannon, satellite cannon, in Final Fantasy 8, wasn't it? Well, yeah. I mean, Ragnarok is, that's, again, more classic Norse mythology. It's, that's the, when all the Einharia are and everyone have their big final climactic battle. Yes.

Well, it's just like, I have a theme going here. I'm going to stick to it. Yeah, yeah. There is like other Norse themes, though, in the Xero series, of course, like the Tree of Life, of Igdesreal, of course, shows up. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's, it's, it's heavy in the zero games. So, while merges with Ragnarok's core and tries slamming the satellite into Earth. And this is where, where Victor talks about his love for colony drops.

And we've already kind of covered that a little bit. But yeah. Yeah, it's, you're bookending a game with, with colony drops. I love it. It's great. You, you set up that, that one that happened long ago, is the genesis of rebirth and humanity's second chance. And then you drop another one as the major threat. I love it.

I think it's a really cool kind of swerve to go from optimistic kind of almost epilogue feel of the beginning of the game. And then nothing's okay. Nothing's ever going to be okay, ever. It's just dope as hell. To be honest, the whole finale of this game. him is dope as hell I love. It really is. I actually really like the last battle. I like the fight with, I should mention actually,

this is a little bit, we'll talk a little bit about the bridge between classic Mega Man and Mega Man X, which is the L-4s. David, you probably have a better memory of this than I do. How would you describe the L-Fors? Wow. Okay, so Dr. Weil, as I recall, he's working with Shell's ancestor on the, on Zero's original body, they were trying to find a cure for the Maverick virus. Right.

And ended up making like putting Zero like in another body, the one that he has now. And while he decided to make a new Reploid consciousness for the original body called Omega, who ended up becoming as general when they developed the cyber elves, which were apparently, I think, able to, well, not. Not the cyber elves themselves, but like the mother elf. The mother elf, yeah. Like actually counter the Sigma virus, the Maverick virus, whatever you want to call it. And, yeah, Wow decided to take that to the extreme.

He made Omega, his general basically, and declared war and wiped out a whole bunch of humanity and a ton of even more reploids, as pointed out earlier. zero and I believe x Axel depending on where you look like you know their combined efforts able to bring a while and omega down they basically and this is the crazy thing to me

but at the same time it's definitely got like you know presenting the torment nexus as seen in the book do not create the torment nexus thing where basically they're like oh we want to punish you bad but we don't want you to die So we're going to make it so you regenerate and basically live forever. And then they shoot him in Omega, like, because I don't think they were able to destroy Omega for some reason.

Just like shoot them into space and they come back like, you know, and, uh, pissed up. At the beginning of zero three. Yeah, he's just like totally pissed because like, you know, he's just been that. That is such a bad idea to be like. It really is. And he's a real, he's a real mean son of a bitch. Like we're going to, we want to punish you. We're going to make you a mortal.

Like, whoops. And then we're going to stick you on a satellite And we're not going to give you any bad movies to watch Nice for us Thank you But yeah Wyle is he's just a real bitter Real angry villain

Sigma kind of had a Had a motive He wanted to destroy humanity While he wanted to be the best And be better than make something better than rock band Be better than Dr. Light While's just like I was

tormented over and over again and just this endless existence and I was kind of an asshole to begin with so you know what, go to hell. You're all going to suffer with me. I don't care if Earth gets blown up. I can't die either way. And my existence is terrible

no matter if I'm on Earth or floating in space. It's kind of fucking metal. All right. It's metal. It kind of is. Yeah. I mean, yeah, he's bad.

He sucks, but at the same time. Kind of cool. He sucks, but he's cool. Cold of personality kind of thing going on here. There's actually a scene. at the end of the game where his little weird ass dome cone thing breaks and you can see his face for the first time

it's actually horrific like it's just this melted thing we can see his face before but like I think it might have been distorted a little bit It was like it was it was behind it was a little bit distorted as I say You didn't get the full tilt while Like I mean the end of

Sorry to Tumberhead slightly But we are talking about him When especially in the I believe the Japanese version is the only one that has this because in the previous games, they have had the blood from the mavericks or from the rep place that you destroy. And when he is being sort of tetsuode at the end into Ragnarok, it's pissing blood everywhere. He's like, it's so violent. I don't remember the pissing blood.

Yeah, it's every time one of those cables slams into him, blood pours out of it. Oh, that's so cool. Constantly happening. The screen whites out. He appears. and the big fallace appears and you're like, what the hell is going on right now? Yeah.

