I don't think this post needs a big introduction, I mean almost everyone is doing the same thing right now.
Like the title says, this is an entry to the Hive Gaming Community's Best Video Game Memories contest, which couldn't have come out at a better moment.
You see, right before checking the HG Community (which I often forget to do) I was thinking to myself "Hey Guub, remember when you sucked at Megaman games?" and then I saw this contest which is all about talking about your own memories and experiences in gaming.
What a coincidence!
However, what I want to do in my entry is something different from others. Rather than just talk about everything I've played I'd like to just talk about one specific memory in my life that happened back when I was a kid, and how I feel about it now that I'm older.
Basically, I'll be going over a really really old memory of my life and then revisiting it and pointing out how different it looks to me now.
...But before I can get to that, I first have to talk about the series in question.
Hey. This post has some spoilers for some Megaman related stuff... You've been warned.
Wait... There's more than one blue guy?
When I was a young boy there was this animated series on TV about a boy and his computer slave best friend Megaman, who fought together against computer viruses and evil people and also transformed in some very cool animated sequences.
Megaman Battle Network 6. The one I'm talking about right now.
Naturally, to a child such as I this looked like the greatest thing ever created. Once I found out that there's SEVERAL games about this Megaman dude I was ecstatic.
I asked my mom to tell her friend, who we will refer from now on as "computer friend", to see if he could get me some of these games. When I was younger computer friend was to me the coolest dude ever at the time (because he had lots of vidya games).
...Of course, neither of us actually knew at this moment that there was, in fact, more than one version of the blue bomber, and this resulted in computer friend getting me several different versions of Megaman.
Funnily enough none of them were Megaman Battle Network, the one Mega I actually wanted to play with.
Megaman StarForce Dragon. This one was similar to Battle Network, but it wasn't the Megaman I liked...
I was a little angry that I didn't get any with my favorite boy and refused to believe any of these guys were the real deal.
Thankfully, with nothing else to play and with them looking really cool I had no other choice than to play some of them.
I sucked at them all, with the exception of one...
A young Gubbo plays Megaman Zero 4.
There was something that drew me in to this one.
In between all of the different Megas I had received there was one named Megaman Zero 4, one which I took an immediate shine to for some reason.
Maybe it was because the main character was red? Because he has a sword that cuts through stuff? Because he was named Zero and he's cool? Because it was the only game in Spanish? Because I didn't completely suck at this one? Who knows!
But whatever the reason, it's one of the games I spent the most time playing as a kid.
...I also think it's the reason as to why I'm afraid of syringes/extremely-sharp-objects-being-pointed-at-me/spiky stuff.
Please no more spikes...
Even though this one was not as hard as the other games I had I still struggled with it for months.
I don't exactly recall how long it took me to finish this game, but I do remember coming back from school, completely forgetting my homework existed and then immediately booting it up and playing, even if I was just replaying old stages because I couldn't finish the rest or deleting my save file to start back from zero (no pun intended).
Megaman Zero 4 had become my favorite game. I refused to play others simply because I enjoyed this one, even though I couldn't beat it.
Then one day something happened, I don't clearly remember exactly what I did but I finally managed to clear the one stage that was stopping me from continuing this game.
It was smooth sailing from that moment on, I managed to kick-start the final part of the game, went to the final stage, beat all of the 8 bosses again, fought against the final boss...
And then Zero dies in the end.
Imagine being a kid that finally manages to beat the game they've spent months playing. A game they put a lot of effort and tears in (because I was a crybaby) and then have the hero die in the end.
Bonus points, this was the first time I had ever seen the hero die in the end of a story.
I tried everything after that. Looking in every corner of all of the stages, talking to everyone, anything that would change that end. But there was no alternate ending. Funny how I didn't even know what those were but I still looked for one.
It's shocking to see your hero die, specially when you were as young as I was back then and even more so when you spent so much time with him. Even though I had played only one Megaman Zero game I absolutely loved Zero, heck I had even forgotten about the Megaman I had seen on TV.
