Ciel asks for your help, but you’re permitted to look through the base if you want, your home town for this adventure.  If you have an A or S rank from the previous mission, please check the door behind her (which is normally locked) in order to collect your prize: another Cyber-Elf.  It’s not even very good!  Then, meet the cast of colourful characters that make up our resistance group.  Besides a number of nameless Reploids (Ciel is the only human), you can meet a few with unique sprites and characterizations.  Most important of these, plot-wise, is Cerveau, the resistance’s engineer, who will come up a little later.  The gluttonous Hibou (who goes unnamed in this game) is willing to let you into the store rooms for a hefty payment of 250 Energy Crystals, though it’s not remotely worth it, giving you a generic Cyber-Elf who – and far be it from me to put a price tag on a sentient power-up – is only worth like 25 Energy Crystals, 50 at best!  There are also two very strange Reploids: Alouette and Andrew.  Alouette is a Reploid built like a little girl, who’s always going around clutching a stuffed animal.  Why would a Reploid be built as a child?  Have we decided to let them age up to develop more like human beings? That doesn’t seem to be the case? We don’t go into her much in this game, but she is nice and concerned for your welfare, and gets some new dialogue from time to time. Andrew, meanwhile, is an old man, the opposite end of the scale of life.  He wasn’t built that way at first, mind you.  If you talk to him, he’ll tell a long story (that’s supposed to be boring, but I find that most players find it interesting?) about how he fell in love with a human woman, and realized she was growing old when he wasn’t. To that end, he asked Ciel to change his body to the way it is now, and while his wife has since passed on, he certainly seems like he plans to stay in his body the way it is!

Oh yeah, did I mention?  Ciel isn’t just “Ciel,” she’s “Doctor Ciel,” though she’s rarely addressed as such. Ciel is a doctor at only fourteen years old, and Andrew says she modified him “long ago,” so she must have been in… fuckin’ kindergarten or something?  I don’t think the first game had its timeline or character ages entirely in order yet, but the finalized explanation from supporting materials is that Ciel is some kind of genetically-produced wunderkind? I think that’s a shame, it’s more interesting if she got there herself (more like her fellow teen genius, Tron from MML), but Mega Man loves throwing up sci-fi concepts at the board to see what sticks. Then again, you can easily dismiss things like Andrew’s comment by assuming it’s another part of MMZ1’s prototypical, abandoned canon. Nobody says Ciel’s actual age in this game, so it could very easily be in her twenties or thirties like you’d expect of a young doctorate… it feels almost unfair to hold the official ages against the game when it might not be doing anything wrong at all!

Continue reading “Mega Man Zero 1 – Acupuncture gone wrong!” →