Gameplay

The majority of it is immediately familiar to anyone who's played the X series. You can leap off walls and slide down them, you have your chargeable gun (it's a separate gun that he holds) and sword, no ducking, a dash move and dashing wall jump, and so on. However, everything's had something added to improve it in some way.

"Hard as nails...tough as Rock"

At first, the gun is chargeable for a simple powered-up shot. As you progress, you'll find Element Cards that will take your charge shot a step further and add an elemental power to your full charged-up shot. This takes the place of Megaman's gaining boss weapons against bosses, as you must now pick the right Element to damage the boss with (which only takes effect when fully charged). New effects are also added through this, as Fire will cause flames to engulf your enemy, Ice will freeze them in a large block of, you guessed it, ice, and Lightning will cause them to be surrounded by electricity.

Your sword has been massively upgraded and can now be charged with Elements just like the gun. As you progress, you'll also learn a highly valuable spin move that deals damage all around, and increases the sword's usefulness by a factor of ten. You can also obtain "souls" from enemies, which are divided up into three categories and carry over from game to game. (You can save your game after you beat it and then start a new one from the save file, which allows you to continue collecting these). As you play, you'll come across glowing spheres that you can collect, both from enemies and from containers, which will then show up in your menu. You can pick from what you've collected at any transporter, and then use them in-mission. They function like power-ups and can only be used once each.

The game exudes an old-school platformer type of skill, wherein enemies have all sorts of continuous respawning (and since there's backtracking at times, this can be a major pain), and is all about learning the levels. The bosses are the same way, following exact patterns that will beat you senseless the first five to ten times, but once you've got their pattern down, the situation reverses and they'll have a hard time hitting you. Frustrating as hell as you go through at first, but by the time you learn the stage and boss, it'll all be smooth as silk. Level goals will also vary from simply blowing through to the end boss to getting assignments like rescue-and-escort-to-safety" (easier then it sounds, not like most protect missions, which are only controller-throwing frenzies) and defuse-the-bombs.

A nice touch is that all the levels are eventually interconnected (à la Megaman Legends) if you find all the transporters. Damned nice touch, as the game helps to show it's not just random areas, but everything links to the base somehow. You're normally in a base, where you can run around and talk to people, including Roll, who will provide missions and a number of assignments. Kinda weird and different, but very nice. MM's definitely moving in a new direction, and I can't say I'm complaining. You can also talk to her to save your game, which helps out tons, especially considering how hard some of the levels are.

Also very helpful is the ability to reconfigure your controls. The default setup makes you hold down the R trigger and press Attack to activate the sword, which is very cumbersome and doesn't work too well for many sections. Thankfully, that can be changed to a single button press, and you can move any of the actions around as you like. Small, but too often left out of games.

Graphics

Positively incredible. The backgrounds are wonderful, chock-full of large buildings and ships, featuring gorgeous animation like the shimmering desert and all sorts of machinery blinking and flashing away. The levels themselves are nicely done. Each area feels like it flows into the next, and there's a wonderfully cohesive design to everything. The art style is somewhere between the X series and Legends/Dash, and has some of the coolest looking bosses in any Megaman game since X.

The animation of the characters is beautiful, and does not detract from gameplay. Enemies are a joy to watch move, especially bosses, and the death sequences are great. Whenever you use the blade, enemies and bosses all have separate death animations that feature them being cleaved in half, exposing the inside tubes and wires, lined with blood (the gun simply has enemies traditionally explode for deaths). This game far and away features the most amount of blood I've ever seen in a Megaman game, and I certainly hope it doesn't get edited for domestic release.

A huge amount of sprite rotation is used in the game. A lot of enemy deaths (falling backwards), as well as various enemies' spinning, attacks (watch the beam attack from the first boss), and other sprinkled areas all utilize it. I really like the way that looks, so I'm glad to see it used plenty here. There are also lots of nice little details to complement that (like the spark that appears when Zero leaps off a wall), and the only detraction I could find is that character portraits don't blink (and that's pretty damn minor).

Sound

Unfortunately, none of the music is terribly memorable, but there are a few high-quality tracks sprinkled throughout (some of the boss music is great). None of it is bad in any way, but you probably won't think of it afterwards, unlike older tunes from early Megaman games.

The sound effects are all great. Explosions, firing noises, voices - all are done well and sound great (headphones all the way). Some of the voices can get on your nerves, but most are wonderful, and much more then I expected out of the GBA. Listening to that green boss belt out what sounds like "Honey!" every time he fires a certain shot was annoying, and the monkey-boss . . . oh God, listening to that thing shriek as it ran back and forth, I really wanted to kill it. (And I did.)

Bottom Line: A few cheap areas and annoyances aside, this is my favorite GBA game yet, and with MMX and MM3, my favorite Megaman game - and I can't even figure out the story or some of the helpful items. For those who don't speak Japanese, you should wait for the domestic release as there's a lot of story and plenty of options to go through, many of which are not easily figured out. I highly recommend it once it gets released in the language of your choice. I'll be first in line for my domestic copy!

· · · MechDeus