Mega Man ZX Advent

I don't know about this one. It's a good game and all but, it's quite a decline from ZX and to me, it's not one of my favorites. There's a lot of good design decisions in this game and most of it isn't a pain in the ass in difficulty compared to ZX. Mostly though it seems this game has a lot of little things that bug me about it and very little of it has to do with gameplay. I'm going to try to not nitpick this game to death as best I can, but I will stress my points as to why it isn't as good as ZX.

New Features

• Two New Characters: Grey and Ashe. They have different stats and attacks and slightly different stories.
• This game has a lot more forms in it. In addition to ZX and the Guardian forms you'll also be able to take the forms of the pseudoroids you defeat.
• The map has been designed to not be such a pain in the fucking ass this game. Thank god for that.

Story
Mega Man ZX Advent has the big problem of talking way to fucking much. The whole game is blah blah blah blah blah on and on and on. You'd swear you were playing Battle Network or Star Force with how much these characters drone on.

So your first choice is between choosing Ashe, a human treasure hunter searching for some missing Biometals for the government, or you can choose Grey, a reploid who wakes up in a mysterious laboratory and has no idea who or what he is. Now the majority of the games story is the same. Ashe or Grey meet up with Model A and end up on a quest to discover who they are.

Anyway if you play as Grey, Pandora from the first game shows up to wreck your shit and the bridge Grey is standing on collapses. The hunters (basically treasure hunters) want Grey to come with them to Legion (the world government) to get some shit sorted out. Tell you the truth I can't remember all that well as it's been a year or so since I last played as Grey. Anyway on the train to Legion HQ, Pandora shows up with Prometheus to fuck up Grey and the Hunters when a Biometal, Model A, jumps up out of a crate and Mega Merges with Grey. Pandora and Prometheus decide that Grey can go on living and keep Model A for now, but Grey still has to deal with a Psuedoroid on the train.

If you play as Ashe, you'll start in a much cooler level as Ashe is chasing down her... "booty"... in an air ship with a group of hunters. She's looking for the Biometals for the bounty Legion has placed on them, but Prometheus shows up and fucks her and her crew all up. She survives and they get the Biometal anyway somehow... they really don't explain how that happened... Anyway she gets on the train and tells about her life story how when she was young she was the only survivor of a maverick attack and has no idea about her family or home town or anything about her. Then Prometheus and Pandora show up and insert what happens to Grey but this time substitute Ashe.

Anyway Grey/Ashe get called to see the Sage Trinity (the world leaders) of Master Albert, Thomas and Mikhail and if you've caught the reference good for you, this is the first of so many throw backs that even a huge Mega Man nerd like me gets sick of them. Anyway Albert turns out to be evil and has a bunch of Model W's through out the world collecting people's bad feelings and he's having a bunch of Mega Men kill each other in what he calls the "Game of Destiny" where basically the last man standing is king or something.

As the game progresses we find out that Albert has infused his DNA into reploids and the survivors of maverick raids (I guess through blood transfusions) to build his army of Mega Men which he will pit against each other. These are the ones who can use Biometal... which confuses me because I thought ZX said that Ceil made the biometals... I probably got lost in the 90,000 lines of dialog though so my bad.

Model A we find out was built by Albert as a means of storing the data for A-Trans or something, which is the ability to transform into just about anything, and looks a hell of a lot like Axl from X7 and X8, enough to not be a coincidence but the storylines of X and ZX aren't fleshed out enough to draw a real connection just yet, so for now this could just be another stupid throwback. On the other hand it could be Axl in a few given sequels but only time will tell.

Vent or Aile show up along the way as well depending on who you play and are there searching for the stolen Guardians biometals who are now in the hands of some other ass hole Mega Men playing that Game of Destiny mentioned earlier. We also find out Prometheus and Pandora are stuck working for Albert because they'll die if they don't and they plan to kill him, but Albert tricks them into wanting him dead and wanting revenge and stuff so the W-Cores can absorb all their hate and whatever and activate Albert's final form "Ouroboros" which will make him a god or something and bring about man's next step in evolution by killing everyone for some reason.

Grey turns out to be a reploid copy of Albert and Ashe turns out to be his daughter. They beat him and Model Z blows up on the air ship. Yeah, thought I'd just toss that one in there. Everyone's happy game over.

