I kind of wanted to do this because I’m actually playing it a bit and actually making a bit of progress. I’m still not very far, and I’ll save an Objective Review System review for once I have more time with the game, but I have some thoughts on the first game after seeing a bit more of it.
Jargon
Let’s get this out of the way:
- Navi/NetNavi/Network Navigator – take Siri, Cortana, or whatever other A.I. assistant you prefer and slap a face and real personality on it, then filter it through the lens of MegaMan Classic and remove the bit where it’s spying on you. Basically if you’re old enough to remember BonziBUDDY, it’s sort of that, but it goes around deleting viruses rather than downloading them. A less annoying Clippy.📎
- Operator – the human who owns a Navi. Annoyance levels vary greatly.
- NetBattling – basically a duel between two Navis.
- Virus Busting – every JRPG has its random battles; that’s this.
- WWW – pronounced "World Three," they’re a terrorist org.
- PET – "PErsonal Terminal," otherwise to be understood as a phablet on a stick. It is hilarious the way this thing basically predicted the modern smartphone and its ubiquity, but as I said in my previous take on this, at the time, there were cell phones and there were PDAs, but the IBM Simon was really the only PDA that made calls. They knew the potential was there, though.
- Battle Chips/BattleChips(?)/chips – for whatever reason, your standard attacks suck and it’s literally easier to perform a matter-energy conversion by shoving an SD card with some useful ability installed on it into a PET than it is to fix that. You will get them out after they’re done being used and you might even get an extra one salvaged from the enemy party. You store exactly 30 of them in a Folder and toss the rest in your Sack. You also have a Library with info on all the ones you found. Lan apparently just grabs semi-random handfuls of them because while certain types can be weighted, what he sends to Megs is otherwise random, so you will rarely get useful combinations unless you’re
idiot-proofingengineering your Folder. - "jack in" – despite spots in the script where this can be taken very out of context, "jacking in" is the process of pulling a physical cable out of your PET and plugging it into a corresponding universal jack that graces most devices made in the past *mumble* years because sending a Navi in is a very convenient way of fixing devices on the fritz due to the fact they’re all run by some combination of the rare other Navi and universally other robo-bunny A.I. programs that could probably also pass a Turing test despite being mostly glib and tasked with one job and only one job each like they can’t be trusted with anything else. It is positively shocking that more isn’t on fire all the time, because these programs can straight-up get bored or distracted and express job dissatisfaction when they’re stuck serving a less interesting role. "Oh, haha, like what’s the harm, is your Furby going to start saying creepy stuff?" Uh, yeah, that, but also try your car brakes. If you think big tech is trying to shove A.I. into everything these days IRL, imagine a world where A.I. is actually toddler intelligent and running everything from toys to cars to trains to critical infrastructure with little to no oversight. And those are ultimately the reliable ones; you find a snack machine a little later where the adult intelligent Navi is having a good old freakout despite the attempt of the resident bunny A.I. to comfort him. Have fun sleeping tonight!
- Program Advance – basically, if you queue up 3 or 5 of the same chip in alphabetical letter code order or do the same with tiers of the same family all the way up the line, they will mutate into a special effect. The game hints at how to do this, but you need to talk to multiple NPCs to piece it together. The sneaky thing is the game might actually unlock this after the story point where you learn about it, rather than when it first becomes available. Regardless, you’re going to want to engineer your Folder to take advantage of it at least a little. Not all combinations are actually valid; there are lists online of what actually works.
Basically, NetNavis are digital assistants, Operators have a Navi, a PET is a smart phone, logging into anything requires a physical jack connection, spells are chips, WWW are the bad guys, and you’re going to be both dueling and battling.
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Visuals
From a design standpoint, the Navis rely heavily on being dressed in some form of "wetsuit" or otherwise "spandex" that looks form-fitting for the most part when they’re not being overtly robotic. This is somewhat distinct from Classic and even the X games in that the designs are largely missing the mechanical underwear and chest armor intended to make sure you know they’re really robots. Because, well, they’re not. They are purely 100% digital beings, so rather than the chunky shins and feet, everyone is wearing galoshes with a heavy stylized cuff and look quite a bit more organic. Except for hair, at least, which is reduced to chunky metal/plastic plating, minus ProtoMan, who gets a healthy dose of Zero mixed in here and gets to have hair instead of a scarf because he’s Cooler Than You™. It’s a fundamentally different design language where metal is replaced with rubber except when it isn’t, giving a greater variety in how organic everything appears. Easily my favorite design out of anyone is FireMan.EXE because he kind of has it all: metal boots, a metal head that splits the difference between a helmet and a smoke stack with eyes in the darkness of the eye holes, a distinctly cloth-shaded jumpsuit with padded shoulders and jodhpurs, and a pair of flame cannons on his arms without any hands. He has a flame coming out of his head at all times that’s actually expressive, with the flame itself sputtering and flaring when he’s blasting out of his arms like there isn’t enough gas left for it. There are parts of him that are variously matte, glossy, and semi-gloss. As far as your first real boss goes, he’s a winner.
On a technical level, this game understands lighting. More importantly, it understands lighting within a limited palette. Whenever MegaMan fires, there’s a frame where the light of the shot reflects against his wetsuit, making it look distinctly rubbery. When your first boss, FireMan, blasts his flame, the pulsing light completely blows out the color on his sprite to the point where first seeing it I wondered how they did it, tripping the "3D" trigger in my brain, but no, of course as a sprite artist myself, I went to look at a sheet of it and they did it completely within the colors of the palette, but they did it in such a way that the parts that are metal and the parts that are shaded more like cloth react differently. All of this gives impact to actions. You can feel the power of the flame, or the power of the shot even though you don’t see the shot itself.
The game also can’t be faulted for its animation. The frames move at a fast clip and they use smears to keep things moving. Mostly. Honestly, it’s a masterclass in sprite work. Even comparing it to later entries shows there was nowhere to go but down from here. There are few things that can be considered effectively perfect, but the sprite work in here is one of them. Playing the Legacy Collection, there is an option to use a filter to smooth it out and let me tell you, it is a disservice. A lot of problems arise with A.I. upscales in general, but for pixel art like this, it introduces wobbly lines and other imperfections trying to interpret things that look fine as pixels.
That all said, the game does have some wonky scaling issues. Cars are tiny and the overworld you’re introduced to is scaled oddly on a good day, with people double the height they should be for the houses while playground equipment looks about right. And it’s easy to argue that all 2D RPGs halve the size of houses or whatever and it makes sense to scale the things to how you’re going to interact with them.
I see no problem here.
