u/SoggyWaffles18

I’ve seen Battle Network 3’s postgame get a lot of praise, especially on this sub. A lot of people think that it’s very fun and rewarding in its own right, and not just in comparison to the other postgames, which so far have been none of those things. While I have my issues with BN3 in general, I think it’s overall a pretty good game, even if it’s not my favorite Battle Network title. So naturally, I was ready to 100% it and see whether or not the hype is deserved.

Chips, chips, chips. I really don’t want to talk about the incredibly tedious battle of filling out the chip library since every game makes you do it, but it’s seriously impressive how they find a way to make the grinding required for 100% worse in every game. Of course, there are nice additions like Collect, which forces enemies to drop chips whenever possible, but there are equally as many baffling changes. For example, locking certain chips behind Styles. There are actually busting levels higher than S rank, which are S+ and S++. You’d probably never find this out without a guide, since the game doesn’t actually show you the plus signs, but certain chip codes are only dropped if a virus is beaten at one of those ranks. More importantly though, there are three chips that only drop at those ranks. You can only achieve those ranks on a regular virus battle if you’re using Custom Style, so you can either suck it up and grind out 100 battles to get it if you don’t already have it or just use the chip trader. But it gets worse. In BN1 and BN2, Navi chips came in three versions. BN3 adds two more to the mix, but only the V4 chips are relevant right now. Having another tier of Navi chips is pretty nice, the main issue is that they only drop if you get an S+/S++ rank on the Navi. And in order to get that rank on a Navi battle, you need to meet the requirements you usually need for an S rank, but you need to finish it in under 20 seconds instead of 30, and you have to be using Team Style. I had Wood Custom by this point and I had absolutely no intention of going through over 200 battles just to get a Team Style and then go back to Wood Custom since that was the Style I actually wanted. Mercifully, there is another way to get V4 chips, which I did and will explain much later, but it’s just such a stupid concept to include in the first place and I’m so glad it was scrapped for all future games.

Rewatching Navis in general is just extra annoying in this game. When you find an α (V2) Navi ghost on the Net, instead of just jacking out and jacking back in to make their β (V3) form turn into a random encounter in that area, their data is whisked away and they become an encounter in a completely different area. On top of that, a couple of them have spawn requirements—like BeastManβ only spawning if you use SneakRun and BubbleManβ’s fuck ass only spawning if your HP is red—and when those requirements are met, other virus battles are added to the encounter pool that you are incapable of running away from first try, no matter what your level is. All of this solely serves to make collecting every chip extremely obnoxious, and I can’t even imagine attempting it without a guide. I seriously can’t stress how bad the chip library completion is.

And that’s not all you have to grind for this time either. Just like in BN2, you also have BugFrags to worry about. You need over 1000 of them to complete the postgame, even more if you’re playing Blue and want to buy out every BugFrag merchant. I made a post about this a few months ago that showed my strategy, which mainly just involved beating the living shit out of GutsMan a couple million times, since countering a boss to death gives you ten BugFrags. I was made aware that there were better method of farming BugFrags, but I decided to keep using my same method anyway. I didn’t do all of the battles in one sitting because I’m not clinically insane, but I still ended up having to fight GutsMan over 200 times, and it was not something I’d like to ever do again, to say the least. And yet this is somehow the game with the most easily farmable BugFrags.

Okay, now that all of that’s out of the way, I can talk about the actual new content. First off is the Virus Breeder, which is a machine that can be found in SciLab. There are specific preset spots on the Net where you can battle virus families that, once defeated, become passive and are sent to the Virus Breeder, where they can be fed BugFrags. After this, a scientist will give you that virus family’s chip, which, when used, starts a roulette that includes all three viruses of that family. Whichever version you stop the roulette on will attack for you, and their attack strength depends on the amount of BugFrags that version has been given. You can feed each family 100 BugFrags, and once this is done, you can find an even stronger version of the virus to be battled and added to the roulette. Technically, all you actually need to do for 100% completion is find every virus the first time. There’s no requirement to feed them… but if you’re like me, you’ll end up needing over 2000 BugFrags in total for the postgame. While the viruses are cute and it’s neat that it exists, the Virus Breeder overall serves little purpose aside from providing you with chips you probably won’t use.

Like BN2, this game has a secret area that can be accessed after clearing the game, called… Secret Area. Uh… stupid name aside, this is definitely an improvement over WWW Area in terms of atmosphere. This place looks amazing and while the music doesn’t slap as hard as And You Will Know The Truth, it perfectly complements the pristine looking water and porcelain paths. Just like WWW Area, you can’t jack out from this area without going back to the entrance, and there are plenty of security systems to keep intruders out. Around the area, you’ll find pillars that can only be broken with a hammer that can be found in Undernet 7. There are two types of Pillars. The first kind has viruses inside that force you into ten back to back battles. The second type also contains viruses, but not just any ordinary viruses. These pillars are home to Numbers, which are puzzle viruses just like Protectos. Each one has a number above it, and they have to be killed in that order. It has to be done in one attack, and if multiple Numbers have the same number, they need to be deleted simultaneously. But they don’t damage you every ten seconds, meaning you have as much time as you need to pull the right chips (especially if you have FoldrBak). You’ll still need to make sure to come with some sort of strategy though, since if you hit them in the wrong order, you’ll die instantly unless you have UnderShirt.

