You will first meet Bit in the empty rooms, and after defeating another three Mavericks, Byte will start appearing, barring your way. After defeating two Mavericks, however, Doppler will deploy Bit and Byte.
Some contain mini-bosses, but most are usually empty.
Also, because there are three gates in every stage (through which Zero is not allowed to pass), and because you can only use Zero once per stage, Capcom effectively prevents you from using him for more than a third of any given level.Įach stage of the game has two enclosed rooms (again, the majority of which Zero can’t enter). (Yes, X has infinite continues, but Zero can’t even carry a single solitary 1-Up.) If you cause Zero to die, he will not appear again for the rest of the game. In fact, if you want a challenge, try taking Zero into Doppler’s fortress! (You’ll find that because Zero is bigger and slower and is lacking an air-dash, he is much more difficult to play.) This means that he will be better than X at first, but as soon as X gets all of his enhancements, Zero is greatly inferior.
He cannot use any of X’s weapons or new enhancements (although his Beam Saber attack is well animated and thus a must-see), and he also cannot go through gates (which means he can’t fight bosses-well, except one). One nice thing to see is that Zero is now a player character (try pressing or on the subscreen it’s too bad the game is still only one player!) although his usefulness is limited to simply being a spare energy meter.