Megaman Battle Network is a side branch of the Megaman franchise. While all the robot focused ones are in their own universe just at different points in a timeline (that had mankind extinct by Legends…. something I would retcon if they ever continued ZX as it makes everything you do kind of pointless, as well as a shocking revelation in how all of humanity according to this franchise is dependent on… well that would be telling). The Battle Network games (followed by Star Force) are set in a different continuity though. Where Dr Light rather than putting his efforts into Robotics and screwing over his friend Wily, instead put his energy into computers, AI and screwing over Dr Wily.

And so rather than a world with amazing robotics threatened by a mad doctor, we have one where people are really too attached to the internet… linking every household appliance to the internet so that people can hack your ovens and set your house on fire. There are many jokes to be said about how dumb the people in the BN universe are.

The BN series reimagines many of the classic robot masters and robot characters from the classic era into Net Navis, a sort of AI like thing that most people have as a partner. Our Lead Lan Hikari (learn Japanese to realize who he’s related to) has the Navi Megaman.

What happens is a story that leads to him facing the terrorist group WWW… yes a child is having to take down a terrorist group, told you this world was dumb… who have plans to cause chaos and potentially destroy the internet itself, and given that’s a world even more obsessed with the net than ours, they would probably all walk off a cliff by accident if that were to happen.

The game is played from a semi top-down angle controlling Lan. You can Jack into appliances with the means to be Jacked into  at which point you switch to controlling Megaman who moves through the virtual worlds of said appliance or the net. It is here that combat also occurs in often random encounters or fixed points like bosses. Battles are not turn based as you move Megaman over the grid that you control and attack enemies, while you have your standard buster for basic attacks the larger attacks are done using chips which you get a selection of 5 at set intervals. You have a library of chips you can draw from containing 30 which you can choose which are in there. These can range from short range and long range attacks, powerful summon attacks or status effects and healing.

Because it’s not turn-based this means you can dodge attacks but also so can your enemies meaning you need to time them as most chips don’t auto target and if your enemy isn’t in the line of fire, or out of range depending on what chip you’re using you can miss, wasn’t that.

So you have a unique kind of battle for a rpg, and that’s good. you can set up different chip folders to benefit against certain bosses or just upgrade them as a whole.

And that’s where the positives end.

I did not choose to play into this games post game and only completed it for the sake of this review.

Why?

Well first moving about in the net is horrible, it’s a needlessly incoherent maze that is a pain to remember what direction you need to go in, and this is one of the most repeatedly revisited areas in the game. Made worse you get a random battle about every 5 seconds with no means to just run from a battle, you win or you die.

Then there’s the whole getting new chips. Often you need to get a high buster rank which is done by beating encounters fast without taking damage, but that’s then up to RNG or if you happen to get good chips right at the start, and you only get 5 each turn over, and when the adds HP gets up that’s putting more pressure on the RNG. And even then it’s random if you get the chip or not. And you need A LOT as the post game has you having to get EVERY chip in the game and that means you need to do some trading which requires some timed  buster level clearing for a CHANCE to get the chip you want. This isn’t soo bad on say an optional boss fight that is just you chatting to the NPC to start the fight, then just redo that over and over, Protoman got very easy by the end. But on a random encounter to get that fight to start… for multiple levels of RNG… no.

When chatting with people I did hear the later games improved on that issue, well mainly the maps and from when I played BN 5 I do think they did so I’m going to play through more of those, but, yeah this is a first game in the franchise that does feel like later entries had to fix some issues.

Rating: 🤖🤖