The boss of the first area is DarkMan, who is trying to delete 1000 Navis so he can fight Serenade. His fight gimmick somewhat mirrors his Classic counterpart. Every time he moves, the element of his attacks changes. He can also make portals over your panels that spawn bats, which are easy to avoid if you have AreaGrabs/MetaGels. Overall, he wasn’t particularly difficult, and he also doesn’t have animations, presumably due to cartridge limitations. The second boss is Japa-sorry, I mean YamatoMan. These games’ translations, I swear. Anyway, he mainly attacks with his spear like his Classic counterpart until he gets below I think half health, at which point he uses mini soldiers to run into your area and steal your panels until he locks you to your back row, so the difficulty mainly comes in deleting him before that happens. Other than that, he’s not much of a threat and his attacks are easily dodged. Both DarkMan and YamatoMan were somehow much easier and less obnoxious than a lot of bosses you fight in the main campaigns, like BubbleMan and DrillMan.

Once you’ve collected every standard chip, you can reach the end of Secret Area 3 and finally fight Serenade, the king of the Undernet, and the incredibly powerful Navi who’s been hyped up ever since the last few chapters of the game. They are impressed that you’ve managed to make it this far and decide to challenge you, and they explain that the source of their power is mercy; they fight by showing respect for their enemies. This is shown in their battle gimmick. Serenade’s main attack is to fire a zigzagging orb, but when you try to attack them back, they’ll simply deflect it. After a while though, they use a more powerful attack that leaves them open to get hit… and that’s the entire fight. Serenade only has two attacks, the orb and the one that lets you hit them, and since you have to sit around doing nothing for a while before they use the latter, it’s very easy to realize how empty the fight actually is. They don’t even get an extra attack at half health or anything. As annoying as Bass’ aura can be, at least he hasn’t used all of his attacks by the time you’ve landed a single hit on him. You can also really easily just panel lock Serenade and start going all out with every attack in your arsenal, since they can only deflect if they have a panel above or below them. For those reasons, I found this to be a very underwhelming fight, and to top it off, they don’t even drop a chip. This is disappointing considering that they never appear again after this and barely even do anything in this game. Such a cool and interesting character who ends up feeling like heavily wasted potential, which applies to a lot of Battle Network’s cast.

After Serenade’s defeat, they hint at there being a stronger Navi who even they had trouble fighting, before granting you with Rank 1, which makes MegaMan the strongest Navi in the Net. There’s obviously only one Navi Serenade could be talking about, but before we can talk about fighting him, we need to talk about parallel universes the BugFrag Trader, which is located on a Press path in Secret Area 3. It’s essentially just a Chip Trader, but it takes ten BugFrags instead of chips, and it has a higher chance of giving rare chips, including the V4 chips (being the only other way to obtain them), so obviously I just save scummed in front of it until I got all of them. It doesn’t give BowlMan/MistMan V4 though, so I honestly just used a cheat code for both of them since my emulator doesn’t support trading and I’m sorry, but there’s absolutely no way in hell I’m doing 200+ battles just for one chip. Every time you trade, growling sounds will come out of the Trader, and once you trade thirty times, it gets very pissed. If you leave Secret Area and come back to the Trader, BassGS will come out and you can fight him.

It turns out Bass actually survived being swallowed by Alpha by merging with Gospel’s leftover data or something like that, so he can now use Gospel’s powers while fighting. In gameplay, this just means he can use an extra attack involving Gospel. He also doesn’t have any memories of his past, which is apparently something that will last for the rest of the series. His battle is similar to how it was in BN2, but now he has that aforementioned Gospel attack and his aura is now 200 damage instead of 150. While this game does have a somewhat reasonable number of chips that can actually deal that much damage, and you do have FoldrBak if you’re playing Blue version, Bass’ aura still regenerates so quickly that any normal folder won’t get you very far against him, so I opted for a folder with 200+ damaging chips like ProtoManV3/V4, KingManV3/V4, and asterisk coded Mines, with MetaGels for panel locking Bass and Meteors with a lot of Fire+30s combined with a GrassStage to obliterate him once he’s panel locked. Your reward for beating him is Bass+ X.

After beating Serenade and BassGS, multiple Heel Navis show up around Secret Area that you can challenge to participate in Serenade’s Time Trials. Excluding anything grindy like chip library completion, this might just be the single worst section of gameplay in any of these postgames so far. I’d be impressed if they could come up with anything more stupid. The idea is that these Navis will transform into every Navi you’ve fought in the game up to YamatoMan, and you have to defeat them in their α forms under a time limit. This doesn’t sound so bad at first. You can just use the strategies you used on them the first times like Sensor3 and PlantMan plus multiple Wood+30s and Atk+30, right? Wrong. You’re forced to do this using one of the various prebuilt extra folders found throughout the game. The only issue is that all of these extra folders are complete dogshit. They have no less than 8 codes, so there’s pretty much zero synergy, and they usually only have a single decent Program Advance, two if you’re lucky. And not only that, but some of the times are insanely strict. You only get ten seconds to beat FlashMan, so good luck defeating him without a Wood Style charge shot. Even once you equip the FastGauge program, and even once you look up the best folders to use for every boss, and even once you learn to adapt to the shitty chips in all of these terrible, terrible folders that have every letter of the alphabet inside them, it’s still entirely up to luck whether or not you pull the chips that are actually capable of defeating these bosses, especially when you start fighting the later ones that have over 1000 health. And the cherry on top is the fact that every time you want to switch folders, you have to run all the way back to the entrance, jack out, run to where the folder you want is, and then come all the way back to Yoka. The time trials are a truly inexcusable waste of time, and one of the most blatant examples of padding I’ve seen in any of these postgames. I can’t think of any other reason to include it in the game, especially since you’ve most likely already fought all of these bosses at least three times. It’s not even hard, it’s just a dumb idea and shouldn’t be an actual challenge you have to complete.