I think there is something to playing these games in their Japanese versions to get the full effect of the blood spray. Because we haven't, I'm sure that's been brought up on a previous episode, but every, every anime shoots just a spray of blood when you slash through them in these games in the Japanese versions. and it was taken out of the English ones.

It's kind of satisfying, to be honest, that spray of blood has a really cool arc. It's incredible. It does add something, I think. And, you know, undubs, as they call them, ROMs are available, but obviously don't download them, for Christ's sake. You're not allowed.

But they're out there and easy to find. I know it didn't sell very well compared to the other collections, but the Mega Man Zero ZX Legacy collection, most of the legacy collections have, like, let you play the English or Japanese versions. So that might be possible there. I'm not sure. It is 100%.

Okay, great. It's actually a good collection. If you haven't bought it, do that. It's incredible. It goes on sale often enough. Yeah, I don't, do they retain, sorry, this is a slight tangent, but I know when they re-released them on the DS, they edited some of the scripts to remove, like, the word kill or die.

And I don't know if they retained that across the- Oh, did they do that? Yeah, yeah. It's like, instead of saying kill me zero. or I know Harpoor says Finish Me or something like that. Oh, boo. Yeah. And Finish Me has other implications, smart asses. Yeah.

And that's when the zero knuckle comes to play. There we have. I almost made it through the other episodes. Yeah. Almost made it through the whole episode without making a joke about him using it to jerk off. But here we are. I've just pointed it took this long. It was inevitable.

I feel like we've touched on this already. But yeah, man, I'm glad there aren't any world leaders who would probably like, you know, fuse with the satellite, just. try to drop down and kill humanity because people didn't want to live under his rule. Rain of blood, no less. Speaking of the final battle and whatnot, shoot, I had a thought and it completely escaped my stupid little head. Was the thought that it's rad?

It is pretty goddamn red. It's cool. Can I mention in the meantime about Kraft? Because we didn't really mention him at all. Yes, let's talk about Kraft. I like Kraft. I actually was a I'm so hopeless

spirals very good I actually asked like a friend of mine to make a fan art of craft and Nege because there was nothing out there

and there still is nothing out there except for that one piece of fan art which is like a billion years old and still exists and God bless and this artist friend of mine by the way someone I've known since I was like 15 and she was even younger

she's an artist who goes to a lot of cons and if you've seen like she be Deadpool she was the one who started Cheeby Deadpool like and what kills me is that the guy who Luigi who shot that CEO there's a allegedly allegedly allegedly um there is a picture of him in the police car grinning at the camera and the police looks stone cold serious and there's that one of those fucking. deadpools in the rear room you're dangling. And she put this on Facebook. She's like the most, like, cutest little girl you'll ever meet in your life. And she's just like, oh, is that cute? Is that funny? I'm like, Jesus Christ, do you know what you have done? This picture is going to be in history books someday.

And you got your Deadpool hang in there. And she's just like, oh, that's so awesome. I'm so happy. But yeah. I want to just say about Kraft, not so much the character, but I honestly, I think that the boss fights with him, both of them are, but still by is one of my favorite boss fights like ever in any 2D platform game like this. I think it's the pinnacle of the whole series. He's got like so many goddamn moves and he throws them.

It's so, it's very challenging, but I'm very fond of it. I don't mean that in the kind of sort of gatekeeping sense, but it's just so much fun learning that fight. Yeah. And it's rough. The one where he fires the laser and it like, propels him across the stage. Oh, God. Yeah. That's a weird arc to it.

And then learning that and learning how to interrupt it feels so good. I love it when he just locks on to you and then fires and you have to get like the, you've got to dash at just the right second so that you can pass under the laser. And it's like, when else, I mean, you do that right at the beginning of the game with the first laser thing, which is probably kind of subtly teaching you that. But is that ever used in any of the other Mega, and zero games, the fact that you slightly descend when you're dashing, like, to any...

Like, is that the only way you can dodge that shit, apart from maybe a double jump if you have to do that. Oh, I see what you mean. I think you might be right. Yeah. I think about it. Which is like crazy levels of look. We've done four of these games now. Just learn how to play them, okay? Like, you've got to learn this shit.

And I'm kind of here for it. Like, it makes it feel so final, you know? Oh, absolutely. I feel like that move might have been in one of the previous ones, but not like in a, you know, this is how you do it kind of way, but just like... It's not hoping to mind. There probably is, but it's not hopping to mind.

