Zero (Mega Man)

Zero (ゼロ?) is a video game character and one of the three protagonists in the Mega Man X series and protagonist of the Mega Man Zero series of video games. In the X series, he is one of the highest ranking "Maverick Hunters" who is fighting to stop Sigma's forces of infected Reploids, known as mavericks, from exterminating humanity.

Incidentally, Keiji Inafune, Mega Man creator and current senior corporate officer at Capcom, had admitted to creating Zero to be Mega Man X himself, the character who would replace Mega Man as the hero. However, due to concerns that players would find it hard to relate Zero with the original Mega Man due to the large visual differences between the two characters, he was made X's partner, and the X widely known today was designed for this purpose instead. Nine years later, Zero did eventually get his own starring role, in the Mega Man Zero series.

In Zero's debut appearance in the first Mega Man X game, he was a gameplay extension of the main character, Mega Man X. He had a more powerful form of X's X-Buster weapon, called the Z-Buster, and a contrasting red color scheme to X's blue. Until the release of Mega Man X3, Zero was an unplayable character to the player, only assisting at discriminate intervals. When he became available, steps were taken to give Zero a varied playing experience from X. While X used long-range attacks to dispatch enemies, Zero gained a very powerful lightsaber-type weapon called the Z-Saber to attack enemies at close range.