Oh, and there’s also Hub.bat. This is a NaviCust program that can be found on an invisible path in Secret Area 3, and it essentially replaces HubStyle from BN2. Similarly to in that game, it gives you the effects of every Style, and also comes with a bug that halves your HP. If you have BugStop, you can prevent the HP bug, but you’d need to grind for Bug Style, since you probably don’t already have it, then grind enough until you get the program, and at that point why even bother? It’s not like Hub.bat is good enough to warrant that much effort, since it takes up a good portion of the NaviCust even when compressed.

Finishing the Time Trials grants you either Serenade’s battle chip or DarkAura depending on your version, as well as the fifth title screen mark. But if you go to the title screen and input a code, the stars will compress to give space for two more stars. This code also causes the Ω variants of every boss, including Bass and Serenade—as well as BowlMan if you’re playing White and MistMan if you’re playing Blue—to spawn. To encounter an Ω boss, you just need to search the general area of where you originally fought them, in which they can be found as a static encounter (or just search up a guide with pictures of every boss’ spawn location like I did). You’ll have to survive three Ω virus battles back to back before fighting the Ω Navi, which is essentially just the Navi’s β version, but with more health and stronger attacks, which only really proves to be a threat when you’re fighting someone like ProtoMan whose attacks move at the speed of light and do 350 damage each. But generally, whatever strategy you used on them the first time will work here. Again, this is all something I would appreciate a lot more if you didn’t have to fight most of these bosses at least four times to even get here, but for what it is… it’s nice. Even if I do still hate some of this game’s bosses and their annoying gimmicks. You can’t ever encounter these bosses again, but they’ll always drop a V5 chip, which is just their V4 chip… but stronger. All of the V5 chips are also Giga chips, which ends up making them mostly worthless since your single Giga chip slot would be better spent on literally anything else. Why would I ever put PlantManV2, PlantManV3, PlantManV4, and PlantManV5 in my folder when I could just put PlantManV2, PlantManV3, PlantManV4, and FoldrBak so that I can reuse all of those chips as much as I want? Oddly enough, SerenadeΩ and BassΩ don’t give you any chips though, just Zenny. I guess it’s because Bass has Bass+ and BassGS, but Serenade only has one chip and that chip is version exclusive. And besides, Bass had four drops in BN2, so it couldn’t have been that much of an issue. Whatever though, it’s not a big deal. Defeating every Ω boss will net you the sixth star, and the seventh star is just for completing the Program Advance library, which you can’t do without compressing the stars because one of them, PrixPower, requires KingManV5, BowlManV5, or MistManV5.

Once all title screen marks have been obtained, if you go back to rematch the final boss, it will be upgraded to a stronger version, AlphaΩ (which is admittedly a badass name for a final boss’ superform). It’s obviously not required for a title screen mark, but beating it is treated as 100%’ing the game, since you get a special picture at the end. Well, in this game’s case, only in the Japanese version/Legacy Collection version, and I’m playing on a ROM of the original English release, so I sadly don’t have a screenshot of that picture. Having a powered up variant of the final boss be the last challenge of the postgame would become a trend for later games, and it’s definitely a change I appreciate and wish BN2 had also done. But as for AlphaΩ itself. As expected, most of the fight is identical to the first one except with a higher damage output and 3000 health, but he does get a few new moves. For example, he can use his claws to steal your front row and poison your field. At low health, he also gains a missile attack that causes an explosion in the back two rows, so hopefully you brought AreaGrabs/MetaGels. Other than that, he’s the same annoying ass fight as before. I struggled on this Jello bastard a lot on my first run, but now that I have Wood Custom and actually know how to build a folder, it wasn’t quite as difficult. I tried out my usual folder against it once, which didn’t work, so I tweaked it a little, equipped AirShoes, and was able to beat it on my second try. As the screenshot indicates, I did lowkey start getting destroyed towards the end of the fight, but that’s mainly just because Alpha starts pulling out straight bullshit after a while, like that one lightning attack. But once you lock in and defeat AlphaΩ, you’ve finally 100% completed Mega Man Battle Network 3, and are rewarded with the final Giga chip, AlphaArm, for your efforts.

So now, to answer the question, do I think BN3’s postgame lived up to the hype? …sadly, if you’ve read this far, you can probably already tell that my answer is no. Like, yeah, this is easily the best postgame so far, no question, but that’s only because the bar is at the core of the earth, not because BN3’s postgame is actually good in its own right and something I could recommend someone to play. Yes, I absolutely appreciate the amount of content this postgame has compared to every other Battle Network game… but it doesn’t really matter how much content there is if said content isn’t fun. And out of all the content in this postgame, I would only really say that 10-20% of it is enjoyable, if I’m being completely honest (and I think a lot of the issues are due to space limitations). The rest ranges from inoffensive at best, like the Virus Breeder, to incredibly frustrating and tedious at worst, like library completion and the Time Trials. I get why people like it, since, again, this is the most content out of any postgame, when I’m pretty sure they normally they only have one new area to explore outside of the chip library completion, but I’m sorry, I just didn’t think the experience was anywhere near as good as people said it would be, and I know that’s a very hot take on this sub. If this is really the best Battle Network postgame, then the future doesn’t look very bright, especially not the immediate future considering what game I’m doing next.

I was doing some postgame grinding when I ran into this guy on accident, and doing the fight made me actually realize how hideously broken this chip is, so I wanted to share it. Not that it’s a bad thing, since it’s incredibly fun to stunlock bosses like that.

First things first, I played both versions of this game, which I haven’t done with any game since BN6. Like with that game, I did it because my brother said the game was good enough that it was worth playing twice, so I decided to try it. Did I agree? You’ll have to read the rest of the post or skip to the end to find out.