It's just that's what, because it's so all or nothing. It's like, this is all you can do is learn the timing and dash just at the right timing. It's very, very fun and very, very cool. There's actually a line that I love in the game that is complete cheese, but that's why I love it. And that is when it becomes clear that craft is, you know, he, I believe in Eunesh, therefore I'm going to kill while and therefore a lot of other humans. and he's kind of explaining his plan to while saying, you know, I'm not your dog to yank you around by your chain anymore, which is a pretty cool line to begin with.

But then like, while she's like, ah, seduced by the sweet words of a woman. And I'm like, yeah, that's the shit we came here for. You know, something about craft kind of gives me kernel vibes,

but... Very kernel, very barrel, I'd say from Battle Network. I was going to mention him too, but yeah. He has a cool design. I just like how blocky he is.

He looks very legends. in a way. Yeah, he's got diesel bun's exact hair as well. Exactly. Yeah. Also, Victor, we have talked about this in the past. He cannot go wrong with a robot wearing a cloak. Robot in a cloak. And this guy, he wears his cloak the whole

time. And then when he takes it off, it's like, holy shit, he's built. And you're going to die. Yeah. Yeah, he's a pretty cool design. Like, he's one of the reasons I like 04. He has that quiet way about him. That's kind of like that crazy kid in the classroom who does the unspeakable. Yeah. I feel like

um Jesus. I can't, Jesus. Sorry, he just, what you just said. Boy.

Boy. Yeah, sorry. That took a second for everyone to register. I'm like, did I go too far? The answer is yes, but. The crazy kid in the class who drops a colony and then hijacks the colony.

Yeah. Um, yeah, I think it, it speaks to the strength of his design that, and, and Maeda's character designs that craft can be like, he can be so bright and,

green and purple and still look like he was built to be a military. Yes. This is a guy who's who's supposed to go commit war crimes on behalf of a government. Like, yeah. Yeah, to that point, I was actually checking something earlier. And yeah, his dialogue was also interesting too because he would like keep stopping himself from talking about them serving Neo Arcadia and changing it to Lord Weil. Right, right.

Because while is taken over in the Arcadia. Yeah, I remember that now. I know what you're talking about. That is an interesting aside right there. Speaking of interesting aside, so Zero dies in this game. Like, he straight up dies. He actually has a really cool and last line that Stewart, if you want to mention because you actually open the episode of that.

It's like, I never cared about justice, and I don't recall, or I don't remember calling myself a hero, something like I only ever thought of what I believe in, of an enemy, what is it? It appears before maybe I'll destroy it. Yeah. And then the callous music you've ever heard starts playing, including the whole choral kind of, ah, yeah. And then like I said, Dr. Wilde grows this massive kind of horn

sort of dick thing that you've got to grab onto the end of. And oh, it's just, oh, it's perfect. The music is so good. It's, it's, it's, I, when I talk about it, I get little hairs on the back on my next step. It's that good. That's how good it. It's like, It is a really cool. It's as good as the final hazard from Sonic Adventure 2, and that's really good. Yeah.

I admit that final hazard is pretty fucking cool. That's a big lizard with a space colony. Let's not mince words rammed up its butt. The Lunders pissed off. Yeah. I mean, look, the Dr. Robotnik nose and eyes on colony arc are already right there. I mean, yeah, if you want me, if you want me to care about. a final boss, put it on

something that's falling into the atmosphere. Oh god, you are timed as well. You've got like 70 seconds or something. Yeah. Yeah. With the planet rise in the background slowly appearing on screen and the fire

and the debris breaking off of it, that's it. And I recall like the hoses flying up like just it's bad. It's going to be bad. Between the craft fight and the first viral fight where he's summoning the bosses from Mega Man Zero 3 to attack you with the X attacks. It all just really does come together to just film like, no, this is the climax.

None of that happened before counted. This is it. Like there's no more after this. We are throwing everything we got at you. And it, oh, it's just so good. It's so good. You know, mentioned Eggman before. And, yeah, I imagine, like, you know, even he and Wiley together would be just like, wow,

can you get to leave this guy and talk about extra? it does remind me of like the finale of Sonic 3 and Knuckles sorry to bring up Sonic 3 and Knuckles on unrelated podcast because I've talked about that one a lot but you know that whole ending of just like no first this boss now this boss okay now he's running away from you you're going flying through space trying to knock this guy like it really does feel just like what you said Nadia the whole kind of I don't give a shit about any of this or any of you

you're all going to die you can all burn with me I don't care And you really get that sense of, it's perfect. The doomsday zone? Yeah, the doomsday zone, exactly. Although Sonic is, of course, fine. Zero does not have a little fox in a bioplane to rescue him, you know, unfortunately. I wish we did. Cupid fox talk comes out in a little biplane and six months.