Heck it's still hard today, whenever there's a long story that ends with the hero dying I still get hurt, but it was harsher back then because it was the first time I had ever seen that happen.
Not everything was sad after that however, the sadness from that event made me not want to touch the game again and that made me want to play the other games I had, the rest of the games computer friend had kindly given to me when mom asked if he had any.
Time helped me forget about Zero, not completely though as at the time I was still playing Megaman stuff and Zero pops up every now and then, but by that point I was already "over it".
Eventually I would learn that Zero dies every 5 seconds in the Megaman X series, so that kind of lessened the blow...
So I moved on, never looking again at Megaman Zero 4 and reluctantly accepting the main character's death there.
Until now that is.
Zero dies in the end.
Around the time that this contest started I was currently playing whatever Megaman X games I could find and reading more about it.
When I was a kid I didn't like the X series much, mostly because its protagonist "X" was always portrayed as a pacifist and when I was a kid I wanted some violence. I think this is the reason as to why the X series was never as memorable to me as Megaman Zero.
However, something happened recently. Something that made me want to play as much of Megaman X as possible and would eventually make me play Zero again.
Megaman ZX. This has nothing to do with the post but it's here to fill some space...
I was in the middle of contemplating some media with edgy settings and thinking to myself "Man, that sure is a messed up setting" when I remembered X.
As a kid I never really liked him, that with the whole pacifist shtick, but now that I've sunk a lot of time in settings like Worm (the superhero setting) and Warhammer 40k I now find myself asking things that brought me back to X, who I remember as the whiny protagonist, and because I had nothing better to do I decided to look for and play whatever Megaman X game I could find, just to see if I could change the way I thought about X.
Now that I think about it... the X series is kinda dark.
It's about robots called reploids that are similar to humans in that they have some semblance of free will and stuff (they can think for themselves basically).
All of the reploids in X were made from Megaman X's schematics, but the guy that unearthed X in the first place, god bless his soul, was a bloody idiot that didn't fully understand X's design and instead of spending time trying to comprehend it he just released a bunch of other reploids because he couldn't wait for testing.
Thanks to this brilliant mad-lad every game is about "retiring"(read: killing) the reploids that go berserk and start attacking everything which are called Maverick, this transformation to Maverick usually happens because of a virus and sometimes due to errors in their systems.
In between all that fighting humans and reploids die, a lot. X5 ends with a space colony landing on earth and killing a lot of people, if that wasn't enough it also forces humanity to live below the ground because the planet is now polluted from that disaster.
Things escalate, because they always do, and by the end of the series humanity is a broken down punching bag that still gets its ass kicked.
The Zero series comes after X and in between those two there's more death, the whole planet goes kaput, everything is a desert now, there's only 1 remaining city in the whole world and, apparently, a high percentage of the human population dies. But hey, at least there's no more Maverick virus!
Of course that's just the backstory for the setting, now we're going into the present of the story.
Zero goes inside a capsule for reasons, X becomes the ruler of Neo Arcadia the only remaining city for humans and reploids but disappears to maintain a greater evil sealed inside his body or something, someone makes a clone of X who ends up ruling in his stead (spoiler: he's evil!), there's an energy crisis and Copy X cuts off the heads of innocent reploids because there's not enough energy to feed them all and so on...
Essentially, it's a setting where the character's struggle but things always become worse.
...Until now that is.
An older Gubbo plays Megaman Zero 4.
We're in the last stretch now, this is the part where I revisit my memories of Zero's death.
An older Gubbo plays Megaman Zero 4... Much better than a younger Gubbo.
So far the story of the world has been dark, battle after battle with lots of deaths from both humans and machines, things are a little different in the Zero series though. People still die, they just don't do it as often as before.
In these times, reploid designs have advanced to the point that they're just humans with metallic parts and the difference is obvious. Compare the reploids Zero, the player, can talk to in the resistance base, with the reploids Zero fights against. If they didn't tell you the resistance people were reploids you would probably believe they were all humans.