Unlike SF2, this game’s plot is actually good. It doesn’t have the exact same depressing vibes as SF1’s story, but it’s still one of the best plots to come out of Mega Man, probably even my favorite. Which is kind of crazy, considering that the plot is basically just BN4’s plot. It’s impressive that they managed to salvage that. Jack and Tia, Ace, Joker, Heartless, and most of the other new characters were great introductions to the cast. Mr. King is also probably one of my favorite Mega Man villains, mainly with how unapologetically evil he is compared to most of the others. The returning characters are also back to normal and not flanderized like in SF2. Even Rogue is less annoying this time. Although I have no idea why Dark Phantom is in this game, he’s still a nothing character and isn’t relevant to the plot at all.

This game also does something similar to BN6 where the first half of the game has most of the dungeons back to back, and a lot of the story beats happen in the second half. But unlike with BN6, the second half also has a sufficient amount of gameplay as well, so it doesn’t feel empty. It also feels like the game was designed around this fact. The events of the first half of the game are relevant to what happens in the second half, unlike in BN6, where the first half of the game has almost no story for the most part before suddenly deciding to develop the plot after the ElementMan scenario. What I’m trying to say is that it feels much better paced than BN6 despite following a similar story structure. But you get my point, the game’s writing is peak. The only real critique I have is it’s weird that Pat is nowhere to be found in this game. You’d think he’d be a member of the Satella Police but no, there’s a single line that mentions his existence and nothing else.

The music is just as good as the writing. I know I’ve said this for every Star Force (and Battle Network) game, but seriously, the composers just cook no matter what game it is. These are Mega Man games after all, so it makes sense. Obviously it comes with a great remix of Shooting Star (not my favorite, but still great), the area themes are catchy, and the dungeons and battle themes are also great. Radio Virus Busting has no business going so hard. It didn’t take long for it to become my favorite regular battle theme in any BN/SF game. And then you have more bangers like Spade Magnus’ stage, Dread Joker’s stage, Rivals Unite, the boss theme, or Go Satella Police. And also, the music that plays in cutscenes with Dealer is so sinister and fits perfectly for a card shuffling monster like Mr. King, it’s my favorite villain theme in any of these games. And not only is the Noise Area theme fire, but it was a great idea to make the track just abruptly stop for a few seconds before reaching the chorus and loop, only to let you hear the full music when you go through the actual Noise Waves. It’s kind of creepy when you first hear it and also enhances the uneasy feeling of these areas. This is overall a pretty peak soundtrack.

Before even getting into the gameplay, I thought it was nice how there were some small details and changes to the battle system outside of the major ones. Like how you can now always pick cards that are in the same row horizontally rather than being limited to a single column, or how cards aren’t always in a straight line when they’re drawn, or how Galaxy Advances exist as a replacement for Program Advances, or how favorite cards can’t be manually selected and must be downloaded from Wave Stations (although strangely enough the game never tells you that the favorite cards a Wave Stations has aren’t permanent, and are selected from a pool whenever you enter the area). They just make the battle system feel more fresh before you gain access to the big new mechanics, something that SF2 didn’t do. What I absolutely did NOT like, however, were the Support Cards. Like I said, cards don’t always appear in a straight line. In fact, sometimes, a card might appear on top of another card. If this happens, the covered card will become a Support Card, and it can either be selected alone to be used normally—you just won’t be able to select any other cards that turn—or be selected with other cards and will change to a new card entirely. Non elemental cards become Area Eater (which essentially functions as a replacement for the Area Grab chip from Battle Network), Aqua cards will become Invisible, Fire cards will become Atk+10, Elec cards become ParalyzPlus, and Wood cards become GrassStage. This wouldn’t be bad if not for the fact that it’s entirely random. You can’t control what cards become Support Cards, it just happens if a card is even slightly covered by another one. And since Mega and Giga cards are bigger than normal cards, they have a higher chance of either becoming Support Cards or turning other cards into Support Cards. All this does is make it so that whether or not you can actually use a given card that you’ve pulled is decided by RNG (there were even instances where all of my cards except one was a Support Card). Even default cards, returning from BN2-BN6, aren’t immune to this. It was an incredibly baffling design choice and I have no idea why they didn’t add a manual way to make a card a support card, since in a vacuum, they are actually useful at times. You WILL hate Area Eater by the end of this game. Fortunately though, this is probably the worst thing in the game, so I won’t have much else to complain about for the rest of this post, which just shows how good this game is. Key word is “much.”

Anyway, the big new feature of this game is Noise. The Noise Gauge was a lot of fun to mess around with, since you can get some pretty broken cards if you finish a battle with over 100% Noise, so you’re encouraged to think about how you use your cards. But I kind of wish elemental cards could fill the gauge. The fact that you’re forced to use non elemental, non screen dimming cards kind of disincentives putting elemental cards in your folder. That’s just a nitpick though. The system overall was fun enough to keep battles fresh until you unlock the real transformations of this game, the Noise Changes.

During Chud Phantom’s “chapter” (it’s really just Queen Virgo’s scenario and Hyde is just carelessly thrown in the game to introduce this mechanic), you unlock your first Noise Change. These are overall pretty similar to Crosses and Souls, in that they modify your charge shot, are based on bosses (although in this case, they’re mostly SF1 bosses with two based on Jack and Tia’s EM Wave Change forms. As unimpressive as SF2 was, I can’t say I don’t wish there were a few Noise Changes based on that game’s bosses), make some cards do more damage, grant some passive buffs, and most importantly, there are actually multiple of them in the game. It’s a little weird that it took three games for Star Force’s transformations to get up to the level of Battle Network 5 and 6, but I can’t complain too much, since the Noise Changes are great. Technically, they’re not version exclusive like the BN4-6 transformations were. There are ten across both games, but the odds of getting a given Noise Change depends on your version. Every element has two Noise Changes, and each version has one Noise Change of each element that is more common than the other one, which kind of does the same thing in a sense. In order to get a Noise Change, you need to get into an encounter with large viruses, which happens occasionally and is marked by the Warning display on the bottom screen. When you delete them, you have a chance of getting a new Noise Change, and it happens often enough that you won’t have to be stuck with one for too long.