Then if you beat it on expert mode or a third time after completing it with both characters, Master Thomas turns out to be a bad guy and calls back the evil Mega Men to presumably take over the world... that he already rules? Fuck this game is stupid. Honest to god this is my best guess as to what the story is trying to tell me because it's really complicated as fuck and incredibly stupid. ZX wasn't particularly great either but you'd be surprised how much voice acting can affect your opinion of a plot.

Aesthetics
Advent is a lot more dull and darker in color than the Vibrant and bright colors of ZX. The stages aren't quite as varied as they were in ZX but are adequate. The stages of ZX definitely had more personality though, going through burning buildings and amusements parks for example, but Advent has a lot of factory like places. There's a few decent looking stages such as the floating ruins and the highway stages but everything in this game is very drab looking.

This game probably houses the biggest collection of the stupidest looking bosses in the series. Sure, there's worse out there, like Tornado Tonion or Wire Sponge, but this game has a lot of really weird looking bosses. You've got a mohawk wearing fire dog thing, an time stopping ice crab fish thing, a giant queen bee, a flower, a electric hedgehog, a guitar playing... skull thing, an oversized frost crocodile and roller skating care bears. They all just look silly and half of this shit you can't even tell what its supposed to be. Quite a step backwards from the dangerous and sharp looking bosses from ZX and Zero. ZX conquers this game visually.

Sound
ZX has some of the best music in video game history and I'm not afraid to say it. It's so good I don't think it's fair to really hold Advent to the same standard that ZX set, that said, Advent has by far an inferior sound track. It's not terrible but there's hardly anything memorable in here besides the hand full of reused ZX soundtracks.

In addition to the music however, ZX Advent also features voice acting. Not only is the voice acting god awful, the sound quality is so bad it sounds like it's coming in through a CB radio. I have to say I'm not really sure why Capcom didn't contact the Ocean Group for this one. I'm sure Lucas Gilbertson would have done the 5 or six lines for Model Z if they asked him. I have no idea why Capcom would go from decent voice actors to incredibly bad ones, nor why they would make them read their lines in different tones through a single sentence.

Design
Enemy placement in this game is much better, allowing players to have some breathing room and more reaction time than ZX which pretty much littered hundreds of enemies on the screen and laughed at you as you tried to dodge them over hundreds of pits and spikes. For that alone this game is a million times easier. The stages themselves are alright but there are a few tricky platforming sections here and there, such as the waterfall stage which has retracting spikes that can fuck you up, but overall not quite as difficult as ZX.

Something that bothers me about this game is that you don't receive the model ZX form until about halfway through the game and unfortunately it is by far and away the pretty much only useful form in the game. Most forms are relegated to stupid gimmick uses, such as Queen Bee being used to pick up barrels or Buckfire's form being used to break blocks. There are very few reasons to switch away from Model A until you get to Model ZX and then you'll use that the rest of the game. The boss fights are especially easy with ZX as a rolling air slash attack will pretty much take out most bosses no problem.

The bosses still retain weakness in elements and certain areas of their body, but gone are the level victories which power up your biometals. Instead this game you collect the upgrades like you would subtanks or life-ups. You still get E-crystals but now you just use them to buy teleporter areas, and you won't find yourself needing many E-Crystals for that even. On beginner mode, they aren't even used for this, making E-Crystals almost pointless to collect. Overall this game is a lot easier than ZX but I find the first game more satisfying to play.

Playability
There aren't many problems with this game control wise. Some of the forms can be confusing in how you're supposed to apply them but Model A tells you what to do when you get the form and there is a handy list of moves always available for you. If you've played any Mega Man game this one shouldn't be a problem.

Extras

• Probably the best place to farm for extra lives is the Oil Fields. Once you have some ability to fly there are about 4 of them in the area.
• Keep giving the digger E-Crystals in Hunter Area 4 until you can get the sidequest to get the blue prints. After that, the guy you do the quest for will sell you E-tanks.
• Beat the game once to unlock a special 8-bit Mega Man bonus game. Silly Inti, a new 8-bit Mega Man game would never work!

Despite the flaws with Advent, most of them are superficial and some are just coming from the comparisons to ZX. ZX Advent is a solid game and worth adding to your DS library.

Playthroughs
N/A