I hadn’t played Zero Mission at all before I dived into this hack, and because the main criticism that I had always heard about the game was the hand-holding and the railroading I decided to go with the version that disabled unknown items and Chozo hints. This turned out to be a relatively good idea, but it had some pretty bad side effects which I think first-time players need to consider, and that future versions of this hack should address.

Most of the time a lack of Chozo hints don’t really mean much outside of increased player agency, since the world design itself is so linear. However, sometimes the lack of waypoints absolutely destroys progression if you don’t know where to go already. Having not played the normal version, I don’t know what the player would be guided on or not, but here’s a few examples of where I personally got stuck;

1) The damn Varia suit. I hit a wall for ages just circling around trying to find the way forward, but the only way I could see was through heated rooms I couldn’t survive. I had to search for a walkthrough on how to find the Varia suit, and lo and behold it was in a secret room behind an unmarked destructible ceiling. I don’t know how players could find it in the base game, but in the Chozo-less version it needs to be made much more obvious.

2) Fake lava pits. Once again I hit a wall for ages and it was only in a madness-induced stupor that I threw myself into a lava pit looking for a secret passage, only for it to be fake and the path forward finally presenting itself. If I had a general direction to go in (like what I assume vanilla players had) I might have tried it sooner, especially if I had had the Varia suit (which I couldn’t have reasonably found myself, I remind you), but in this version the fake lava pits only confuse new players and should be removed.

3) Ridley. Overall the difficulty is pretty well tuned, but the very beginning of it is agony. The floor crumbles underneath you and you fall into lava, with a ridiculously long string of fireballs keeping you in the lava. New players will get shredded in seconds (especially since they wont have the Varia suit) on their first attempt, which is obviously unfair. Removing the crumbling floor and delaying the fireballs would be a good tweak.

Those are the main sticking points, which I reiterate I only have because I’m a new player playing the Chozo-less version. If one is playing the regular version or is knowledgeable about the game before playing this version, then this hack is just an objective improvement with zero drawbacks. And even when I was lost and confused, being able to make my own decisions and go through the game on my own terms is an undeniable advantage that this version has over Chozo hints and unknown items. And of course I experienced zero glitches or technical problems over the course of my playthrough (save mGBA crashing a few times). The hack has an incredible future, it just needs some more tweaking.