To say that the Mega Man Zero games are challenging is an understatement. These old-school GBA platformers really require your full attention, and if you haven’t yet mastered these games, you’ll probably get stuck eventually — the biggest issue is the lives system. When you run out of lives, you’ll have to restart levels, and even experienced Mega Man fans are going to get stuck grinding levels.
The Mega Man Zero / ZX Legacy Collection changes all that thanks to two new game modes. You can make life easier with a mode that lowers the general challenge, or you can use the ‘Save Assist‘ feature. I highly recommend using ‘Save Assist’ right from the start if you’re new to these games — all Save Assist does is allow you to repeat checkpoints as many times as you need without restarting a level. Normally, you’ll have a set of lives, and you’ll reset to a checkpoint when you die. If you lose all your lives, you’ll get kicked out of the level and be forced to restart from scratch.
More Mega Man Legacy Collection guides:
- Mega Man X Legacy Collection: How To Beat Every Boss | All Weaknesses Guide
- Mega Man X Legacy Collection: MMX1 All Upgrades, Sub Tanks & Heart Tanks | Locations Guide
- Mega Man X Legacy Collection: How To Unlock Ryu’s Hadoken & Ken’s Shoryuken | Secret Moves Guide
The Mega Man Zero games are infamously stingy with giving you extra lives, so veteran players like me are pretty experienced when it comes to mindlessly grinding. That’s one of the worst features of these otherwise awesome games, so if you want to give yourself the best possible experience, I highly recommend turning on ‘Save Assist‘ from the start.
‘Save Assist‘ makes the game more fun. Why? Because you’ll be making steady progress, and the ‘Save Assist’ feature doesn’t negatively impact the game at all. You can still unlock achievements / trophies.
The other new mode lowers the difficulty considerably. You’ll take more hits, you’ll defeat enemies faster, and the challenge is made a lot more trivial.
The new ‘Easy Mode’ you might want to think twice about activating — as long as you have checkpoints, which ‘Save Assist’ basically gives you infinite lives, then I believe these games are a pretty fair, fun level of difficulty. But, there’s no shame in dropping down the challenge if you’re having no fun. Start with ‘Save Assist‘ 100%, then you can decide to lower things from there.
