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| "Sometimes before you beat the game, the game first must beat you." |
I had to wait two damn years for this, but it was well worth the wait.
This game was announced late 2019, where I pre-ordered it from the official Capcom store. Ordering this from the online store was not the easiest thing to do, since I had to use a VPN to access the website as the pre-order was not available in Europe. Additionally, I had to let this game ship to an address in the United States.
When it comes to importing stuff, I usually do it the old fashioned way where I let the product ship to a colleague from work and then wait until an overseas business trip is scheduled. It's pretty much what I'm most accustomed with, especially when it comes to Nintendo-related products. Although nowadays this hands-on approach can be considered obsolete, but it does get the job done. If you have a network, you only need to be patient. Or in this case, very patient.
Anyway, it's time for another history lesson! In the early days of the internet, indie game development became a common pastime activity with the growing popularity of free game development software. I was involved with a handful small projects as a spriter, since I found making sprites for games to be something I found interesting and fun to do.
Being that much involved with spriting grew my passion and preference for pixel-based graphics. Eventually I came across an old website called The Spriters Resource where it was easy to pluck lots of different sprite sheets. You could use these sheets to make placeholder images, which in return would make developing early builds of games easier.
It was fun to browse the expansive library on the website and I visited it daily to see what was added. Through this I eventually stumbled across sprite sheets of the then-released Mega Man Battle Network and Zero series, which is how I initially became aware of their existence. I even did end up using some of their sprites in a handful of projects.
A few years later, I was visiting my local Free Record Shop to purchase Pokémon Pearl, which then just came out.
On the same shelf, I found a copy of Mega Man ZX. Out of pure curiosity and familiarity with the sprites from its predecessors, I instead decided to buy ZX based on what was shown on the back of the box. Ironically ZX ended up being a better purchase than Pearl, as Pokémon Platinum's announcement wasn't too far away.
So yes, ZX was my entry to the franchise. It was still during a time when I was only interested in playing video games on the easiest difficulty, as I greatly struggled to beat games like these on even the easiest difficulty settings.
It was only until much later that I grew capable of overcoming challenging video games, simply by continuing to play them. By gradually raising the bar, I came to understand and appreciate the game loop of difficult video games. Eventually, I became skilled enough to beat them, to a point where game difficulty became a part of the enjoyment.
In 2016, I decided to pick up a copy of Mega Man ZX Advent, with the intent of beating Expert Mode. After that,
I purchased Zero 3 and 4 on the Wii U's Virtual Console. I also wanted to have ZX and Advent on the Wii U, but unfortunately Nintendo didn't include them with the service. Playing these types of games on a TV with a SNES controller really does bring out the best experience, and with the Zero/ZX Collection, it offers just that.
The collection itself isn't perfect, but it definitely raises the bar within its genre. It almost includes everything and the image quality is almost as good as it'll get. Unfortunately for whatever reason did they not include the Battle Network connectivity for Zero 3 and the pixel ratio for the DS games aren't 1:1. And for the sake of being a purist: the collection doesn't offer the original GBA versions of the Zero games as it only offers the DS editions. Thankfully though, what is included is a steal. Almost every regional release of each game is included (so you can play the uncensored Japanese versions if you want) and they went the extra mile by including the uncompressed audio/video files for the ZX games.
Anyway. I do hope that one day Capcom would hire Inti Creates again to do ZX3. As the most desirable games are not those that are guaranteed to eventually come out... but those that are unlikely to ever exist. Most want Half-Life 3, others wanted Metroid Dread, but to me, Mega Man ZX3 and Sin & Punishment 3 are those games.