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The big issue is there are some basic details out of order. Aside from the fact you only see the parts of each house that are important, which in some cases is just the bedroom of whatever friend you’re visiting, things simply don’t add up in other ways. Inside Lan’s house (you know, that place that serves as your primary hub) is the most obvious example of this: the main space is oriented in such a way that it’s consistent with entering from the back. Someone got the detail of the dog house outside right, even the side of the house it might be leaning toward, and the detail of a ball (though from inside it’s a soccer ball outside Lan’s room and outside it’s very clearly a blue dog ball), but there’s simply an entire wing of the house that isn’t represented or else that one has to assume is only accessible from going upstairs as visible in the arch to Lan’s room and down a completely different set, or else for whatever reason you go inside and have to go through that wing and around the back to get into the interesting parts the game cares about. Or else there are actually two dog houses and the missing wing is on the southwest side. For that matter, it’s supposedly "upstairs" to Lan’s room, but it’s clearly on the ground floor due to the soccer ball sitting just outside when there isn’t even an awning to have kicked it onto based on the outside view. The exterior is less than distinct, but there’s a gray band that could be interpreted as a curb or sidewalk that the details show is directly outside, and then what is clearly the road beyond. If one takes the view that the road is visible because it’s below, that raises very unfortunate design implications, because it’s clear that someone was told to make a sliding door like the exterior shows on the ground floor. There is only one reason to have sliding doors and that’s so you can open them to go out, which works a lot better if you’re stepping onto solid ground or a balcony rather than thin air. There is, at the very least, clearly no balcony. Not from the inside; not from the outside. Or else the light gray strip was supposed to be a balcony, but they completely forgot the guardrails in the process of animating it for a bird to be there, or it makes some heavy assumptions about the road actually being the balcony wall with no visible supports or corner or other point of reference to define it, but it looks for all the world like a road to me, darker area after a lighter area. And it doesn’t make much sense for a soccer ball to be left on a tiny balcony when there’s a much larger room to work with, unless someone else kicked it up there and Lan is holding it hostage. The problem is no side of the house has a sidewalk against it. That side of the house does have the road against it, but it’s after grass, not sidewalk. And if you assume that the view through the sliding doors in the dining area do indeed view a completely different dog house in the back, then Lan’s room was made with the assumption that it would open directly to adjacent road on that side, but it’s on the wrong wall. If you’re assuming you’re keeping orientation to the back of the house, there is simply no road in that direction. The same direction in the previous room was all greenery and it suddenly becomes asphalt through a doorway or else the game glosses over a turn. All of the areas have entryways that make them look connected, but it’s a funhouse at best.
The real explanation is that different artists entirely were assigned different rooms with the entries and exits without anyone having drafted a floor plan or decided what was actually outside. Either things didn’t have full design docs or else things were so in flux that they didn’t always get to go back and fix details. Maybe they were all executing on concept sketches in good faith without anyone realizing that nobody had, you know, actually put the concept art together from an overhead view. This honestly is the sort of thing I notice because when I’m writing, I’m thinking about the environments in a connected 3D space, and I can and sometimes will throw together a rough blueprint of any place I write about. I may not be a professional architect with all the technical, material, and physics stuff that comes with, but I could easily be accused of making for an effective interior designer. This understanding of how a space is designed is why I get so hung up on the mixed-usage space in Shinra Manor in FF7 Rebirth and why this sort of inconsistency bothers me here. I actually prefer it when the game shows me less in cases like this because I will accept disconnected spaces more easily than improperly connected ones.
Whew! Does that count as a mini-Rant?
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Even more curious is the fact that each chip has a unique portrait and even similar chips don’t simply recolor the same portrait. Taking the three levels of StoneMan as an example, the eye is interpeted differently in every single one, the cracks in his body have more or less detail and even break down a bit, and the colors above him have different shapes each. You see quite a lot of this, almost like each image was colored from a printed base and then scanned rather than done by hand. The outlines get crunched differently between them, lighting doesn’t quite come off the exact same way, different versions that shift around might even have subtly different shapes. It just feels very strange that they wouldn’t have saved themselves a ton of work and palette swapped them, or if that simply wasn’t technically possible, that they didn’t simply recolor them with the fill tool ahead of time rather than crunch a fresh image each time. One has to wonder if the differences where blue tends to have an intermediary band and such doesn’t come from the overall game palette favoring certain colors over the others. It’s not bad or anything, just very strange. Like I’m not one to talk; my current most colors per sprite to palette is a less than generous 15 and transparency; they would have had to have been crunched pretty hard to get down to that level, or else they would have required manual cleanup or just being done by hand in the first place, but I’m actually kind of curious about their process for this one. It just feels like it might have been more work like this.
But back to complaints, it’s kind of clear when things were supposed to be one way and didn’t end up that way. Like, the dog house outside Lan’s house is passed off as part of a security system that will trigger if someone broke in, but literally what use is that? WWW comes knocking and Lan’s mom freaking opens the door for them. It doesn’t actually pay off until game 4 from what I could find. Maybe it would have done something if you didn’t get effectively locked inside during the oven incident, but you don’t get to see that. And it doesn’t make sense to have a dog ball near it if the plan wasn’t to have a dog at some point.
That’s not to say there aren’t good details. On entry, Lan’s room will be graced by some sort of small bird pecking at the ground before flying away. They wouldn’t have needed to add sprites for just that. In most cases you can almost completely forget it’s a pixel art game. At least right up to the point you look at a TV, because while someone clearly put effort into the posters, the TVs are all mostly playing some hilariously bad dog food commercial on loop and it’s just… so chunky and flat and awful, and I think it’s honestly on purpose. There are probably limited colors so it can fit into any environment and on the tiny screen it was on originally, maybe it wasn’t quite as distracting, but the text especially in this game is mostly kind of awful and it has the perplexing tagline "dog know" as if it was poorly translated from something more like "dogs know what brand blah blah" or else it was actually supposed to be "dog chow" and someone biffed it.
Honestly, having text being quite so bad is also kind of distracting and you see it in a surprising number of places, from the floor tiles in some areas of the net to signage, where anything with Japanese text left over looks much better. Text just feels like it was hastily redone by an amateur, with no smoothing (although maybe they didn’t have a color budget for it) and some odd shapes that in many cases looks like it was done by drawing it with a mouse rather than doing it as actual pixel work. And sometimes this can be rather charming like how "PetS" is sloppily drawn on Lan’s dad’s work PC, but only in the sense that it’s charmingly crappy in that case, where basically everywhere else it’s kind of just crappy crappy. It makes the game feel like it’s full of placeholder art. It is always a disappointment to see a localization team come in and take a steaming crap on something. You know darn well it wasn’t actually given to an artist to fix all the text and it should have been.
*cough* *cough*
Please… These fonts… They’re killing me…
You already used Courier for the game text…
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On the topic of text, you bet your buttons there’s a mod to restore the original pixel font for the PC version and while I normally don’t condone the sort of hacking this mod seems to require, for this one, I’ll give it a pass, because the original font is better in every way and there was zero reason the game should have shipped without it. Seriously, they had the graphics. If I can write a text writer that slaps down raster graphics as a font, there’s no reason they couldn’t have done the same with infinitely more money and expertise. Especially because the hard part was already done.
