Why the Ending of Mega Man Zero 4 is Effective

*Spoiler Warning*

Mega Man Zero, as a series, presents itself as a sort of black sheep to the overall Mega Man franchise, even when compared to the Battle Network/Star Force spin-offs. The Zero spin-off is the darkest of the series, but despite that, neither the story nor the characters can be taken seriously. The writing is choppy and stilted, and the implied relationships fall flat due to a lack of interaction between the characters. Furthermore, the game encourages players to perform well based on a score-based system, and incentivizes that notion in Mega Man Zero 2 and 3 with the promise of gaining new abilities. However, despite the fact that the incentive is nowhere to be found in Zero 4, I found myself compelled to sweat and bleed by finishing each level with the coveted S-rank that never benefited me. The rank became less of an arbitrary carrot on a stick and became my raison d'être for playing the game. I was not compelled by the patterns of pixilated marionettes. I only wanted to know how skilled I could be at the game, and the rank screen displayed at the end of every level proved arbitrary, but it was a definite way for me to gauge my performance.

I will never care for any of these characters.

Compared to the original Mega Man series, Mega Man Zero is starkly different – instead of distilling the game mechanics to the running, jumping and shooting, Zero adds variety by incorporating dashing, wall clinging/jumping, slashing, and other techniques, depending on the installment. However, all of the mechanics are somehow purer than the later installments of the original series that bordered on the edge of convolution in that it provides a repertoire of moves that are well-defined and are the only factors at play through the entirety of the series. Therein lies the motivation: by forcing the player to operate within a strictly-defined set of rules, the player learns the vocabulary of the world quickly, and the player becomes quicker to adapt to any emergent hurdles. By creating so many constraints, and by specifically tailoring the experience in a certain way, the game promotes flexibility and creativity with limited resources. Furthermore, the game is shaped by its various subtleties, such as the emphasis on swordplay rather than gunplay. At no point do the games remove the ability to use your gun/buster shot, but by making the short-range sword a more viable option for dealing damage, the weapon becomes the player’s all-purpose tool in moving through the levels, and the player is nudged towards creating a myriad vignettes of action that keep the entire structure of the game fast-paced. The levels are essentially obstacle courses, and by playing the game for the highest rating possible, retrying each level becomes an inevitability as the “right” paths and courses of action are memorized, imbedding several specific routes into the mind that cannot carry into other levels, and that is sloppy design. However, even the levels share no sense of cohesion, and even if the story detracts from the overall game flow, the individual cases of split-second decision making are so effective in that they present one constant fail-state: death. That is why the ending to the game is striking.

After reaching the final boss and defeating its first form, the final level – a satellite – begins crashing to the earth, with Zero and the final boss still on it. In a scripted story event, Ciel, Zero’s mission support, tells Zero that if he leaves at that moment, he will leave alive, but Zero refuses to acknowledge that he is supposed to care for her, and decides to continue fighting. That one moment presents both a betrayal of the player’s agency while unwittingly acknowledging the flimsy story. Zero is the player, but if the player is incapable of caring for the characters, then it’s logical that Zero should act the same. However, that does not happen until that one moment: the train wreck of a story continues on without a care in the world, and it is implied that Zero is involved in a series of events that the player cannot skip. The story will grate, and it will interfere with the player’s enjoyment of the game, but that one moment acknowledges that Zero, like the player, is only motivated by battle and the idea of finding things to slice in half. However, the moment destroys the player’s agency and is counter-intuitive to the entire game. Zero is not the player, and he decides to fight until he dies, creating a bitter irony that negates the ideas behind a game driven by split-second decisions and the drive for success. Regardless of what the player does from that point forward, he/she will earn their fail state. Both victory and defeat will result in Zero’s death, but the third option – escape – is not available. The goal of the game is survival, and if the player tries to earn an S-rank by learning from his/her deaths, then what lesson can be learned from Zero’s last stand? Nothing.

I wish I could pretend to care for you as much as you care for me.

By choosing to end the game with Zero dying, the folks over at Inti Creates have presented a grim interpretation of life in general: our life and death are two mutually exclusive concepts, and our actions and our lessons in life will not carry over into what will inevitably follow, even if they are so intertwined. We are defined by a series of split-second decisions, but we can never choose to escape our fate. However, by creating a game that is enjoyable, they have also imparted joy into my life, which is what motivates me to strive onwards and to escape my own fail state. The story of the game is a mass of cockamamie interactions, but by emphasizing action, rather than contemplation, the game, with its leading robot, is somehow able to appeal to the plight of humanity. Even if the lives and livelihoods of the characters never existed, Zero and the player give life to each other because ultimately, they are the same person.