That would be neat, but no. No, sadly, Zero does not survive. As far as we know, he does not survive the descent into the atmosphere. He turns into a biometal, maybe kind of. He turns into a smashed tin can. So do you remember the discourse that I'm pretty sure has subsided now that we have high resolution of the end title screen? Yes. Because the way the game ends with you see Zero's broken helmet lying in the sand and the rubble.

And there's the sun shining on it, casting long shadows and the glare from the sun. sun, in the low resolution Game Boy advanced screen, it does look like some of the debris could be a figure standing that is just back with. I mean, that's got to be their, um, well, hedging their bets to some extent. Like, I mean, we know now that it's not, but they could easily have said it was. They could have if they really wanted to, but just seeing just seeing the source of that illustration in its normal resolution, it's clearly not. It kind of reminds me of the face on the moon.

Yeah, yeah. Face on Mars stuff that's really. That's right, Mars. We really want. Here's the thing, though. No, they did not want to leave an out. They did not want to make a 0-5. They've said, like, no, we killed zero because we're done.

We are done with this. Like, we're not, we don't want to do Megamon 05. This is ending the series. So when people started, like, spotting phantom zeros, like, the background or whatever. You just know they were probably cussing. Yeah, yeah. We tried to make...

This was supposed to be as unambiguous as humanly possible. Please stop. Yeah, yeah. What's funny there, though, is... And, like, there was some speculation, and I kind of wish it had panned out. Because when you do get to make a man ZX, you've got this guy who does take up Model Z,

that's like got Zero's essence in it who already looks a lot like Zero and his name is like Zero it's I mean the idea that like you know oh maybe Zero just decided to lay low for a few hundred years and like now he's like you know running a UPS or something out of

kind of like Alucard in Donna Sorrow or area of sorrow where he's Alricardo he's a businessman and it just I don't know I still think it would have been great, especially for as long as he was like, you know, in the whole thing anyway. If, uh, Zero had been

Zero doing that whole thing. I agree. They should have kept him in there longer. Well, yeah, then he'd still be dead. So it wouldn't. I'm kind of mad that they killed him off. He was really cool. But, uh, anyway, Zero in this iteration, yes, certainly dead.

His helmet is there on the ground, all cracked and broken. And we all know there's nothing underneath the helmet. So that has to be that. Yeah. And actually, sorry, I just wanted to add one other thing. Ziro, like, you know, of course, doesn't have the helmet, like, not even like when he's mega merged. So that was kind of further fuel for that early on. But again, now he's turned out to be a whole other guy.

Yeah, yeah. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead. So, yeah, broken helmet, kind of a sad ending for the game where she'll, seal, clearly knows that Jero is probably not coming back. So she runs off to the hill side and has a good cry to the tune of a j-pop song by her voice actress unless you are in North America. Did they restore that for the collection? No, I don't think so.

No. I thought they did on the DS one. No. Oh, maybe on the DS one. I know not Legacy Collection. I don't think it is. Yeah, because there are vocals, but we don't get them in the English version of the game, unfortunately. Oh.

The song is called Frisia. And, yeah, Shale just kind of cries there for a little while as the wind goes through the trees. And it's actually, I think that the credits are all in kanji. It's kind of unusual. Okay. According to Mega Man Knowledge Base, they say, unlike the North American GBA version, the Mega Man Zero Collection uses the Japanese vocal ending for the game. Oh, that's good.

Oh, charming. Oh, great. But either way, you know, she gets over her cry and she stands up and says, like, you know, I believe in you zero. I know you'll come back to us someday. He never does. I'll make you come back. Nope.

I'll make you come back as a rock. Now, here's my question. I referenced it on the notes. Did any of you read the wild incident Eden Dome at Sinaiberth supplementary story thing that came with the soundtrack for? I think I did long ago. I have it some. It's possible I did a long time ago before I gave up reading. before I gave up reading.