Like Crosses and Tribe On, Noise Changes are permanently in effect as long as you have the Noise ability equipped, but they only gain most of their effects once you reach 50%+ Noise. They also of course have a special card for if you counter an enemy. If you’re hit by your elemental weakness, you don’t lose your Noise Change, but your Noise gauge resets to 0%. Overall they were a lot of fun to use, especially when you get a counter and use your special card, and Mega Man calls the attack’s name. I forgot to mention that this game has some occasional voice acting, and it’s always a treat when it shows up. However, while Noise Changes are on par with Souls and Crosses, I didn’t really get to experiment with them too much. That’s because I somehow had such good luck that I got the best Noise Changes for each version on my first attempt: Wolf Noise in Red Joker and Gemini Noise in Black Ace. Wolf Noise is busted because in addition to buffing Wood cards and automatically locking on for them, it has a permanent Quick Gauge effect and buffs sword cards, and some of the best cards in this game are swords. Gemini Noise is similarly mainly good for its ability to paralyze enemies after hitting them with any sword card, which has self explanatory combo potential. Plus, it lets you tag cards like you could in BN6. As a result, I just filled my folder with mostly sword cards and a few Wood (Red Joker) and Elec (Black Ace cards and stuck with them for the rest of the game. While there is a Noism that lets you switch back to your last Noise Change whenever you want, meaning I could have hypothetically switched for a new change and gone back to my old one whenever I wanted, I just felt like it would be too much work to constantly switch my folder like that, so I didn’t bother.

But thankfully, this kind of scenario is exactly what MultiNoise is for. It works just like Double Tribe; you gain the attributes of the Noise Change that your brother’s card has in addition to your current Noise Change. But since there are ten Noise Changes, and the MultiNoise is different based on the one you start with (meaning Libra Corvus Noise is different from Corvus Libra Noise, for example), there are 100 different MultiNoise forms. My little brother played this game twice and replayed it alongside my first playthrough to do a no damage challenge run, so he formed four BrotherBands which me, meaning I did get to test some out. The biggest issue of the feature is that there are no Auto Brothers for people who don’t know anyone who plays the game in real life, but even that’s not a huge problem since you can get every Noise Change in any version, and there’s more than one transformation in each version.

There’s even a Tribe King equivalent in the form of Finalization. If you have over 200% Noise when you open the custom screen, you can access the Meteor Server to finalize. This gives you the actual version exclusive transformation, the one in the game’s title: Red Joker and Black Ace. They raise all your buster stats to five, and cards do double damage when you lock on. To make it even better, your folder is replaced with one that has extremely powerful cards, some of which even being the cards you usually have to counter to get. The exact cards depend on how much Noise you had when you finalized, but no matter what they are, nothing really stands a chance against Mega Man in this form since you can double almost any non screen dimming card’s attack power, and your buster decimates health bars.

Overall, if you know what you’re doing, you can destroy pretty much anything in the game by using Noise. Of course, you could say the game is too easy as a result, but I think it’s like BN6 where it’s the fun kind of easy and not the mindless kind. It feels rewarding to plow through everything. The Omega bosses are also a great way to test how good you are at using Noise, but, um, I think I’m getting a little ahead of myself talking about the combat, so I’ll change the subject. All you need to know is that the battles are peak.

I can’t believe I’ve been talking about this game for this long and I’ve only just covered the battle mechanics. It really goes to show how good of a sequel this is. One more thing this game fixes is the Wave World. It’s kind of a combination of the SF1 and SF2 Wave Worlds, in that it’s combined with the real world but also has paths that go over the real world. You can also pulse in anywhere and you won’t get random encounters until you go onto the actual wave roads, which is a very nice change from SF2, especially since the encounter rate is reasonable this time around. Anyway, onto the dungeons. These weren’t really that noteworthy. Spade Magnus starts off strong with, as already mentioned, some absolute beats playing in the background, and the actual dungeon gimmick is fine too. Diamond Ice’s dungeon is at first until I realized that it practically doesn’t have a gimmick to speak of. You’re running on these icy roads and if you stand on them for too long, Geo freezes and you need to use Taurus and spam A to thaw him. The only issue is that there’s no actual punishment for getting frozen other than being forced to use Taurus for 10 seconds. And you don’t have to do anything, because if you don’t press any buttons, Geo still thaws, just with a low body temperature. In other words, you don’t actually have to interact with the gimmick even though you’d think you do. It would make sense if you got sent back or something if you got frozen so there was more of a punishment for messing up. Club Strong has a decent dungeon, and so does Dread Joker, but none of them are really that stand out. Not that it’s a bad thing, but still.

Surprisingly enough, the scenarios that didn’t have any dedicated dungeons ended up being the ones with the best gimmicks. Well, two in particular. Firstly, the Queen Virgo scenario, which basically just makes you play a Tower Defense game. You have to defend WAZA HQ from Omega-Xis clones by using the real Mega to slash them. If you touch a clone, you’re forced to fight it. It was a shift in gameplay that I was not expecting, and it’s backed up by amazing music, which gets even more epic in the last one and overrides the battle music. The other gimmick is in the Jack Corvus scenario. Rogue returns in this game, being a little less edgy than he was in SF2. During this scenario, he decides to swallow his pride and work with Geo for a mini game where, as Mega Man, you have to destroy Noise clusters so Rogue can slash the Noise virus creating them. This was also a fun change of pace, and it was nice to see Rogue not be as much of an edgelord for once. Although the fight with him right after felt extremely shoehorned in.

