I have to read good, when the words are very bad.
-KNIJohn
Alright, buckle up everybody. It’s time to look at a game that despite being the third highest-selling single title in the Mega Man IP to date is highly polarizing. But what exactly is this game? Given that little 4 in the title, it’s the fourth installment in the Battle Network subseries, which follows our human protagonist Lan Hikari, and an internet-based iteration of the blue bomber, Megaman.exe. The game is an isometric RPG with tactical and action elements, and a little bit of card collection mixed in that takes place across two worlds. The real world is where a majority of the story happens, while all of the action happens in the internet world where Megaman.exe resides.
Now that the scene is set, let’s go over exactly where I got to in my personal play because it’s an important reference point for a wildly varied experience with this game. I did technically beat the game, but unfortunately, that doesn’t put my experience anywhere close to completion. The final boss is just the beginning. A full experience actually is designed to take three playthroughs of the game at a minimum. I personally got through one and one-third of the playthroughs. While for some games, this wouldn’t mean too much in the grand scheme, for Battle Network 4 it brings up some issues. There is a lot of content locked behind new game plus, so some issues with the game might be remedied if you stick with it past the end. The game struggles to keep the content fresh and engaging until then, though.
A Test of Strength
The primary reason for a lot of the game’s issues is in its primary setup, a series of three tournaments per playthrough, each with multiple candidates randomly filled in. These tournaments have some issues of their own, but the randomness can drive players away. There are some aspects that are set in stone to some degree. The first tournament of the first playthrough will always possess the Aqua Man scenario for example. The game also puts a certain number of tournament scenarios that unlock new forms in each playthrough.
These tournament scenarios each follow a similar pattern. The player sees the face of their opponent in the tournament and wanders around the area for a bit before the opponent ropes the hero into some form of test or side task before the match. Once that is finished, the opponent is faced with a net battle between Megaman and the opponent’s Navi, and then the cycle repeats until the tournament is won. Each of these also takes about five of the game’s 20-hour runtime, which leads to the main issue with them. There’s next to no plot significance to any of these. Very few unlock or lead you through new areas, and only six unlock permanent upgrades, which are only seen over the three playthroughs. And when 3/4ths of the game is relegated to mandatory filler, it puts the game in a steep uphill battle to keep the player engaged while running through the same three rooms fighting the same random encounters for the whole runtime, let alone three runtimes.
The 8-Bit Review
Visuals: 6/10
The art for this title is a pleasant pixel art style, much in line with the previous titles. Unlike previous titles though, the game took a shift in overall art direction. It’s brighter, bubblier, and more colorful. In the internet areas, pathways are large and have rounded edges. As is expected of the Megaman series as a whole, the unique character designs are over-the-top, especially when it comes to the Navi combatants you face, while still line with the character’s themes. There are however one or two sprites that were muted out for some reason, namely Megaman’s Aqua Soul and Proto Soul sprites, which were both reduced to an almost grayscale palette instead of being bright blue and red, respectively.
Audio: 7/10
Toshihiko Horiyama and Shinki Amagishi did an amazing job on the music and sound design. At least, as amazingly as they can with the chirping noises that the Game Boy Advance’s sound chip is capable of putting out. The music suffers from the flaws of the portable console more than the sound effects, but it still keeps the score and excellent sound effects on attacks from reaching their full potential.
Gameplay: 5/10
Controlling our hero Lan in the human world might not present us with any particularly interesting or revolutionary gameplay, serving mostly as a vehicle to move from one story beat to the next, but his little blue friend on the other hand has plenty to offer. While controlling Megaman, the game operates on the random encounter system of RPG battles. Occasionally, while running around, Megaman.exe will be pulled off of the brightly colored pathways of the cyberworld and onto a six-by-three grid against a gaggle of enemies taking the form of highly advanced computer viruses. The fact that the game is an action RPG means that which enemies load into the other side of the field determines a lot about how you’ll want to engage them since they all have different attack patterns. Luckily, Megaman is equipped with a customizable selection of 30 battle chips. Unfortunately, where other titles in the series only have a few viruses with specific conditions to be struck or strange attack patterns that make them frustrating to hit, Battle Network 4 is rife with enemies like the CirKill, whose predictable but incredibly fast movement and attack patterns make them hard to pin down without taking at least one hit from them.
The trend of making enemies hard to pin down or invincible at certain stages of their attack patterns is likely to offset all the new power Megaman has through Double Soul and Full Synchro. Full Synchro allows any attack our digital friend dishes out to deal double damage as long as the previous attack hit an enemy during a certain window. Double Soul is where the version exclusivity comes in. Each version of the game has six opponents with powers that Megaman can access, granting a variety of buffs based on the element that the opponent harnesses in battle. This is a double-edged sword, though. As an example: my version, Blue Moon, has the water soul of Aqua Man, whereas the Red Sun version has the fire-based soul belonging to Fire Man. This can cause issues if the player decides they love the fire options but are playing Blue Moon, they may feel cheated out of the potential of what they want to do.