It's really interesting, actually. It's set up in the manner of kind of a newspaper story written by someone who's visiting Area Zero two years after the fall and kind of going over what has happened since. And yeah, it looks like Reploids and humans are living in harmony finally. There's actually even an illustration where they're putting up a windmill together and they're all just kind of mingling. and mentions that there's a baby boom, apparently.

And humans just, they're fine. They get along. They're good. They're good until ZX. Good for them. Thanks, Zero, for your sacrifice. But I actually do recommend reading it. It's just the manner of writing is really interesting.

Was it Nez? No, it was a reporter. Nez is a reporter. It actually mentions her in the report. She gives the reporter a picture of herself and craft, and it's just like a picture of her sitting in Craft's lap and craft is very big behind her.

It's kind of sweet actually. Yeah, sweet. That is what she said. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so that is zero four. It's just like a, I don't, it's an unusual zero game,

but I think given how much conversation we've had about it, it's also an extremely interesting one. It's different. It has my favorite story of all the zero games. Yes, David. Oh, I just wanted to ask. I remember Victor was talking about coming back to the weather system thing later. Yes.

Is there anything you wanted to add on that? I was going to say, if you guys have anything else to add at this point, now it's the time to, like, just kind of give me your straight thoughts. When we talk about the series difficulty and, like, I think zero three nails it better. Like I mentioned, you have, it's something that they got better with as the series went on, but even the fact that you're just not meant to do well on the first time you beat a stage. What happens is they add more save slots to the games as they go on. Because what they actually want you to do is make a save slot where you just learn the stage.

and then you load up a save where you then execute completing that stage really, really efficiently and really, really well. Because the levels, the way the scoring system works is if you want a high score, you have to kill lots of enemies, you have to get through very quickly, you have to not get hit very much, and the scoring system is pretty strict. If you want an S rank, you have to get 96 to 100. A ranks are like 80 something to 90 something, B ranks. So in 03, the way you get X skills from the bosses is you have to finish their stage with an A rank or higher. Right. So what you would do is you'd make a save file for that level, get really, really good at it. It wasn't about blazing through the game linearly. It was about breaking it up into chunks that you get good at and execute really, really well.

Because there is, like, Four has like a crafting system and materials to farm and the e-crystals that you upgrade your cyber elf with, which was also totally revamped for four. Yeah, there's only one. Yeah, they're sort of leaning towards it with three with the, the satellite elves that are free to use. But then in this one, it's more like you can put your points in almost like you're gradually leveling up just the one elf, right? Yeah. And you gain more and more abilities, the more you feed it.

You can use it for free, which is nice. You know, it's friendly of them. Yeah. Unlike the first two games or three games even, like where you were, like, actively punished for using, like, cyber elves. I think this was more friendly for it. This is a lot more lenient, gives you room for experimentation. but the materials that you want to farm take time.

So you want to be going back into stages after you've cleared them for the first time and gotten your S rank to go get these materials. Otherwise, you're harming the bottom line of your score and risking losing your A or S ranks or whatever. So I think three really nails that balance really, really well. Right. before, it's not about whether it makes it too easy. It's about whether it incentivizes you to get good, to get better than you even need to be with with extra rewards like the X skills. Because the way they give the X skills is beating the bosses with their beneficial weather. Now, I don't love that the weather change system is just a toggle.

It's just either you're in good weather or you're in bad weather. Why do we as zero have control over this entire region? Because we're friends with Jesus. We talked about this. But there's no reason why that should work. No. What I wish. One of the resistance members hacked into the weather system from Eurasia.

Yes, Herondel tells you that, hey, we've got access to this region's weather. Don't worry. We can manipulate it however we want. Which seems like something that you would not, like a while would certainly, he's got all his weather-based minions at his beck and call. You'd think he would stop you from controlling the weather. Yeah, there is that. Yeah, he's about to send somebody down to, like, you know, assassinate, like, whoever's in there. And then he's like, wait a minute. Why is he making the stage harder? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, no, no, let them do it. This is weird. I want to see what... Abort the operation. Abort the operation. Let him cook, so to speak. Literally on Saltwitanian stage. Yeah. With all of the references to X-5, what I wish this game did, and I try not to do this,

I try not to speculate on what I wish a game was that it isn't. But when you're invoking X-5 like this with Eurasia, why not give it a timeline that where you are then you're monitoring the weather in the stages and you're trying to decide, okay, do I want to go to this stage while the weather is optimal or do I want to try to finish this one in this sort of time limit that is given to me? It's sort of like, yeah, in a way, it's sort of like the nightmare effects from X-6. I was going to say, yeah. I've been waiting the entire episode to bring that up.