While the X series was about Reploids fighting to protect humanity... Zero is about Zero fighting against other Reploids to protect innocent reploids. You're essentially fighting for Reploid rights now.
But it's also about Zero, the protagonist of the Zero series and also that one guy who always dies in X, all of the Four Zero games end up with Zero coming to a realization about himself and his purpose in life... Or something like that. 4 is no different from them, despite it having an ending where the hero dies and being the end to the series.
Some important themes in this game are futility and belief, the human refugees mention how it's the reploid's fault that the world is as messed up as it is, refusing to get help from them or even cooperate. Craft himself, the big bad's sidekick, mentions how useless it is to fight against the world's current system because he believes that it can't be changed.
The exception here is Zero, despite the fact he's the only one with the right to complain (man's been fighting for 100+ years), he still believes that the world can be made a better place, actually, no, it's more like he believes in the resistance's cause.
That's a big point in this game I didn't notice as a child, partly because I was blind and partly because I hadn't played any other Zero or X game to understand where were they coming from.
And then the game kicks up. Craft goes desperate and tries to force change to the world, he destroys Neo Arcadia, the only city remaining in the world, and kills more than a million people with it.
It hits me then, that Craft is a foil to Zero. Both are heroes fighting for something, but while Zero believes that something can change Craft has stopped believing that things could change for the better, until the moment he realizes that he's wrong and tries to force it himself.
It's at this moment that Zero's final words echo go in my head. It's only now that I realize the meaning behind them.
15 years after the game's release date and 10 or so after the first time I played it, I understand.
It's exactly how he says it, Zero himself isn't fighting because he has the "moral high ground" or because the people he's with are right. He's just fighting for something he believes in, the cause of the resistance, that better future they believe in.
A lot of people in the games refer to Zero as a hero... Which he technically is, but you eventually come to realize that he's never fighting things because he feels that he needs to do good.
Zero isn't like Original X, who always worried about doing the right thing, Zero just fought. He did have his moments on the X series where he questioned his reasons for fighting (this happened in X4) but it's in the Zero series where he answers that question himself.
Zero didn't just die to stop a satellite that tried to destroy a settlement, which was all that I thought he did back then.
Zero died fighting for what he believed in, he was perfectly willing to give his own life fighting for a cause he cared about, even though the world just kept getting worse and worse and his cause proved to be more difficult, he still fought and even supported the people he fought with whenever they questioned if it was worth it at all.
To fight, or live, for something you yourself believe in. To struggle for a better tomorrow even though the present may be bleak. Just because the world is bleak doesn't mean you should be too.
He's a fictional character yes, but Zero fought for years on end alongside X, he didn't event get to see what he fought for come true but that didn't stop him.
I refused to understand anything about this ending back then, but now that I am older, more experienced, more... willing to understand things... I actually ended up liking this ending. It's not only an ending to Zero, but an ending to the X series and to all of the things they fought for, after all, in the end humans and reploids end up working together to survive...
No one likes it when the main character in anything dies (like in Mass Effect for example) and I still get sad whenever one does die in the end.
But when they die doing something they cared about? Something that mattered to them? That's something I can now appreciate, admire even.
Zero's death still hurts a little, because I cared about him as a character, but it means something to me now as opposed to when I was younger and I couldn't accept it.
It's been more than ten years but I still cry ;s;
...And that's my memory, that's what I got out of visiting this old game I loved as a kid, and still love as an adult. It's interesting to me to see how much my perception on its end changed.
Wow. That was long. I know this may be really different from the other entries to this contest, but I really wanted to talk about it, even though some parts may not make a lot of sense.
This was the product of several days of typing, deleting everything and typing things again. But after four days of working on this I finally feel satisfied.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go take a rest because this took me a while!
All pictures are screenshots were taken by yours truly, and the gifs were made by me thanks to the beautiful program of "ScreenToGif"