Megaman Zero Collection Review for the Nintendo DS

     When this game was first announced, it was supposed to be Japan only. I wished and hoped and PRAYED it would finally come to our shores! The gaming gods smiled down upon us and finally delivered. You get all four Megaman Zero games packed perfectly unaltered inside of one cartridge. Considering that Megaman Zero was one of THE best series on the Gameboy Advance, this is a collection not to be passed up. And being that I only had the first one, I was totally in for a treat.

Gameplay

+ The “Devil May Cry” of handhelds - Pure, unadulterated speed and destruction. Never are you standing still, it’s just a constant push to the end of the stage until your final showdown with the residing boss of the area.

     Like the Megaman X games, you have your dash and wall-climb abilities, Zero’s sword and Megaman’s buster (although it’s just a pistol in these games). Basically you play through a stage as fast as possible, taking as little damage as you can manage. As you dash through the stage, you’ll end up using the sword to slice through enemies, watching their bodies separate as they explode in the wake of your speed and mercilessness. SUCH A RUSH! It just has that “Devil May Cry” feel to it when it comes down to the speed and precision of everything. If only they transplanted Dante's personality into Zero... Hmm...

+ Tough as nails, smooth as butter - First time going through each title, you’ll be dying endlessly as the waves of enemies, level design, and bosses just don’t give a **** about your wellbeing. If you stop out of frustration though, you’ll be missing out. Fighting through the frustration to complete every level is what makes you a better, more confident, and precise gamer. Playing this collection is an opportunity to prove your worth.

      After you go through a level once successfully, you know how it’s done; when to dash, to jump, and to slash. It gives you the opportunity to transform yourself into a total bad-ass as you ambush baddies before they even appear on the screen. Going through the stage again after that, you get to try for the high S ranks, awarded only to those with the best speed, enemies destroyed, damage taken and items collected. It’s HARD to S-rank and if you manage to receive one, it’s because you really deserve it and you worked hard memorizing every step and rhythm of the level.

= A mode for all mankind - So the games are just way too hard for you. Fine. Lucky for you, there’s a continuous mode where you play through all four games without breaking up the story and every game is set to an easy difficulty. I wouldn’t recommend this unless you really can’t push yourself to make it through the rough difficulty or you’re in a supreme rush and you just want to know the story. It’s much more worth your time to just fight through each game and show it what’s for. BE A WO/MAN! It would have been really cool if you could have adjusted the difficulty for continuous mode.

     As a plus though, if you go through on easy and learn the layouts of the levels, normal will become much easier. At least it should…

+ Weapons cache - The main weapons available in each title only get better through every game. You have the Z-saber, buster, shield boomerang, and triple rod. Most of the time, you’ll only use the Z-saber but there really isn’t a drawback from using everything else. It really depends on how you want to play. The shield can reflect bullets and be tossed about the screen like a saw blade on a boomerang and the triple rod can be extended three times (you’ll stab in one of 8 directions and you can attack two more times while increasing the strength and reach of the rod), you can jump and stab downwards to bounce on enemies, and you can charge for a rod-spin attack to negate any bullets. I preferred the Z-saber for dash-cuts and spin-slashes; it was just more speed-oriented and that's how I roll, pardon the pun... Get it? Roll, Megaman, his sister?...


+ The way a sequel is meant to be - Every next installment of the series improves on the last at the same time as succeeding at trying to do something new. Megaman Zero 4 was really good but after hitting its plateau with Megaman Zero 3, the series was bound to begin losing steam. Luckily enough, it seems like they recognized that and gave the fourth installment to the fans as a last hurrah. Every one of the games are incredibly awesome and it pays to go through them in order. Jumping around to whatever title can cause you to perform poorly since they evolve the gameplay formula in each title so drastically. The Megaman Zero series on the GBA is a great example to the rest of the industry on how to constantly build and improve on something already so successful.


Story and Presentation

= Am I good or bad? - The tale woven through the four titles is a story of Zero kind of figuring out who he is. Is he a savior of mankind or is he really just a tool of destruction gone rogue for the moment. While the stories aren't incredibly deep, it's holds your interest enough to actually wonder what might happen in the next game and how the series will conclude.