Sorry. I just wanted to say on that point, yeah, it's very much like the nightmares, but I think I kind of prefer not like having to, like, you know, oh, I want to go fight Rainey Turtleoid. Oh, but I can't because, like, you know, scrupid effects in the stage. It actually kind of reminds me more of in X2 when you have the X hunters going into each stage. And you have to, you have one chance to get that hunter.

and if you complete the stage or leave the stage, it's gone. I think I agree. I mean, I basically, I'm going to be weird about X-5 just a minute, okay? Like, I think X-5 is one of the great Nihilist games. Like, it's, I, the fact that you can do everything right and still fail is like, oh, come on. Yes, art. Finally, games are up. You're Siread uncharted, you know.

But like, um, totally. I do think it would be cool if zero. did lean into that kind of not randomization because I don't want things like the nightmare effects because they do my head in. But if they did take more of a leaf out of X5 and the sense of you're not fully in control of this situation, because it does seem a little

toothless that you can just choose what you do when more or less. And if Hirondell was like giving you a weather forecast or something and it was like, okay, do a like which beneficial weather do I want to do now or do I want to use this opportunity to get an X skill from a boss that will help me do something later? Like there's a there's a schedule management thing and a time management thing that I think would have worked and and lent itself well to the sort of apocalyptic scenario plus

weather being such a factor like it would whatever. I guess one thing I want to mention. Sorry, real quick, I promise. Zero three is my favorite one. I do think that the difficulty isn't what it could be in the sense that getting these high ranks, if you want that challenge, you also are playing the objective. And some of the objectives in those levels are a pain in the ass, even if you know what you're doing. Like burning every single shred of vegetation or like that stage where you have to memorize the colors of the doors and go in the right door. And it's always the same.

And I'm kind of glad they took that stuff out from Ford just to make it a more straightforward action game. I don't think there are any real puzzle aspects here, apart from the occasional, get the key card, get the sub-tank, you know, search the levels, find, what is it called seretanium, the rare metal that you can craft with.

I do think it was a nice idea to give the player almost kind of a victory lap by this point, like, look, just tape the stuff. Like, it's fine. You don't want to have to unlock Jackson load and use every single goddamn cyber off. Nobody wants to do that. So that's gone.

I feel like they streamlined it. Maybe there's a fair argument that they streamlined it too much, but I think it paid off for telling the story they wanted to tell. Exactly. Yeah. Zero three really hit the difficulty sweet spot for me. It felt like the best kind of difficulty from the X games to me. To what Victor was saying earlier, though,

I don't remember using the multiple safe points often. Like after the initial completion of it, when I was trying to perfect it. Basically, what I would do is, like, you know, I'd play. And like, if I got hit or just anything that went wrong, I'd reset and, like, start over, like, reload the save file and just basically kind of do that over and over and over. Sure. And regarding the comparison between the nightmare system and zero four,

I will say that, like, you know, being able to choose probably would have benefited X6 more because there you've got the, like, you know, boss cycle weaknesses. I don't remember if that was like really such a thing in zero four, was it? Yeah, I mean, one thing with zero four is, did they get rid of the fire ice and electric chips in this game? I feel like they did. I think you had to craft them. Oh, you could still craft them.

I know you can get the X skills that use those kind of things, but it just felt like the focus was even less on the rock, paper, scissors type thing here, which means that no matter which order you do them in, it doesn't really matter that much. You're going to have a similar kind of time fighting the buses. So it's a weird balance to me. I don't know if any Mega Man game in the entire series

has ever perfectly managed to nail that. Even like X, my favorite, you can just stink a million your way through the second half of the games. Yeah. But I feel like in four they did capture something of that feeling of empowerment finally in a series where you're usually really up against it.

You're really scraping by. In this one, it's like, no, it's okay. Just, you know, feed some. crystals, you can have a much longer life bar. It's fine. Don't worry about it. You can have the AS Franks. You can have the skills. It's fine. As a treat. You fought very hard, okay? The next game is

a pain in the ass. Don't worry about it. Just do this one. Have a good time. Yeah, it was a nice change versus like, you know, zero ones. Like, you know, eat kittens to like, you know, get perks kind of, like, you know. Yeah. Yeah. I can never get behind that

kind of thing. I love all these games. It's just, it is a kind of a interesting thing where they've made probably ultimately the most simultaneously uplifting, painful, but also easy. I mean, some of the bosses are really hard, but you have much more opportunity to turn the tables. It works. I could go on forever, but I mustn't.