Music and Sound
If there’s anything the game mostly nails, it’s the music and sound.
“Aha! Found the n00b, talking about good music in a series known for always delivering bangers!”
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Hush, you, of course a MegaMan game is going to have good music, but this music is different.
It doesn’t sound like the rest of the franchise up to this point. Let’s take this beauty as an example. Notice anything? Yeah, that part where it walks down made a choice. If this were a song that had to play in an NES stage, that would have hit you with a rising fanfare. It’s not there to get you pumped; it’s there to prepare you for when the track switches gears and reveals its hand. That’s where the punch comes from, but it’s not even a musical punch when it does it. The bridge gets a baton pass from a strong melody and meanders a bit like a stream through the woods before winding up and then slamming you straight into the familiar opening riff, playing on your sudden recognition. The main theme is a banger; you know it’s a banger from the first time you boot up the game. It’s at this point you realize the song is basically the opening theme, and the tail end became the head, just lower. It might have been somehow familiar, but it teases you because you probably didn’t sit on the title screen listening to that tail end over and over; if anything you reloaded it to listen to the front half. So not only does it recontextualize the part you didn’t care about, but it makes you question where it’s going before it hits you with the good part, and then it goes on to develop the good part. It’s a fundamentally different mindset to Classic despite having similar limitations. Why? Because unlike the video title, it’s not actually NumberMan’s stage. It’s the school network and you’ve been there before. There is an inherent safety to that. The tune doesn’t have to be its own thing because the area it’s in doesn’t belong to the area boss. None of the areas do. You’re not going out of your way to some remote factory or tundra or rainforest; you are bumping around a child’s tiny little world. ACDC as a "town" is really just a neighborhood. There’s absolutely more "town" beyond its borders, because there are cars that pass in and out of the main drag and adults talk about how the train line simply follows that road, but the sidewalk and road stop at the edge of a void. Lan, symbolically, is not allowed to keep going, so his world abruptly stops there. In contrast, the major networks feel so much bigger, even though each is at a micro scale within that tiny world. It really brings home the feeling of the world at your fingertips, the wonder we all felt at the time with computers rapidly advancing. But it doesn’t change the fact that the early game is largely set within such a tiny world, and that this tune in particular comes from a place Lan has been many times when it was a controlled environment. He’s in his power here. That only gets subverted when it’s turned against him, but it’s in that situation when you spend more time with the tune that you get to actually understand it. Chances are with how little text there is when the music is otherwise playing during the talky bits of the tutorial that you don’t even get that far into it. It’s like the music itself sits giggling behind the curtain until the big reveal.
That’s not just music; that’s psychology!
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You see this time and again in the music where it doesn’t play out like a side-scroller level, in part because you are expected to spend time there and getting the blood pumping is reserved for the battle theme. The music rarely takes it up rather than down a notch and musical contrast often comes from pulling back a step and going up two rather than just going up two, keeping it in a narrower range without dropping the effect. It leaves somewhere to go up from, which leaves a much more chilled atmosphere while you do all the necessary bumping around. It’s a different sound for a different game type.
The sound effects border just above descriptive, with MegaMan’s basic shot being a sharp "pew" sound and the chip load coming up with something that sounds almost like the rattling of chains mixed with a tambourine mixed with a flurry of sword clashes. Rolling shock waves have a sort of "gravel crunch" as they hit each panel. You can tell what’s happening by the sound and the sound cues help manage a battle system that can be surprisingly hectic given the maximum of three enemies on the field at once.
There is one really bad school chime, obviously a lo-fi recording, but other than that, the biggest complaint is that indoor areas, which you’ll be in a lot, have a 10-second loop as some sort of adversarial design to keep you out of them and in the more interesting parts of the game. Yep. More psychology. It’s not a completely awful tune when taken on its own; just very basic. And I mean, yes, it is literally 10 seconds or maybe even not quite, even if it sounds friendly at surface level. It can make itself just annoying enough to get you out of wherever you happen to be standing without being cruel about it. And Japan is no stranger to using sound to force people out of a place, like playing a high-pitched whine that adults aren’t supposed to be able to hear to keep kids from hanging out near train stations. There are many forms of adversarial design.
In contrast, most other areas have solid minute-plus loops and while that might not sound like much, for limited storage space, it’s quite good. More than long enough to not wear out its welcome and it falls into a cool and smooth synth vibe, which is especially my jam. Some of it is probably best defined as trance. At any rate, the tracks have a variety of tricks up their sleeve. Sometimes a backing instrument will get a baton pass on the melody or even engage in bouncing it between two instruments as something that’s not exactly call and response because that typically features a musical question followed by a musical answer, but feels in the same spirit, almost like two excitable friends inviting you to a party and each chiming in with additional features as they remember them.
The best thing is really that each place, or at least each type of place, has its own vibe. Tooling around, you’re greeted with a cheerful, calming loop like everything is right in the world, whereas when something’s going down, you get another 10-second loop that really sets in the panic. In contrast, most of the net really feels like a reprieve from everything else going on, just a bit pensive, as if you can finally be alone with your thoughts, at least until a battle comes up, but even battle has a jaunty tune that makes it a cheerful rather than foreboding experience.
Which is perfect for enacting extreme violence!
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Writing
I feel this is where the problems start, because Lan is… just not a very good kid. To the point of there being some offensive content fairly early on. His Navi, MegaMan.EXE, otherwise just known as MegaMan, because people tend to knock off the ".EXE" part since ALL Navis have it, is quite frankly a much better person than he is, and seems most limited by his inability to reach out of the screen and shake his Operator for being so irresponsible. It’s clear the two have known each other for a bit, but it feels like they could feel a bit more close and it would have been nice for the game to have given a timeline to explain that more. The game starts things off with the big kid in class and closest thing the game offers to a school bully, Dex, challenging them to a NetBattle, which Yai rushes up to remind them is against the rules, but they blow her off saying it’s consentual, which, I mean, of course it is, but she kind of just slinks off. You’re given the option to do it anyway after class. Nothing forces you, but it does reward you for it. And that’s just kind of the beginning.
I’ll be on standby.
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Once you leave the area, you end up with the run of the neighborhood, where you can start talking to people outside their houses a bit. After everyone goes inside is where the real problems start, because you go into Mayl’s house next door, but Mayl specifically tells Lan not to poke around her room. And you don’t have to, but once again the game rewards you for it with items. You can maybe offset this a bit by doing a sidequest for Glyde, who’s Yai’s Navi (and the only character whose equivalent is from anything but MegaMan Classic as a character from The Misadventures of Tron Bonne, which you should definitely check out). You can go to Dex’s house and challenge him and GutsMan to the duel if you missed it on school grounds, not that you’d have any way of knowing it ahead of time, but he specifically refuses to give you his "link," so you can access his computer right in front of him to get "@Dex" and this looks for all the world like you just went and stole it. It’s only later that you realize, no – I mean yes, you did steal direct access to his PC, but that’s not the "link" he was talking about.