+ Humans or robots... Does it matter? - Reploids have been cast out from the society of humans and it seems, in the role of Zero, that you are protecting them from a genocide of their kind. There are reploids who protect the humans in their utopia and form assaults on helpless, outcast reploids. When you kill the attacking reploids though, instead of just feeling that you destroyed a machine, they split apart, showing their insides and motion their bodies in a reactionary pose of pain. You destroyed a sentient being, not merely a machine. Making observations between the morals and ethics of how artificial lifeforms should be treated are part of what makes the series interesting. It's also alluring to be aware of such violence even though the game is hardly that gratuitous.


= Don't judge a book by it's cover - While all of the artwork for the Megaman Zero series has been nothing but AWESOME, there seems to be a lack of focus in the look of the game's menus. Kinda lets me down since I feel like the game deserves a blaring fanfare for its achievements of being such a bad-ass action game but the games tend to speak for themselves. I guess it keeps the unwanted demographics from a gem... Whoever those demographics are... I wanted more artwork! *weeps*


Sound


= Just enough - The soundtrack can be good at times but I seem to get a much larger rush from playing using my own music. I'd suggest you do the same. If not though, no worries. Nothing ever hurt anyone's ears while playing.


Graphics

= You look good for your age - For whatever they lack in any technical area, they make up for with great artwork. At times, it comes of as visually simplistic but it does what it needs to to stay aesthetically pleasing. Luckily, it still holds up today, avoiding a visual style that plagues old Playstation games.


Should you buy it?


     YES! A large, emphatic YES! There's so much bang for your buck with this collection! You get 4 full games in their original form to play through and the gameplay is fitting for small sittings or lengthy run-throughs. If you're a fan of action games, or if you want something new to play on your DS, or both, I can't imagine that there exists any reason that you haven't picked this up. Go out and buy it, NOW!


Megaman Zero Collection was developed by Inti Creates and Natsume and published by Capcom for the Nintendo DS. Completed the entire collection and attempted the various difficulties and S-ranks clocking in at a playtime over 20 hours.

Style Savvy Review for Nintendo DS

     I HAD to give this game a shot! With such high review scores and recommendations, I was pretty enticed to try out this fashion game. And besides that, I was already interested when I found out that it was a fashion game that didn't play down to it's audience. It treats you like a person, not a generic 8 year-old girl that likes Barbie dolls. So here's what I got out of my experience:

= Try this on for size! - Here's the barebones of Style Savvy: Look at your customer's personality and clothing style and try to match it. That's it! Unfortunately, it didn't really work for me. I don't think anyone really knows that I secretly love women's clothes. I also have no better way of wording that sentence either at the moment! I mean it in the sense that I love the way women look in different fashions. It seems so much more fun than what guys tend to have going on. I looked forward to playing since I think that I may have a good eye for what goes with what to make an attractive outfit. I wanted to have my own store and sell styles that I liked. That's what any fashion store would do, right? You don't go to Hot Topic to find stuff you'd see at Abercrombie and Fitch (Their clothes don't breathe worth a damn by the way). Unfortunately, that's not what you get with Style Savvy and it was a bit disappointing.
     You get your own store and you get to choose what kind of fashions it sells, what the front of the store looks like, and even the music of your shop! None of this seems to factor into what kind of customers you get. I ran a boho-chic shop (Think indie, earthy wear) and I kept getting teenyboppers and elite class women. I went out of my way to make sure the game recognized what kind of clothes I wanted to sell but it just wouldn't give me the right customers.

+ Maybe this is more you? - There is a bit more depth to the game than I've seen with a couple of other fashion-oriented games, not that I've played any though. There's a bit too much to go through and they'd all get small explanations anyway so lets just shoot right through what else Style Savvy offers.

• Hard Sells - Just because someone wants what they asked for doesn't mean you have to give it to them. Sometimes someone just wanted a prissy mini-skirt but you just don't have it. Offer them something else that might compliment they're current attire or personality and you might rope them in to try something new. 

• Fashion Shows - You can enter into fashion shows to win premium clothing pieces and gain recognition for your store. They're incredibly easy to win though, I can't say that I felt like my competitors were even trying.

• Guest Designer - A company can hire you to design a piece with one of their own stylists but the only thing you can do is change two colors of specific designs on the clothes. Kind of a missed opportunity right there because how cool would it be is you could really just make your own designs?

• Customize The Store - You get to choose the looks, the sounds, and the styles of your store as well as making your own mannequin displays, creating advertisement flyers, and declaring sales.