All right. Any final, final thoughts on 04? It looks like the consensus is it's a good game. Great in many ways, but maybe 03 is better in other ways. I think it's that frictionlessness that stops it being my absolute favorite, despite the fact that's what makes it more playable. It's a weird one. But I do love it. Great game.

I play it again in a second. Great fun. And 03 lets you decorate the home base. It does. Come on. What are we doing? It does. And I have to say, oh, and you can put cats, many, many, many cats in that base.

I am kind of pissed off, though, that the chip. or the card you're supposed to get for Andrew to turn back into a handsome reploid. He turns into a regular MPC. Like, boo, that's crap. Here's where we got ripped off, though, is because, like, you did all that stuff with e-reader cards, but we didn't get those e-reader cards here.

And I don't think those options were, like, legitimately available to us until either the DS collection or the legacy collection. Yeah, I think they were in D. They're in the DS one, yeah. Yeah, I think you beat the easy scenario for each game when you unlock the cards for as it goes along. Which is cool.

I get like plants. Very cool. It's fun. You're right, Victoring your base is a very important part of 03, and it sucks that took it out. Yeah, you can change zero's color. That's fun. Zero three is having fun.

It's having fun. It's having a good time. You can also cross it over with Battle Network 4, I believe, to get a Z-saber in that game and bring viruses from Battle Network into the Cybers series. That's so great. Just, hey kids. bring viruses into a world without viruses. It'll go great. Immunity.

Learn it real fast. That is it for this nature-destroying episode of Retronauts. Huge thank you to my guests. Who wants to promote stuff? Why don't we start with you, Stuart? Actually, the blood card, but no, I'm kidding. I read a book

called All Games are Good. You can get it through limited run games. It's about how all games are good, and I wrote it. And you can hear me on Retronauts fairly frequently, possibly too frequently. Some may say. As some are wrong. How about you, Victor?

Oh, of course. Well, Nadia and I are co-hosts over at a sort of Retronauts's sister podcast, all about RPGs, Acts of the Blood God. We've got our weekly episodes, and we've released a bunch of stuff over the holidays that are really great listens. Our most anticipated RPGs of 2026 episodes. just came out. We got a bunch of fun stuff planned for the future. So head on

over there. Our discord is also a real treat. We have a great discord. There's a lot of crossover in the retronauts in the Blood God community. But yeah, that's pretty much it. Also, I'm an actor.

Hire me. Oh my gosh. Please. Please hire me. Hire Victor. He's very good. And he has lots of experience. I have quite a bit of experience. And David, how about you? Well, for the, I guess, relevant stuff, I run the MMnetwork.com, which is the Mega Men Network,

and the MM Network on socials. So you can find me talking about or sharing Mega Men stuff there. We mentioned earlier this Wednesday, I have all better comic shops near you, or at least the one's handling lunar distribution. Mega Man Z-X timelines number one, which I did not write. And Mega Man Legends Timelines No. 1, which I did write. Those are both going on sale this week.

And also, Nadia and I, we do streams on the Nightworks. That's NYT-E-W-R-K-S Twitch channel. Usually every other weekend, we usually alternate between Nadia and David Rune video games, where we play, you know, whatever tickles are fancy at the time. time and not yet and David's Mega Man Mayhem where we play we're basically playing Mega Man games trying to adhere roughly to the chronological order like the like you know story timeline we're starting Mega Man 9 next time and uh you know once we finish classic we'll go on to X and after that we'll go on to zero and you know so on. Yeah it's good stuff I swear a lot. I try

not to swear when we're playing the Mega Man stuff because I try to keep it PG but sometimes I flip and then he gets mad at me. But anyway, if you like Retronauts, please support us over at patreon.com for slash Retronauts at $5 a month. You get episodes a week early and add free in addition to Discord access. You also get bonus articles and exclusive podcasts. But if you really want to blow your kids' inheritance money, you can subscribe to the new $100 month level for all that cool stuff plus the chance to be a guest on Retronauts for every four months that you are subscribed at the $100 level. Wow. That means you can tell us to dedicate an episode to calling ourselves stupid morons and we have to listen to you.

It'd be the law. But until you can actually afford us, so long, Zero. We'll see you again. You've been resurrected as a piece of scrap metal that gives children's superpowers.