G4TV

The original Mega Man ZX was a brilliant game with a fatal flaw. Everything worked fine except one thing, which was the game’s mapping system. It had a free-roaming world – like Metroid or a new-school Castlevania adventure – but it expected you to essentially memorize how to get around, or find each new area through trial and error. The in-game map was almost, if not quite, so low in detail as to prove completely useless.

Mega Man ZX Advent fixes the flaw. It features a detailed map on the touch screen that clearly lays out the structure of every area, and makes it pretty clear how to get from one area to another. It even has two levels of detail, so you can tap an icon to view the world at the macro level. Tap it again to view your current area at the micro level. As a result, this is just a brilliant game. It’s a gorgeous-looking side-scroller with tons of room to explore, tons of enemies to fight, and tons of challenge for the hardcore action gamer. Mere mortals, meanwhile, can choose the Beginner level of difficulty and have a pretty good time too.

I’ll Take That, Thanks

Like the original ZX, Advent builds on an evolved version of the classic Mega Man gimmick. Instead of absorbing a simple weapon from defeated boss enemies, you gain the ability to simply transform into that boss, taking over all their different weapons and movement abilities.

This opens up a ridiculous number of possibilities for combat, puzzles, and platforming challenges, because each of the bosses – there are more than a dozen – has a pretty sizable repertoire of moves. With just a couple of boss battle victories under your belt, you’ll be able to smash blocks, jump from walls, melt ice, climb vines, slow down time, fire off jolts of electricity, and swim underwater with ease.

If there’s a flaw in the level and mission design, it’s that sometimes there are too many different things you have to do. The game world is fairly large open-ended, even in the early stages of the game, so you can often head in a couple of different directions at once. One area might contain a boss battle that unlocks abilities needed to advance in another area…but you won’t know you need them until you’ve headed a long way down that latter fork in the road. On the other hand, heading off in that direction might reveal some abilities that make the backtracking easier. There are enough bosses scattered around the game world, as well as hidden chips and other extras, that wandering is rarely a waste of time, even if it eventually lands you at a dead end.

Sights To Show You

Often it’s fun to just run around admiring the scenery. Pound for pound, considering the limitations of the DS screen, this is one of the best-looking 2D games money can buy. The outdoor areas mix up as many as three different layers of parallax scroll, and the quality of the artwork matches the programmers’ technical chops. Advent’s characters are detailed little cartoons in the classic Mega Man style – often featuring excellent animation, too, especially in the case of the rival Biometal bosses – and the backgrounds help create a world with lots of depth and color.

The soundtrack, too, helps draw you in, with lots of catchy music (something the series is famous for) and a surprising amount of voice acting. While the voice clips have been compressed down a fair bit with the sound quality suffering as a consequence, they still don’t sound that bad at all, and they add a lot to confrontations with bosses and other major characters.

Easy Way, Hard Way

Mega Man has also always been famous for its challenge. Sometimes “infamous” is more like the right word, though – the franchise has had a few outings that were just unreasonably tough. Advent tries to solve that problem by throwing in a mode for less experienced players.

The Beginner difficulty level changes much more than just the bad guys’ life bars. It makes it easier to unlock warp points – so you can get around the game world faster at less expense – and changes the layout of some areas to swap in less dangerous opponents. Beginner mode also inserts more tutorial blurbs, so experienced players who don’t need the controls explained to them can cruise on through uninterrupted, but novices will get a quick note that might reveal something they didn’t already know.

Altogether, it’s a great addition to the game, and one that obviously took a lot of extra work on Capcom’s part. If there’s one complaint to be made, though, it’s that there isn’t a happy medium. The default mode is very hard, tough enough to challenge any veteran gamer. There’s a wide gap between that and Beginner mode, which a lot of players are liable to cruise through unscathed. If there were a mode that split the difference, leaving out Beginner’s tutorial bits and upping the strength of the enemies a little, that would make the selection almost perfect.

Transformation

Advent’s done more than enough for one sequel, though. It fixes the main problem with the original ZX, throws in some other major improvements besides, and keeps everything that almost made ZX a classic to begin with. Now that it’s finally playable and pretty friendly to beginners as well, there’s no reason for anyone that owns a DS to pass this new Mega Man up.

Review by: D.F. Smith