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Capcom has brought forth another game of their Megaman Battle
Network series. I heard many good things about this game,
as always. But, I have to say that this was one of the most
disappointing games of the Megaman series. But, let’s
not start with the bad parts (which are many) and start
with redeeming parts of this game.
You start off as the games protagonist,
Lan Hikari, a 6th grade student and net operator of Megaman.exe.
A giant asteroid is heading to earth and you’re the
only one who can’t stop it. If you see the movie Armageddon
then you know where this is headed. The game goes through
3 different tournaments in each version and has different
battle chips in each. So in order to fully complete the
game, you will have to trade with a friend (Another of Capcom’s
evil schemes!). Some good parts are the tournaments, which
are quite fun. Another new feature is the Free Tournament,
where as you can get opponent data from your friends and
fight in a type of championship mode, which was very entertaining.
Dark Chips have been introduced into
the game. These chips (which you use semi-early in the game)
allow you to do massive amounts of damage to enemies and
can be used in the Free Tournament as well. But, using these
chips comes at a heavy price. Every time you use one, you
lose 1 hit point (Hp) permanently. There is no way it will
come back ever. Not only that, but using them strengthens
your evil side which will come back to haunt you later in
the game.
Megaman now has different emotions.
Each emotion gives a different effect during a battle. For
example, if Megaman lose many health points, he will become
nervous and you can be swayed by the dark side to use dark
chips and turn the tide in the battle. If Megaman gets angry
(from being paralyzed from electrical attacks many times),
will stop being knocked back and his chip attacks will do
double.
Soul Unison is one interesting feature.
During the tournaments, you will come across several characters
that Megaman will have a connection with. This connection
will allow Megaman’s “soul” (how a program
has a soul is beyond me) to “commune” with them,
thus giving him the power to gain their powers to use in
battle. So, instead of the style change of the last game,
you can unite with a different soul once every battle for
each soul. In a battle you can unite a soul for one time
during a battle or 3 rounds. After that, the soul union
dissipates, turning you back into regular Megaman.
Now for the bad parts in this game. This Megaman game is
so much different that the other installments in the series.
The sprites for the characters have gotten smaller compared
to the other Megaman games, when Megaman was of proportional
size. The mini-games they have are just ANNOYING! For example,
there is a game where you smash boulders against metal man
curing 30 seconds in a competition to see who will get the
most boulders smashed. At first, it’s fun, and then
it just gets tedious and repetitive.
For those who have already played the last game game, this
game has a few changes. There are no summon virus chips
(Boo!), no more style changes (Boo!) and a new soul unison
feature (yay?). While the Soul Unison feature offer some
new strategy, it is poor executed and doesn’t live
up the last few Megaman games. Die-hard Megaman fans will
enjoy this game (all four of your), but for the rest of
us it’s just a rental. 6/10
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