So I have only beaten Mega Man X and X2 (waiting for a sale on X3), but I wanted to give its follow up series at try on GBA. I'm about 15 minutes in and I'm already kind of confused. It seems I have 3 lives. I died twice beating the first couple of missions and have saved. Now I have one life left and three mission options. When I die on any of them, I either can reload my save game, with just one life, or I can give up and I'm told I've failed the mission. Does that mean I don't get another chance at it down the line, or will it come back? That would seem to be pretty harsh.

The game's set up is weird. I can't even remember exactly how it goes but yeah it is weird. And hard.

@Jargon
From what I remember, I assumed the worst case scenario (no continues) and mastered each level without dying (and without using Cyber Elves, since you get something special for beating the game without them). Then I got stuck at the fucking Boss Rush.

Then I found out that you can continue. But it still didn't help me beat the Boss Rush.

I did the same thing with Mega Man NT, by the way. Although I actually beat that one. 1 Credit Clear!

So... no one knows how continues work?

Beaten. My save file says 4 hours but it probably took double that because I restored basically any time I died. Probably went overboard with that since I ended up winning with maximum lives. I really hope Mega Man Zero 2 has a more forgiving system though. Really not handheld friendly.

As far as actual gameplay, the game is great. Controls felt better than Mega Man X to me with the addition of the melee weapons. My big complaint is that they basically added grinding to the franchise, which is a pain. Probably spent an hour collecting energy cells so I could level up cyber elves and get more health/sub tanks. I don't love the exploration aspect of the X games, I prefer my Mega Man games to be more straightforward, but it's certainly preferable to grinding for collectibles.

I probably shouldn't have bothered upgrading so much because the game went from super challenging to a walk in the park as I progressed. Part of that was just me getting better at playing, but if I hadn't doubled my health bar it still would have been more tricky. Still fun though.

Overall, great game despite its design issues. I'm intrigued to see if they smoothed out any of those flaws in the later entries because they could be really amazing if they did.

Zero 2 is much more straightforward and more like a classic Mega Man style progression rather than the pseudo-open world style of Zero.

@Jargon Yeah, the grinding (among other things) was always really baffling to me in the Zero series.

Zero 2 does still have some of MMZ's weird quirks, but it definitely cuts a few and tones others down from what I remember.