• Magazine Features - At times, you can be interviewed for a magazine article where you can show them one outfit and two additional pieces of clothing to show off. I didn't get interviewed more than once and customers were constantly asking for what was featured in the article when I could no longer acquire them.

• Seasonal Outfits - The styles that you can buy actually change around the year.

• Interact With Other Store Owners - You can connect to the internet to obtain exclusive fashion items and receive flyers from other players to shop at their stores. For a game like this, this specific feature is genius to me. 

- Sorry, I wanted leather, not pleather - For all that it does to vary the gameplay, there's just so much that it fails to fully deliver on which sucks because there's so much potential! The more you play it, the more you begin to see that the whole game is just based on giving clothes to picky NPC's. I expected more from Style Savvy.

- The Fashion Police have arrived - I wanted self-expression. I wanted to dress up women and I wanted to influence the styles of my new customers that were looking for something different or to change the perspectives of those who think certain clothes and colors can't mix. It wasn't here. I mean, it is but it follows a method that takes creativity and passion to a more mechanical level. Don't mix brands even if the clothes go together, don't work with customers who don't want what you have, it's the design of a game with the goal of attaining a win with no reward at the finish line. Animal Crossing is a good example of what this game should have been with it's surprise events, constantly changing cast, and rewards out the wazoo.

+ That is, like, so you! - Playing dress-up with your character is extremely varied, deep, and my favorite part of the entire game. There are so many styles when it came to the eyes, hair, lips, clothes, highlights, eyeshadow, you really get to make your character exactly how you want! While it's not on the same lines of customization available in a game like ModRacers on the PS3, it's comparable to Little Big Planet's sackboy creation tools. A GREAT feature in a game such as this!

- I had no idea - They don't really help you in this game at all. If you have zero fashion sense, you're gonna have to figure it out for yourself because the game rarely ever clearly recognizes what you did right or wrong. There's no indicator for what goes together either except for brand names, colors, and common sense. I was asked to prepare an outfit for the customer many times and a bunch of them were flat out rejected. I have 7-9 items in that outfit and it could be literally one thing that makes the customer flat-out disgusted and she won't tell you what it is. To me, the outfit made complete, perfect sense but it didn't work according to the game's logic and it didn't care to illustrate why that was.
     Also, be sure to get a hold of the booklet because there were a few things that are immensely helpful to your success that are just never brought to your attention, things like expanding your inventory and gaining the ability to declare sales.

Story and Presentation

+ Made in Japan - You can tell from the aesthetics that it came from Japan. In fact, I believe this game was brought over to the states after becoming such a huge success overseas. It works really well for the game actually. It's got some aesthetics in common with the popular Bratz dolls and the design brings a lot of life to the game making everything feel happy and upbeat! While it might put off some potential buyers that aren't into things they shallowly cast off as "anime crap" I can't think of a better look for Style Savvy.

= Oh. Em. Gee. He JUST looked at me! *scream* - As you start to branch off into your own store and strive to become the best stylist internationally, you are basically being pimped by a dude named Dominic who is oh-too-cute! He pays for your store and helps you finance things as you go along. Your co-worker won't stop gabbing about how cute he is though and sometimes it can get annoying but it never really bothered me. That's about all the story there is though.

Sound

- You missed a beat... - The soundtrack is horrendous. I dunno how many people it's likely to affect but it's looping began to aggravate me. Past that, there's nothing good to hear or anything that adds to the experience really so I suggest turning the volume down. All the way.

Graphics

= Not so Haute Couture... - It ain't pushin' any limits but it does what it needs to to serve the style they're goin' for.

Should you buy it?

     No, at least, not for yourself anyway (that is if you're the stereotypical, hardened gamer that desires complicated mechanics). But I would advise any and all gamers to not hesitate whatsoever in getting this game for any girl you know that is into the whole fashion scene or loves dress-up. I'd say the perfect age for this game would be in the 12 and up area. And if you're looking to get a girl into gaming at all, I'd be inclined to say that they might learn a thing or two through Style Savvy that someone else might learn through an action game or an rpg. I may actually write up an article on that sometime, we'll see. Otherwise, a rent could definitely not hurt if you've ever been interested in something along these lines. I did enjoy my time with the game as a whole for the most part.

Style Savvy was developed by syn Sophia and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo DS. Played for 12+ hours and got my store "Neptune*" up to a three-star store rating.