Time skip forward and Lan is late for school, but Yai did him the favor of calling his name for role call, so Lan decides to 1) get mad about it and 2) not worry about getting to class in any hurry despite MegaMan’s protests, letting you access a bit of the school early and grab some stuff. So we can add playing hooky to his list of sins. He sneaks into class from the back door (this being a Japanese school design, there are two access doors) just in time for it to end.
Once you’re through the next major dungeon, with kudos from your completely unaware teacher, and dumped out into the neighborhood again, you get the first real indication of why the game tosses up a disclaimer every time you boot it up: going to visit Mayl shows her hiding behind the ladder up to the loft in her bedroom. And I was like, "oh, is she playing hide-and-seek or something?" Nope. She was dressing. So she screams and tells you to go away and it’s only because nothing actually has any repercussions in this game that I didn’t reload after that.
You can, however, go get the "link" from Dex, which is "/Dex" rather than "@Dex" because apparently Dex straight-up locked off the local network from the wider area for some reason. Lan isn’t the only malcontent, apparently, but it comes with a comment of "Dex isn’t so bad after all!" Which is, I dunno, maybe not the best reflection on the heroes, because Megs says it and he’s supposed to be the responsible one. Dex is arrogant, to be sure, but other than his rivalry with Lan and thinking GutsMan is the ultimate Navi, he’s not actually evil or anything, which is why I say "closest to" a bully the game presents. It feels like Lan is perfectly on board with the rivalry by the time you meet him.
Anyway, there’s another sidequest where you can find an old man’s dentures to return them, so it’s not like Lan is actually evil or anything.
And over here you’ll find the pavement made out of good intentions!
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Lan doesn’t really seem to apply himself much, though, with Yai being a self-proclaimed expert on PETs. Thing is, Lan’s grandpa literally invented the things and his father is considered the foremost researcher following in his footsteps. Why the heck does Yai have to explain this stuff to Lan? Because she skipped a grade? Well, no. It’s because you kind of start seeing that Lan isn’t all that interested in his family’s work so much as the gifts his dad might provide to make up for the fact that he’s barely ever home due to being so absorbed in his work. And this is kind of the first distinctly Japanese thing about the game that the rest of the world might be confused by, because Japan kind of just has that, where kids are effectively orphans even when both parents are alive because they’re just off working. Lan’s mom is a housewife, so he’s not actually abandoned, but his dad is rarely home and more or less makes up for it with emails with apologies and attached gifts. And even his mom leaves a bit of the parenting to Megs, with Megs being responsible for waking him up. Lan seems like the sort who’s perpetually late, which, I mean-
Hi.
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Some people come by it honestly, not that Lan is really coded AuDHD for time blindness; humans are ~300,000 years old, clocks with minute hands are only ~400 years old, time is fake, and not everyone is a disgusting early riser. It’s a character flaw, nothing actually "bad," but it is a launchpad for other bad behavior, and factors into the story and game mechanics both days of school you’re treated to, because if you choose to skip breakfast, you miss out on a healing chip, plus the aforementioned Yai calling his attendance. Lan being "late late" has him try to push the responsibility onto Megs.
Megs isn’t without his own flaws, because no sooner do you go try to visit Lan’s dad and find him missing than Megs pulls the "well, maybe we can at least get the gifts he promised" bit. I’m not going to say it reflects well, but he did sort of fix the entire train system so they could visit the place only to be told that this man of mystery that you the player only see as a sepia photograph was somehow not even chained to his desk as expected. No, you literally go all the way there, talk to his personal receptionist, and hear second-hand that he’s been gone since this morning and won’t be back in any reasonable amount of time. After all that, no sooner do you exit the station near your home than you get, wait for it, yet another apology email with gifts attached, though in this case it was the gifts promised because he somehow managed to write an entirely new compression algorithm to deliver them. As in, no, he probably wasn’t as close to actually coming home to visit as he said last time. You don’t just hammer out a new compression algorithm. That’s the sort of thing you do when you are completely consumed by your work and have fun by doing more work.
So what you really have is a dual protagonist setup where Lan is just kind of self-centered, and has plenty of opportunity to go sailing past the boundaries of his supposed friends, flout school rules, and kind of just be a jerk. In contrast, Megs is stuck with herding cats and really only shows any real flaws of his own later when he gets excited about hacking Lan’s dad’s work computer looking for some of the gifts he was promised because he’s really not any more invested in Lan’s dad than Lan is. Maybe even less.
And, sorry to get personal for a sec, but not gonna lie, that hits me in a strange place. I am a child of divorce. At times, I was a latchkey kid. I look at these two kids treating this phantom of a man like a vending machine because that’s the only way they’ve ever interacted with him and my heart aches. I read the apology emails they get and it hurts me where my feelings live because it’s clear this man is clueless and still thinks he’s doing okay despite his absence and string of broken promises. He doesn’t realize they don’t see him as a human being. But in return, it’s clear he has affection for the idea of them, sporadically, whenever he remembers they exist. These two have no male role model. None. And Megs is stuck with the unenviable role of trying to parent Lan despite having even less support himself.
And there is kind of one other problem with how the game handles the story, and that’s if you’re ever lost and have no idea what to do, chances are you just need to go to bed so Lan can wake up to when things are going down again. Which is to say this game is very fond of time skips. And I was actually rather annoyed by that. Like, I mean time skips are already sort of lazy in my opinion and it’s hard to do them well, because the expectations are very different depending on how much time you’re skipping and all of them are very different problems to solve. It’s not so bad at first because the first couple times Lan goes to bed he wakes up only days or a week later, so nothing has to change, fine, fair enough, you’re skipping the boring bits, but the third time skips an entire month that just says WWW has been causing mayhem the whole time, which is rather unsatisfying given how personal they made it off the bat. Lan and Megs solved increasingly wider problems, first just their own home kitchen, then their entire school, then the rail system that same day, or at least the section of it between them and some other place in the city, all within a couple weeks, and there’s not really much reason it had to be a couple weeks other than the fact the game uses Lan going to bed to break up its chapters. It makes use of it once to do a nighttime scene, but that doesn’t actually mean the problem is caused at night; you just have the person causing it out there at night like a weirdo and then waiting until daytime to follow through. As freaking adorable as StoneMan.EXE is, there was no reason for him to be a whole second dungeon and boss in the same chapter. There was no drama to it, just the heroes getting annoyed. Maybe it’s to try to paint it as more realistic, but it could have been paced a bit better.