While the game is decently long, I actually never felt like I was backtracking that much. Unlike every other game, some of the Comp spaces have unique designs, and when you have to backtrack, you usually have to return to one you couldn’t previously access. The fact that the Comps aren’t just squares makes them much more fresh to explore, since they feel like mini dungeons. The way they went about it was pretty smart too; obviously there’s not enough space on the DS cartridge to give every single Comp a unique layout, so they mainly only did this for the ones you’re required to visit during the story. The optional ones tend to opt for the basic Comp design. This game also has the Astro Wave, which is similar to the Sky Wave from SF2, but good. Not only is the encounter rate is bearable, but the layout is also just much more straightforward, so it’s more obvious where you actually have to go now. While you do need to use it to get to WAZA at first, you can do a side quest to add it as a stop to the Wave Liner, meaning you don’t have to use the Astro Wave to get to half the areas in the game like in SF2. It’s just a much better area than the Sky Wave.

And now it’s time to talk about the game’s ending. The game tries to fake you out by making you think Dread Joker’s stage would be the final area, but the actual last scenario has you entering the Meteor Server to stop Meteor G, a giant mass of Noise that will wipe out all EM Wave Technology and 80% of humanity if it hits Earth. While Mr. King was just using it as a weapon to control people, Jack and Tia were able to hijack it and aim it directly at the planet, because they want to destroy all technology due to trauma. I won’t explain it in depth since I’m trying to wrap this very long post up quickly. The Meteor Server itself unfortunately isn’t very good. It’s weird how the only final dungeons across all nine of these games that don’t suck were BN5 and BN6’s, and the latter is just a medley of all the dungeons, so it’s really only BN5 that has a good and original final dungeon. Don’t know how they managed to cook that one time and never again. It can’t be that hard to make a final stage that isn’t annoying. But anyway, the Meteor Server has two gimmicks, just like Mu. First, every so often, Crimson (Noise clusters) will fly across the screen. You have to use Omega-Xis to destroy it like in the Queen Virgo scenario, and you get into a random encounter (with no reward) if you touch one. In order to proceed in the dungeon, you’re supposed to find fragments of Kelvin’s memory (who’s actually been alive fighting against Meteor G all this time) to reassemble them and continue. Except they’re invisible. You have to tap an icon on the bottom screen in order to get a glimpse of the areas that the fragments are in. The problem is that the map is way bigger than it has any right to be, and while you’re trying to look for the fragments, you’ll just be ambushed by Crimson and have to stop to deal with that. And you have to contend with regular encounters on top of that. It’s incredibly tedious, not very fun, and I think it was the only section of the game I can think of I was actively dreading having to do in Black Ace after finishing it in Red Joker because it was that unenjoyable. As is tradition with Battle Network, the main saving grace of this stage is the music. I think I can comfortably say Meteor Server is the best final dungeon theme in Battle Network, and I don’t say that lightly.

Mega Man manages to convince Jack and Tia not to destroy the planet, but Meteor G still hasn’t been stopped. Mr. King has been transformed into an EM being because of plot reasons, and he fuses with the core of Meteor G to form Crimson Dragon. He also absorbs Kelvin so Geo won’t fight him, but this of course doesn’t work. This does make Mr. King the first Battle Network villain to actually serve as the final boss instead of sending a mindless creature at you, which is a nice change of pace. Crimson Dragon is a pretty solid final boss by Battle Network standards. The gimmick is that you have to deal enough damage to it to make its head splits so you can attack the core. This would be pretty difficult in SF2 or SF1, but because you can Finalize, you can kind of trivialize this boss. I really feel like it should be disabled during this fight because it almost makes it too easy. I was able to beat it on my first try on both versions. It also has an incredible theme to top it off, which immediately became one of my the favorite final boss themes in the entire franchise, right up there with Falling Down and Cannon Ball. It even managed to incorporate Shooting Star in. Despite being easy, I thought it was one of the better BN final bosses.

Unlike the other final bosses, just clearing the fight isn’t enough to defeat Crimson Dragon, so Mega Man ends up finalizing to go back for a second round. The fact that after finalizing, he turns his head and just glances at Crimson Dragon right before the second phase starts is such aura. Geo actually has a lot more super badass moments in this game compared to SF1 and SF2. The second phase of the fight is actually functionally identical to the first phase, just that you’re in your finalized form and none of your attacks damage Crimson Dragon. You’re supposed to wait until you eventually pull the card you normally get when you counter, which one shots the boss. It’s seriously such an epic way to end it off. And since King isn’t seen in the end credits, I have to assume this makes him the only Battle Network main antagonist to actually be killed off at the end of the game, which is absolutely deserved.

The ending of the game is a great way to end off not only SF3, but Geo’s entire character arc since SF1. However, I feel like this post has gone on long enough, so I won’t explain what happens in detail. I guess Ace somehow being depicted as alive in the credits is kind of an ass pull, but it’s supposed to be up to interpretation whether he’s actually alive or this picture is just a representation of Tia (and maybe also Dr. Goodall’s) new wish, so it’s fine. Besides, his BrotherBand was still intact, so he could have been revived the same way as Luna. It’s not like the sequel will answer that question, since it doesn’t exist. It’s really sad that Star Force released when Mega Man oversaturation was so bad, because if Star Force 4 ended up coming out and was had an even more peak story and gameplay, imagine how good it could have been. But as it stands, Star Force 3 is already a contender for my favorite game in the franchise and is definitely my new favorite title in the Battle Network timeline, regardless of how common of a take that is. There’s so many other small things that make this game great that I didn’t even talk about, because that would make this post even longer.

