This week, our guest writers wrap up their Mega Man Zero recollections with their final posts about Mega Man Zero 4. Today we have 1UP’s Jeremy Parish with his last guest blog, recalling his memories of playing Mega Man Zero 4. You can check out the previous entries, including: Protodude from Protodude’s Rockman Corner and Heat Man from the Mega Man Network .

From Jeremy:

Sequels can be a dangerous thing. In the best case scenario, they let developers improve on good ideas, bringing refinements and complexity to an idea. And that’s great. But there’s always the danger posed by the annual sequel cycle, which has a tendency to result in a steady stream of games that feel like more of the same, and always a little too soon. And that is why I didn’t have terribly high expectations for Mega Man Zero 4: As the fourth Zero title in as many years, I assumed it would just be a rehash of the last game, leading into the next year’s warmed-over sequel.

Happily, I was totally mistaken.

Hit the jump for more!

 Sure, MMZ4 felt familiar — it was built around the same graphics and mechanics as the previous three Zero titles — but it did a lot of things I really wasn’t expecting. Take the weather system, for instance. This wasn’t really a new idea for a Mega Man game (remember how defeating Chill Penguin would affect Flame Mammoth’s stage back in the first Mega Man X?), but MMZ4 finally explored the idea to its logical extreme and made an interesting game mechanic out of it. Swapping the weather before launching into a mission served as a creative adaptation of the ol’ difficulty selection switch, with rain or sun alternately making different stages much harder or much easier to navigate.

Of course, you could only properly appreciate this aspect of the game if you didn’t weasel out and play it on easy mode — not that there’s anything wrong with starting out with a gentler difficulty level! Inti Creates isn’t known for being merciful to their fans, so easy mode was a handy way to get a sense of the level layouts and enemy weaknesses… acceptable strictly as a warm-up for a real playthrough.

The trade-off for MMZ4’s innovations was that they forced the game’s structure to be a lot more traditional that what had been seen in the previous Zero titles. I’ll admit it: When I reviewed MMZ4, I dinged it pretty hard for what I saw at the time as a reversion to a less inventive play style. Over time, though, I’ve developed more of an appreciation for what MMZ4 did accomplish, particularly the way it took a concept that had appeared from time to time throughout the Mega Man franchise over the years and finally did it justice.

The most important thing about MMZ4, though, is something that’s only become apparent in retrospect: It brought the Zero series to an actual, honest-to-god end. Sure, the game’s ending seemed pretty conclusive… yet I thought the same thing about Mega Man X5, only to have to suffer through the ill-concieved and wholly unnecessary X6 a year later. But no, MMZ4 was it: The ultimate, absolute finale to the tale of X and Zero. The series’ spirit lived on in the ZX games, but Inti Creates and Capcom had the decency to stick to MMZ4’s epilogue and make a clean break. No takebacks, no magical resurrections, just a leap ahead to a spiritual successor set centuries later.

Real endings are entirely too rare in this medium… especially when you’re talking about a franchise that consists of something like a hundred different games. That makes MMZ4 a rare gem of a game, and a satisfying conclusion to a great series.