I do think the game does a few things well. It’s smart about how it portrays the other kids and their economic standing. See, Lan has a sort of terminal in his room that looks a lot like really old, sleek stuff from the 1970s, almost more like a kiosk than a PC with only a modest screen, and it’s hard to tell whether it’s supposed to be modern, old, powerful, or basic in the context of the world. His house has a few odds and ends about, mostly a forgotten ball outside. As the baseline of the story, you get a solid feel for him as being part of an apparently middle-class scientific household. The Hikari family in this universe still kicked off the A.I. revolution with their version of Dr. Light (Dr. Hikari here), but you see it a couple generations removed with Lan and Megs being the lens through which you the player learn and understand this stuff. Megs himself is far from the first Navi, but he is a unique one, which dives into spoiler territory. If taken at face value, though, Lan’s family might be better off than they appear, assuming the security system disguised as a dog house is any indication. If there’s reason to have a warning system not to enter the house due to an invader, it’s clear someone is taking precautions with the family’s protection. The question then really becomes whether it’s something that was provided or something the family invented, or maybe something they bought on money that others spent on renovations. All the houses seem to be two stories in the area; just because Yai’s is the biggest doesn’t mean it’s not in the same neighborhood rather than a gated community.
Because when you look at everyone else…
Yai
Yai of course has a luxurious room as the local rich girl. Two, really, with separate areas for sleep and wakefulness. Despite having one rather insensitive comment about how it must suck to be poor, which she assumes from the fact that she’s never heard of MegaMan.EXE as a Navi model and thinks it must be really old because Lan can’t afford better, and resting b— face, other than being very direct to the point of rude, she seems to be free with her knowledge and helpful to Lan in particular. Glyde.EXE is her butler-like Navi because of course she’s going to have a butler. Or I guess technically a valet, but even Wikipedia says a butler can serve the valet role, so I’m just going to say "butler" because you know what I mean by that. Yai otherwise makes a point of saying she skipped a grade and is only 8 years old, which explains why she’s such a runt compared to anyone else in class. Thing is, the math doesn’t quite work out for this, because everyone being in 5th grade should be at least 10, so she actually skipped two grades and comments on wanting to skip all the way into junior high, which is to say somewhere in grades 7-9 per the Japanese school system. Lan doesn’t actually seem to like her much, which, I mean, is kind of understandable given how abrasive she is, but he doesn’t seem to appreciate her sticking her neck out for him and even gets mad about it, which just seems unreasonable. The early game isn’t generous with different text for most characters and it feels like she gets less than almost anyone else given it doesn’t want to let you miss technical exposition, but you still get a good feel for her voice, if not any particular reason Lan disproportionately dislikes her.
Mayl
Mayl has Roll.EXE as her Navi, but you actually get Roll as a summon before you ever hear her speak. Mayl is hinted to like Lan, and you’re introduced to her waiting to walk with Lan to school so she can talk his ear off, which Lan finds annoying. So we know where both of them are in their respective emotional development. Which, I mean, yeah, girls develop differently from boys. They’re in 5th grade; that’s about when girls start sprouting up and liking boys. Boys, in contrast, hit puberty by weight, not age, which is a problem in US schools these days because boys have been hitting that weight earlier for some time now, but that wasn’t quite the issue even in the US back in the release year and certainly not in Japan, so Lan isn’t quite to the point of sprouting up and liking girls in return.
This has been your impromptu science lesson.
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You can tell a certain amount about Mayl’s family from her house, which is pink inside and out, and they seem to have a good deal of money given Mayl has a pretty spacious room with a loft compared to Lan’s own room, which is like half the size. Not like Yai’s family, but Mayl’s family seems to have enough to afford whimsy. Mayl is also very clearly helpful to Lan, offering the "Roll R" chip as assistance to Lan for the second dungeon, assuming you talk to her before tackling it.
Dex
The final named neighborhood kid, Dex, is giant compared to the other kids, both in height and weight, so we know exactly who sprouted up and started liking girls early. At least one might otherwise assume if he weren’t completely 100% obsessed with NetBattling and GutsMan.EXE. Not in the "gay for his Navi" sense so much as he has a one-track mind and that track is fighting. To that end, he pretty clearly considers GutsMan the perfect Navi, and is constantly challenging Lan to NetBattles to prove it, pulling the "chicken" insult for a little extra spice. Thing is, there is every indication Lan is 100% receptive to this, their rivalry being on display from the word "go." Dex is the only other kid to have a PC and his is decidedly of the more modern at the time variety of a CRT screen on top of the box. The sort of setup that could have been a boat anchor or top of the line and you’d never be able to tell from the outside, but it’s honestly a much larger space than Lan’s offers when you jack in, so I’m actually leaning toward the latter. He has a GameCube, though, so you know he’s not actually poor, just sloppy. His room feels like the smallest of anyone’s, with a very traditional vibe including closet space, but it’s a mess and Lan comments he has sloppy handwriting. Dex having put a lock on the wider network, plus some apparently branded memorabilia, is clearly on his way to being a stereotypical basement-dweller. You get a feel that his family simply spends money very differently than most, and maybe they do have less than some of the others, but not in a way that’s supposed to make you pity him. Or maybe just a little, but it’s at least clear he enjoys himself. If anything, his economic standing is closer to Lan’s at face value than Lan’s is to anyone else’s.
GutsMan somehow suffers more than Roll in that you face him as a boss up to twice and get the GutsMan G chip before you ever hear him talk. He gets deleted by viruses and restored from backup before you ever hear him talk. For all his screen time and story importance, you never get to hear him talk in the early game. And whether he’s actually good is very much up for debate. Just to be clear about this, you can lose your first optional fight with him, rather easily given it’s just after the tutorial, but it’s very winnable. Dex will gloat appropriately or else express shock and dismay if you win, almost choking on it. Dex is frankly so confident in GutsMan that he gives Lan an "I know how you feel, but let me handle this" bit right before GutsMan ends up deleted. It’s kind of a good reason Mayl offers Roll for assistance because Dex tried to go it alone and failed. That all said, by this point I was already using Buster MAX for expediency and didn’t bother to turn it off for the area, but I suppose that’s worth talking about in its own right in a bit.
And now a word from our nemeses!
If I had to pick one of the first three WWW bosses as my favorite, it would honestly have to be StoneMan.EXE, which is weird, because he’s the only one who doesn’t have any apparent Operator. I just think he’s kind of adorable, only able to speak in "gok" and "gokgok" words with translations and he’s just sort of this innocent turtle thing who seems really excited about what he’s doing without really understanding it. I just want to hug him.
Remember, kids, Heaven isn’t about being perfect. Do the best good you know, love instead of hate, and you, too, can make it. You don’t need to be Christian and frankly it doesn’t even help at this point.