At the end of my BN6 post, I made a ranking of every Battle Network game. So to revise it with the Star Force games included, this is my final ranking of every game in the Battle Network timeline:

9. Battle Network 4. I know some people are really fond of this game, but I personally thought it was complete garbage, even on one playthrough

10. Battle Network 1. It’s just unpolished and a chore to play through. It’s a decent bit better than BN4, but not a good game overall

11. Star Force 2. The story is a joke and the gameplay is tedious. I’d return to it over BN4 and BN1, but this game’s still pretty bad

12. Battle Network 2. This game is miles better than the games in ninth, eighth, and seventh place. It improves upon BN1 in many ways, but it has a lot of padding. Still a good game, though

13. Star Force DX. If this was the original Star Force 1, I’d probably have it swap places with BN2. But I’ve never played that game, so I obviously can’t fairly say how I’d rank it. Star Force DX was pretty fun, but it at its core, SF1 just is not as innovative as most of the Battle Network games before it, so I think this is a good spot for it

14. Battle Network 3. I’ve never really liked BN3 as much as most people seem to, but I’d still say it’s a great game in spite of its many issues. The battle system is definitely better than the games before it and it even has a somewhat good plot

15. Battle Network 5. I’ve always thought the Liberation Missions were a fun change of pace and the gameplay is mostly drastically improved from BN4

16. Battle Network 6. The Battle Network battle system peaked with this game, and it’s overall a blast to play, despite being on the shorter side

17. Star Force 3, for all the reasons I’ve explained in this post

Obviously, I’m not done with making Battle Network posts, since I still have all the postgames to get through. But playing through these games was a great experience, and Battle Network and Star Force are definitely among my favorite Mega Man series.

Would the kid be half death half human? You know, kind of like Dante?

- Favorite Mega Man was a toss up between Geo and X, but I ultimately decided on the former
- Childhood favorite is blank because I’m 17 and got into Mega Man last year when I was 16, so I can’t really be that nostalgic for any of the games right now
- Favorite transformation is based on design, not functionality

Like with BN1, I wanted to talk about my opinions on this game’s 100% experience. In my opinion, 100%ing BN1 was mostly a tedious and unrewarding waste of time that I could not recommend to anyone. But BN2 was a huge improvement over its predecessor in almost every way. Does that include the postgame?

Like I said in that BN1 post, I’m going to try to avoid talking about filling the chip library every time since I expect it to be horrible in every game. But Battle Network 2 does have a few differences worth briefly mentioning, and while there are some good ones like the addition of subchips or ability to run from battles, there are some bad ones too. I’ll only talk about the changes that were for the worse. The first one is something that I’m sure many people aren’t aware of, because there’s pretty much no way to know about it without a guide. Exclusively in BN2, for reasons beyond my comprehension, many viruses only drop certain codes of their chip based on how much health you have. Using a made up example, if you have 1000 HP total, and you’re at full health, a Canodumb will drop Cannon A and B, but they’ll only drop C and D codes if your health is between 250 and 749, and they’ll only drop E codes if it’s between 1 and 249. This is just a stupid change that makes chip hunting more convoluted than it needs to be, even if it’s only codes that are like this, not entire chips. The other change is that there’s now a Program Advance library. You’re now required to activate every PA at least once for 100% completion. For the most part, this wasn’t actually that bad in this game, but I can see it getting worse in the future. But yeah, the chip library still fucking sucks and is a slog to fill, and this game has 100 more chips than BN1, which means even more grinding. The only redeeming quality of this part of the postgame is the fact that the chip trader seems to be much more likely to give you new chips than in BN1. Oh, and searching the Net for Bug Frags also isn’t fun.

Now on to the stuff that’s actually interesting to talk about. During the main story, you’re required to get a Z, B, and A License, but once you do enough board requests (I don’t think these are important enough to deserve a paragraph, so my thoughts are that they’re fine. They’re inoffensive overall, and doing all of them wasn’t that bad), you can do the S License test. After that you can do the SS and SSS License tests. I do think that the parts with multiple back to back virus battles were a decent test of skill. My biggest problem is that for the SSS License, you’re expected to do 30 whole battles and if you die at any time, you have to restart. I just used save states every ten battles, but still, I feel like that’s a little overkill, considering that it takes 20+ minutes to do. Most of the battles aren’t too difficult, but sometimes you’ll get some bullshit like Dominerds who instantly use Geddon to put a timer on the battle. But outside of the virus battles, the rest of the tests sadly just boiled down to doing fetch quests. I could run away from every battle since I had almost every HP memory, but it still wasn’t exactly what I would call fun.

After obtaining every license, you’re able to explore a concealed area of the Net accessed from Undernet 4: WWW Area. A secret base where the remnants of the terrorist organization have hidden after seemingly being defeated in BN1. It consists of three areas, and each one has a boss at the end. Getting through here is much easier said than done, however. It is a postgame area, after all. On top of the bosses, you also have to contend with extremely obnoxious viruses, including a special kind that doesn’t appear anywhere else: Protectos. Protectos appear in preset spots on the map, and they’re gimmick battles, where each one of them has to be deleted simultaneously in one single hit in order to clear the fight. So if each one has 300 health, you need to use an attack that both deals 300+ damage and can hit all of them at once. The battles are also essentially on a time limit, as every ten seconds, the Protectos will cause a strong, field wide explosion, and they’ll keep doing this until you die.