A good combat system with fun potential but bogged down by multiple game versions and some rough virus encounters isn’t the worst thing, but here’s where the three-game format rears its head again. Certain viruses are locked behind multiple playthroughs of the game. Since viruses are a large source of unique battle-chip drops, this means that options early on are very limited. This, coupled with the fact that Souls are unlocked in a random order per file, means the game can potentially have a huge variance in player enjoyment simply based on choosing the right version without a real reference point and then getting lucky.
Multiplayer: 6/10
Battle Network 4’s multiplayer battles and trading were resurrected from the dead thanks to the Legacy Collection’s online capabilities, which serve the game well. Trading is functional. I can’t say it’s anything too crazy, but where the multiplayer really shines in the battling. This is one of the deeper multiplayer battle experiences of the collection, considering the new features introduced to the battle system in this entry. But despite them being functional and potentially deep, the online matchmaking in my experience didn’t really have many people on, so its usage is limited to doing private battles unless you want to wait around a while.
Narrative: 3/10
Battle Network 4’s story is…strange to say the least. At any rate, it’s hard to talk about since there’s not just one story at play. Alongside the tournament stories, two categories of stories happen in the game. There’s a meteor extinction event and the dark chips. While these stories do all theoretically tie together, the methods in which they do are haphazard at best.
There are also two other major plots besides the tournaments that are technically happening during the course of a playthrough. The first is a standard ‘end of the world’ scenario presented to the player in the first cutscene, which is not brought to the attention of our heroic duo until after they win the final tournament and are thrust into a plot that’s been building up in the background the whole time. The second is a run-in with an evil force that threatens to take over the mind and corrupt our little blue friend. This subplot is linked to the gameplay through the Dark Chip system, which to be fair does have permanent negative effects if the player interacts with it. However, if the player only chooses to interact with the system the one time during the story they are forced to use one to progress, it leads to even the final boss’s monologue about the darkness inside falling flat, as it makes the player feel like they’re being punished and forced down a path they didn’t choose themselves.
It’s also worth pointing out that this is a game on the Game Boy Advance, meaning there wasn’t any real potential for voice acting, which means that our story is purely text-based. Now this usually isn’t a factor that really has much meaning behind it, but this game series has a tenuous relationship with the English language. For Battle Network 4, the translation is particularly egregious. Not only is it chock full of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, but there are also plenty of instances where text boxes are attributed to the wrong characters, causing many conversations to be confusing and hard to parse out.
Collection: 7/10
Since we are looking specifically at the Legacy Collection version of Battle Network 4, we do get a lot of fun new toys to play with. The collection has some of the standard things you might expect, such as concept art and music from the games to peruse. It has optional filters to smooth out the game’s original pixel art style and backgrounds to fill out the rest of the screen if the aspect ratio doesn’t match up. However, it’s got 3 major additions that really set it apart from other collections and the original versions of the game. First is BusterMAX mode, which cranks up the power of Megaman’s basic attack by 100 times, which absolutely melts any difficulty the game may have had, and is a nice accessibility feature. The second feature we get is the addition of online connectivity, making it much easier to trade and battle than having to have a link cable in the same room as someone else with the game. The final thing that got added is the patch card system, which isn’t actually new, but instead reincorporates the Game Boy Advance’s E-Reader features into the game digitally. These virtual cards do anything from changing Megaman’s basic moves to changing the menu colors. Together, all of these features really make this version of the game the definitive version most people should play.
Uniqueness: 5/10
When considering Battle Network 4 is the fourth title in a series that has 6 of its own entries, as well as 3 similar entries in a subsequent series, it’s hard to say it breaks any truly new ground. For its time it did present some fresh ideas for the series that would be refined into something more as the series continued, but all of its ideas can be seen in other games, and in most cases refined beyond what this title introduces. Card collection is a genre that the indie scene has refined to no end, and games featuring random aspects for multiple playthroughs became a genre of their own.
Personal: 4/10
It’s so hard for me to put into words exactly how I personally feel about Battle Network 4, but I’ll try. I want to like this game, both as a long-time fan of the series and as someone who thinks the Legacy Collection as a whole is a masterpiece. The game, however, makes me feel like I’m not meant to like it. Every cool concept and idea I see in the game is plagued with issues or half-thoughts, and it makes me sad. There’s not even anything I can think of about the game that immediately kills my enjoyment. In fact, I think any of these issues could have and some of them do exist in other titles in the series, but for me, the culmination of small problems combined with the game’s overall structure makes me feel like it would be a waste of my time to go any further playing it than I already have.
Aggregated Score: 5.3/10
700m has played a lot of games in the last 20 years, and thinks way too much about them, so now they’re here to share those too many thoughts with the world.