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If I had to pick one who I wouldn’t feel 1000% guilty about taking into battle, it would be FireMan.EXE, who makes a striking impression as a first real boss. He’s just so cool to look at, has some fantastic animation, and seems like an appropriately imposing and intelligent kind of guy who enjoys what he does. It feels like he’s actually an equal partner, at least right up to the point where his Operator goes "drat" rather than "NOOOOOO" when he’s deleted. Mr. Match is absolutely a bad guy, using FireMan as a tool, and is the sort of conniving b@$+@rd you know is going to come back later. I’m not saying I feel bad for FireMan, just that he serves as a solid baseline for what a Navi is when you’re not talking about a main character, because, let me be frank, most of the others don’t seem all that advanced. You the player know MegaMan as the title character is going to be a fully fleshed-out person, with all the nuance that requires, because ain’t nobody buying a MegaMan game for some kid named Lan to outshine him. The game is going to come up with whatever excuse it needs for Megs to be at least as important as whoever else happens to be on the box. The only other good guy who gets to even talk is a butler, which is always going to be an early pass because it doesn’t take much to write hollow pleasantries. FireMan, in contrast, is shown to be able to lay on some intimidation and give a good "WOOO!" when he gets the go-ahead to personally incinerate a snot-nosed kid. He’s not a good person, but, importantly, he is a person. One might imagine you could pair him up with just about anyone and as long as he saw plenty of action, he’d be perfectly happy. It makes perfect sense for someone like him to be a standard model you could just buy and download and then build a relationship with.
In contrast, NumberMan.EXE kind of freaks me out, because it feels like he straight up hypnotized his Operator. Like, it takes a certain kind of evil to go, "but it’s fun to be a slave, isn’t it, my supposed partner?" And then he kind of warns him about feeling bad about it at first like the Free Thought Detector™ calculated the hold might weaken, and like, geez, that’s just unsettling. Mr. Higsby looooves himself some Battle Chips and apparently that was useful enough to brainwash him with. Unlike Mr. Match, once you delete NumberMan, I don’t know if Lan realizes it, but it might legit have broken some mind control there, because Higsby goes from a rather sinister dude grinning at the evil he’s going to commit and generally proactive and competent to spouting gibberish for a bit and low-key breaking down crying as Lan lays into him. And I think Lan only just realizes something is wrong with that when he repeats his request to trade chips, because it almost feels like that’s just easier for him to get out than trying to explain he has to live with knowing what he’s done to a ten-year-old who’s been gloating well past the point another ten-year-old told him to tone it down. Dude then just finds a vacant house in the neighborhood to turn into a chip shop, which is about where I left off, but like, yes, he’s sort of a weird guy, but it’s clear he’s not actually designed to be threatening, and the game does a good job of making him threatening anyway right up to the point he’s not, but since everyone only gets one animated protrait, all of that is very clearly out of character. If anyone in this game is actually on the spectrum, it’s him, with chips being his special interest. I’m not going to say he’s especially charming or likable or anything; he’s just sort of… there.
Gameplay
Yeah, I ended up turning on Buster MAX since my last review, really just before starting this one, after reading that it made grinding certain chips expedient. I had wanted to stock a few FireTower F chips for myself in the oven, did that, and then turned it off for FireMan.EXE. But I thought I was supposed to get his chip from it. So I looked up all the parameters on which the game judges you, busted my butt, nothing. And I finally broke down, turned it on, killed him in three shots… and got the same as doing it without, just leaving me even more confused. Between that and chip mining, I burned myself out for a while, but after taking a break from games in general (I am frankly "on break" from gaming more than gaming because I’m usually too busy creating something) and coming back, Buster MAX was still on, and I just kind of eventually accepted I was not getting the chip and found better guides. Some of the top Google results are positively crap info, let me tell you. Buster MAX was still on and left it that way wandering the game without leaning too heavily on a guide for anything beyond that.
It doesn’t feel like cheating. When you know you CAN beat the battles, it really just speeds them up.
I keep telling myself that, but watch me justify it for the rest of the review.
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But it does become readily apparent when it’s propping you up in areas you’re not otherwise equipped to handle. I didn’t think much of it in the second dungeon, because I tried it without, and yep, I was still okay there, even if it was a bit more challenging, but after you get access to the subway, you can very quickly start unlocking areas you can tell you’re not prepared for. And while, yes, you CAN manage those battles even on modest chips, the chance of a Game Over is much, much higher if you’re not actually building your skills, and I was not actually building my skills, learning enemy patterns, any of that stuff, just unlocking everything to see how far I could go. And while I don’t feel like that was a "mistake," I do intend to go back to normal after unlocking one last door. Buster MAX was useful because I screwed myself over beefing up the two worst stats you could start with and I want to address that again from my last review.
See, by default, the Mega Buster SUCKS. It is frustratingly slow, cannot charge at all, and only deals 1 damage. It is effectively useless. You’re expected to lean into your chips to mitigate that. So I put my first PowerUp upgrade into Rapid just to get some semblance of control of the thing and make it suck less. This doubled its speed, so while it’s not as responsive as I might have hoped, it’s still pretty fast and I can even get a nice suprise if my button-mash timing is right. It made it feel usable in any sense, doubling the DPS. Then I got curious and put another PowerUp into Charge just to see what it was like, because you don’t actually get charged shots without the upgrade. And then I saved like an @$$.
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See, the problem with Rapid and Charge is they are both sneakily speed stats, with Charge not controlling charge power in any way, but charge rate. And that means that your 16x and 32x multipliers for the two charge levels only bring it on par with the weakest chips available after far too much charging time.
Power, like Rapid, will effectively double your DPS with the first point. It will quadruple it when combined with Rapid. Combined with Charge, waiting for the time it takes will actually bring the damage to your weak chips’ game in half the time, or surpass your strongest ranged chips if you wait it out, getting you damage that you’d otherwise need a Sword family chip to reach. If I had understood the math, Power would have been my second upgrade just because Rapid makes the game feel instantly better, and I would have waited on Charge because it just takes so blasted long and I never remember to use it, partly for that reason.
Buster MAX fixed my Power deficit and I told myself I would turn it off once I got a point in Power. And let me tell you, there was a LOT in between me making that promise to myself and getting that point in Power. Quite frankly, a whole dungeon, and a new area of the net, in which I ended up buying it in an area I don’t honestly think I could have handled well without Buster MAX. Doable? Yes. Fun? No. And then the story just up and gave me another one, which I also put to Power, because the Buster math works out to where that’s going to give me a 6x above base to my damage with Rapid and it’s going to give me 90 damage with a full charge. I can worry about experimenting a bit more with the other stats after that, see if another point in Rapid makes a real difference, because Rapid is a division on cooldown and I don’t know if 1⁄3 is actually going to feel any better than the 1⁄2, where putting it to Charge will make a much more significant difference on its viability.
But getting access to those areas in the net would not likely have happened without Buster MAX. I’m walking away from it with much better chips, mind you. I hadn’t actually done anything with my loadout because Buster Max made it redundant, but I might have been okay if I’d done things more organically.
