November 29, 2009

It’s an Advent review for Advent!

Mega Man ZX Advent is a game for the Nintendo DS Portable Entertainment System. It is a sequel to Mega Man ZX, which I got for 9 dollars at Toys R Us once. I enjoyed it, as one might expect that a combination of Mega Man and Metroidvania might be enjoyable, but it made some really, really dumb decisions. The biggest one was that it didn’t have a map, so much as a very vague screen that it called a map. This map showed “areas” and where these areas could connect to, but gave you no information about the areas themselves. So while I knew that, say, Area A connects to Area B, it gave me no information about how to get to the exit in Area A that lead to Area B. It was really stupidly hard to navigate without having GameFAQs open with an actual map.

I assumed that, seeing as this was a huge problem, that they would fix it in the sequel. But when I got it in from Gamefly and booted it up, I found out that that is not the case. The map is slightly more useful, splitting the areas up into multiple, smaller areas, but it still doesn’t give you an actual map. You still have no idea where the hell you’re going half the time. To make matters worse, they added some awful, awful voice acting. Now I can hear some really bad voice actors saying some of the really awful dialog that I wasn’t playing the game for anyway. Whee.

The game did some cool things, like letting you turn into bosses instead of just taking their powers, which was a pretty neat idea. But the first time I got lost because the map was so useless, I couldn’t help but say “fuck it,” and I sent it back immediately. Come on, Capcom. You can do better than that. I’ve played games where you’ve done better than that. So, so much potential wasted. Ugh.

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