I think Buster MAX is useful for things without it being cheating. If pressed I might MAYBE have cheated myself a little, because I had no idea how poorly I’d actually have done in areas I breezed into with it on, before I had reason to check what it was like without it, but because I proved to myself I could have still squeaked by on the loadout I had, and had a much easier time after updating it, it could be a lot worse, especially because the last area to unlock literally requires me to do poorly for at least some of it and that means I have to actually not use Buster MAX to avoid being too fast. But if you’re grinding battles you already know you can win, it’s not cheating; just expediency. Using it as a tool to see if you might actually get better stuff from a boss isn’t cheating; it’s experimentation. And, really, no, no matter what your grade is, the early bosses don’t give you anything different. I don’t know if that’s ALWAYS true, but it’s fast enough to win for real and then blow them away.
Playing without Buster MAX on around Internet 3 where I know I’m supposed to be has me refining my loadout, learning what each chip does (the snake ones are powerful, for example, but you can only have one snake out at a time and you have zero control over their movements), and you know what? I’m getting a pretty good spread of ratings. Mostly where I fall to lower scores is when I biff an input or somehow think I have chips in a different order. It didn’t take much to get myself closer to where I need to be.
Good, good, this is what we call the Acceptance Phase.
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At least I get to feel like I don’t suck.
Pinball scores
Something that rears its head very early is the money situation, because Zenny pays out in such a way that the ones place is effectively meaningless. You’ll be raking it in by the hundreds straight off the bat, but prices ramp up so quickly that you’ll blow through it. HPMemory upgrades in particular are criminally expensive for the marginal benefit they offer, only +20 HP each, and there are 45 of them in the game according to a guide I found, with nearly all of them for purchace at five figures. Like, I take pills; believe me, I am one of the lucky ones in that I have good insurance and I’m not taking pills to not die, but the prices here would probably give Martin Shkreli pause and each one you buy in the early game either doubles the price or adds 50% to it. The markup gets less as numbers get higher, but in total, buying all of them will cost you 397,500 Zenny for only a total of 900 HP. That is an average of 4412⁄3 Zenny per 1 HP. Like, imagine having to pay $500 per sneeze. There is, based on early game enemies, since I can’t find enemy attack power charts, literally no way to lose less than 10 HP in this game before resistance because you’re the only one stuck with a pea shooter as your standard weapon. That means it costs you an average of 4,416.67 Zenny to tank one weak hit. That’s over two bosses worth of money (each boss gives you 2,000Z). HPMemory upgrades are easily the biggest scam in the game, but OMG do you ever need them. The kicker? They’re one of the few things in the game that it seems to expect you to come back for later. There are some that outright start lower than the second upgrade of the last one and this isn’t out of the goodness of their hearts; areas unlock via story progression. The game flat-out doesn’t expect you to be able to afford them; it expects that you’ll keep coming back to areas that can otherwise do nothing for you at whatever point the hole you dug yourself into previously has suddenly become the cheapest option. Let me say this: using Buster Max really shows how later areas ramp up the rewards. You will simply get more money from enemies in those areas, find easy thousands lying around as treasure, and be able to amass far more money than the game actually is balanced for at that point. Just running around grabbing chests in some of those areas could net you up to 8,000Z a pop of easy respawining loot, plus whatever you get paid for removing from the census. It is trivial to grab yourself 20k. Just keep in mind you have zero business being there without skills, chips, armor, and whatever HP upgrades you can scrounge for yourself if you’re not using Buster MAX. I mean, it’s doable, barely, but you’re probably going to be scoring yourself a 1 or 2 ranking for each battle and the chance of being deleted is high.
In comparison, armors are expensive, each in the 5 figure range, but they halve damage to any element they’re not weak to, including non-elemental, so by the time you can get your first one for 15k, you probably already have enough to buy it, if not much else, and you’ll want to invest.
This shirt already gives me +20 Wind enjoyment, though. Also why do they all come in blue? Normally I wouldn’t complain, but how do you tell them apart?
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The game text is honestly more reliable than anything you’ll find online, so here’s the mechanics: if the armor isn’t weak to the element, it halves the damage; if it is weak to it, you just take normal damage. It can literally only ever help you, so grabbing an armor, any armor, is going to do way more for your survivability per Zenny than HPMemory will by effectively doubling your HP 4 times out of 5, and frankly more like 100% of the time if you’re at all paying attention and have more than one of them. There are 3 armors in the game – HeatArmr, WoodArmr, and AquaArmr – and areas tend to only have a couple elements to worry about each, so you don’t actually need an Elec version as much as you might think. The elemental cycle is Fire < Aqua < Elec < Wood < Fire, so with each armor defending against 3 elements and neutral, you would need to somehow end up in an area that had Elec and two others to be forced into a position where you’d have to take normal damage once you have them all. Elec+Fire, Elec+Wood, and Elec+Aqua can be defended by the Fire, Wood, and Wood armors, respectively. Even if you get nothing but the WoodArmr at 15k, even if you have gotten zero HPMemory upgrades and are sitting at 100 HP, it is still only a cool 150Z per HP, or about 1⁄3 the cost. Even if you’re diving into the rough parts of town to get all the way to the AquaArmr, it’s double the price at 30k and still only 300Z per HP. And frankly if you’re already there, you could start at 0Z and have the money in less than 10 minutes. The only real problem with it that makes it feel like a missed opportunity is that it doesn’t visibly change Megs, which should have been as simple as a palette swap in a game that already does palette swaps. I know it might sound like I’m banging on about this, but it’s a solid technique that shouldn’t be as hard as it is on modern hardware.
Look, if I can do it, anyone can!
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Each shop has some form of limited inventory and it’s mostly not worth buying it all up. If you’re missing a necessary letter for a Program Advance, it might be worth it to grab a couple if it’s in your budget, but chances are you’re going to get them out of treasures if you wait a bit. Whether it’s worth waiting when you’re not using Buster MAX is a question I can’t actually answer, but chips tend to be cheaper than upgrades and you might be able to at least snag one without trouble, with the benefit they keep their price, but the downside that a shop is only going to have 3 of each.
What money can’t buy
You get your first Navi chip if you talk to Mayl before entering the second dungeon. I don’t know if this is actually missable, but I was pretty obsessive about not missing it, so Roll R is going to be available for your random rotation fairly early into the story. Around the same time, you’ll be able to collect GutsMan G, FireMan F, FireMan2 F, and FireMan3 F, all in quick succession. Your third boss will make it easy to collect StoneMan S, which will then let you work toward StoneMn2 S and StoneMn3 S in the same area. The game actually seems to go out of its way to put these in your initial load after you first get them, just so you can play with them a bit and see how they work. You only have 30 chips in your Folder, but you’ll find Navi chips weighted in such a way you see them quite a lot. This does seem to trail off a bit, but random being random, I’ve had situations where my initial load had three of them in it. There’s no reason not to enjoy them. No drawback. The only limitation you actually have is that you can only pack 5 of them into your Folder and Megs will let you know if you try to do more than that. But 5/30 is still a 1⁄6 chance of seeing at least one of them each chip load.
Can you get them all at once? Sure, easily with Buster MAX, and that’s what I’ve done so far. Just to make it fun, you know? But the intent is really a much better reason to come back to older areas once you’re more powerful, so you can do better at kicking their butts, so you can get higher grades for the upgraded versions. You’re guaranteed the first one as long as you stumble into whatever corner they’re hiding in, but after you beat that, you get their most powerful version as a random encounter in the area and that will make you work for the better levels of the same attack. If HPMemory is intended to keep you coming back to an area shop, Navi chips serve as a much better reason to grind a bit there. I would call their encounter chance reasonable. You can even have duplicates, so if you really want to load all 5 slots with the same one, there’s nothing stopping you with anyone who becomes a random encounter.
But, really, you know what? It’s just really satisfying to see a boss you beat teleport in and do their attack for you. It’s like, "oh, you’re one of the good guys now, and I did that." Which is, like, not actually how it works at all, but leave me with my warm fuzzies, okay? These designs are so good it’s a pleasure just to have a way of seeing them.
Is this a “warm fuzzies” joke or…?
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No, man, I just wanted to include you. But also it’s on theme with summoning someone. You know, since you’re summoned back to the human realm.
And actually, the entire "digital ghost" idea kind of extends to a lot of attacks. You’ll get the Dash chips from the Fishy enemy and to perform it, Megs pulls out a pint-sized Fishy to hang onto and ride into the enemy ranks. FireTower is a ridiculously powerful chip for being available in the first dungeon and using it shows a brief flash of the mouth spitting the flames like the actual VolGear enemy does when it does it. Even the Cannon chips take the same shape as the enemies you get them from. These are all really smart design choices that show that Megs is doing what every Megs does: stealing the powers of his enemies. It’s just doing it in a different way than changing his colors.
Humors out of balance
Doing a little research for this, I found something kind of ridiculous: Wood has half as many chips as basically anything else at a mere 7. Three of those are different versions of WoodMan as a Navi chip. Of the remaining four, only two of them are actually attack chips: WoodTowr and Snakegg1. In contrast, Fire, Elec, and Aqua have 13, 14, and 20, respectively, with many more offensive options. The really weird thing, though, is that for most purposes, Wood is the top tier of whatever it is you’re doing. WoodShld (a homage to the Classic Wood Shield) will outright convert one hit of damage to healing. WoodAura is the penultimate damage negation ability, shrugging off anything below 80, and is the last one you don’t have to win by defeating a superboss. Both of them are only available near the end of the game. WoodTowr is the final and most powerful of the Tower attacks and is available shockingly early. In comparison, Snakegg1 is the only one that’s the weakest of its line, and while it is available fairly early if you’re using Buster MAX, it does a generous 130 damage. WoodMan’s damage might not be spectacular, but it’s probably the most spectacular damage you can get that hits the entire enemy side of the field until it breaks even with GutsMan at the end of their respective lines. It’s honestly kind of ridiculous how good it is as an element and it’s just very strange how little of it there is.
FireTowr is the first of the Tower line and available technically right off the bat in Lan’s oven, provided you’re either fantastic or using Buster MAX. That and FireMan both do a generous 100 damage and since both have the F code, you can even combine them if you like. There are legitimate reasons to do it depending on enemy movement patterns.
Interestingly enough, WoodMan/2/3 is the only chip that can’t be used with anything else, as the only chip with the W code.
So zetta slow!
Hey, you know what I said earlier about the animations mostly using smears and stuff to keep things moving? Well, there is a problem here and that’s that some animations, and specifically the ones Megs uses to fire, toss in way too many frames. Early in the game, the Cannon type chips will be probably your most reliable way of doing damage, but they take ten frames from button press to hitscan. That’s about how much time it takes to say "but." At least in my dialect of English. That’s a whole 1⁄6 of a second. In contrast it takes only 3 frames for most enemies to teleport out of the square. So there are just enemies that are slippery little scamps who teleport around a lot and are effectively impossible to hit with a Cannon attack until they’re spitting a stream of something. And, like, fair enough, this is a series all about learning enemy patterns, BUT, and this is a big "but," the game gives you little to no feedback on WHY you’re missing. You can nail an enemy mid-teleport; that’s not the issue. The issue is unless you already know to be counting frames, you’re not going to understand why your attacks aren’t connecting. This is a balancing issue that the game does both right and wrong, because letting you nail enemies mid-warp feels good, as an allowance they wouldn’t have had to give. It’s to the player’s benefit. But having such a long animation for something you expect to be immediate is the opposite. There’s an assumption as a gamer that the delay between you hitting a button and your input hitting the screen is going to be minimal. And maybe this was less of an issue wired on a GBA, but when you’re already dealing with a 2-frame delay on a wireless controller plus potentially another 4 frames on your TV unless you put it in Game Mode, it all starts to add up. And maybe we’re just all used to that 6 frames, but let me tell you, when something feels bad, you notice. Even if you don’t know why, as a tool-using species, we have a visceral understanding of this. And for what? Ten frames of animation you’re probably not paying attention to and can’t properly appreciate because each frame zips by so fast? It could have been cut down.
I never considered myself a good enough gamer to worry about frames, but maybe I should.
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There’s no denying it; this game feels bad early on. With your Buster being 100% useless, your reliance on chips puts you at the mercy of the immediacy of each individual attack. There are other lesser attacks that are faster, but even right out the gate, they simply don’t do enough damage to keep things moving properly. They don’t feel satisfying. And the random nature of what gets loaded up for you means you can’t even rely on getting enough in a row to capitalize on potentially cracking a few off in quick succession. This can make combat a slow, methodical affair, which is honestly something Buster MAX tempts you with fixing.
I don’t think the encounter rate is especially high like some people seem to think; I think you just spend so much time in each battle that it feels like it’s too much. Actually going from battle to battle is entirely reasonable. You’re just left slinging peas for too much of combat itself, and not even with any sense of urgency, which is to say battle leaves you with far too much waiting. Especially for an action combat system. It puts a huge dent in your feeling of agency.
Overall
I don’t think MegaMan Battle Network is a bad game. A deeply flawed game, but as the first to do what it did, I think that’s acceptable. Some of it may just be aesthetics, some of it is mechanical shortcomings, some of it is in the writing and not all of that is just "hasn’t aged well" so much as some things were never acceptable and enabling or even rewarding bad behavior. I can look at all this stuff from the perspective of someone who knows better, but there’s a term for a lot of this and that’s "repeatable behavior." I’m not saying the child protagonists have to be angels; I’m just saying there are things that the game lets you do that no child should be doing.
As a game, as it’s unlocked, I’ve been happy enough with the mechanics. I don’t think you should have to earn the game being good, but it gets around to it quickly enough.