I was expecting to hate these fights, but I actually liked them more than the regular viruses that you fight here (those beetles with auras can go straight to hell). My usual strategies of a) Gater, b) LifeSword2/3, and c) using my folder full of Gospel, FullCust, and miscellaneous asterisk chips wouldn’t always work, or would at least require more thought to use, which meant I had to think outside the box. For example, using FastGauge (which I had set as my regular chip for most of the postgame) to give myself twice as many chances to access the custom screen, or using a fan before using Gospel or LifeSword so I could hit the Protectos if they were in the back row, or using an Aura or Shadow chip so I wouldn’t take damage from an explosion and could stall a little longer, or using an ElecBall right before the explosion so it deals massive damage when it touches them. That plus the fact that they always appear in set locations and never spawn again after being defeated made them feel like fun puzzles to solve.

And now there’s the bosses. At the end of the first area, you fight PharaohMan, returning from BN1. He’s very similar to that game, with the biggest differences being that you have to actually try in order to beat this time. His sarcophaguses are permanently on the battle field, and you can’t even cheese his Ratton attack by standing right next to the coffin because of the field layout. The guardian of the next area is a new Navi, NapalmMan. I wasn’t a huge fan of this fight. I get that the postgame fights should be difficult, but NapalmMan just feels like he just floods the screen with bullshit. You have to react to his turrets shooting at you, while at the same time he’s throwing three napalm bombs at you at once that leave fire on the panels they land on for a few seconds and break those panels. It just feels cheap. And at the end of the last area, you fight PlanetMan, who is both new and not based on an existing Robot Master. He also reveals that this entire thing was a test to see who could get this far into the Net and reach him. Whoever could do that would be able to join WWW. Of course, MegaMan and Lan say no, and have to fight him. His battle is fine, I guess. I don’t really have much to say about him. Overall, these postgame battles were at least an improvement over BN1’s, even if they weren’t perfect.

But obviously PlanetMan isn’t actually the final challenge of the postgame. Right as you’re about to leave WWW Area, you get approached by Bass again. The real Bass, not the fake that Lan and Hub fought in Kotobuki. And he’s decided that MegaMan is a worthy opponent, so he fights you. He doesn’t seem to recognize you from BN1, though. Anyway, his fight isn’t that much different from in that game. He still has an obnoxious 100 HP aura that regenerates every time he attacks, his attacks are still ridiculously fast, and so on. The main difference is that he has 2000 health now, so he more or less requires Program Advances *cough cough* Wind Fan GateMan *cough cough* in order to beat. But once you do, you get a results screen that includes your performance on all the V1 bosses, and that serves as the conclusion to the story based content of the postgame.

There’s still some more stuff left to do before you can actually say that you’ve 100%’d the game. While it technically isn’t a requirement, I decided to go for HubStyle anyway. In order to get it, first you need to S rank every Navi except Bass. I hadn’t already done this since I was able to get a few V3 chips by trading or with a rank 10 busting level, but it wasn’t that hard to do with Darkness, an incredibly busted Program Advance that requires BassV3, AntiNavi, and a Gospel chip, and this went perfectly with my aforementioned extra folder of FullCust and Gospel chips. Unsurprisingly, the hard part was actually finding the Navis. Especially the postgame bosses, since they’re located in WWW Area, where I can’t run away from most virus encounters. But once you do that, you just need to do the 280 battles to get a new Style, and your next Style is guaranteed to be HubStyle. I think it’s ridiculous that you have to do that many battles to get a new Style, because I had to spend possibly upwards of 30 minutes while on fast forward just running around Den Area 2 with AirManV2 set as my regular chip to one shot every virus. This was the last thing I did in the post game, though. I guess running around in circles is a pretty fitting way to close it off. HubStyle gives lets you pick ten chips, increases your buster power to 10 but reduces rapid to 1, gives you super armor, lets you hold 8 Navi chips, starts battles with a barrier, and lets you shield by pressing B and back on the D pad. So essentially, it gives you the power of every Style at once. The only drawback is the fact that your HP is cut in half. This is a neat reward for S ranking every boss, but as I said, it was the last thing I did in the game, so I didn’t actually get to use it.

The real final thing to do in the postgame is fight BassDeluxe. After you get every chip outside of the ones this boss drops, BassDeluxe becomes a random encounter in WWW Area 3, essentially serving as a BassV3. Pretty much the only difference in this fight is that he has a 150 damage aura instead of 100, which poses a much bigger threat than you’d think. It’s surprisingly difficult to find chips that deal that much damage and come in the same code in BN2 (which I assume is the result of them trying to fix the issue BN1 had where chips were too powerful, they just ended up having the opposite issue, so now you’re forced to use broken Program Advances to beat bosses reasonably quickly), and you’re expected to have a ready supply of them to stand a chance in this fight. Even Gater won’t work because it only does 100 damage each hit by default. I settled on mainly using chips for CrossShield3 O, Muramasa O, and Guardian O to destroy his aura and then using BodyGuard—the second most overpowered PA—to actually damage him, and using Gater if the chips for it showed up. I don’t really know how else you can realistically kill him quickly enough to get an S rank, because the 150 damage aura regenerates so quickly that it invalidates nearly any other approach. And keep in mind, he’s a random encounter. If you aren’t using save states and you mess up, you have to just run around until you find him again for another try. I know LocEnemy exists, but still, that doesn’t make it not suck to hunt down bosses like this. Even though you get BassV1 after the first fight, you still have to fight BassDeluxe three times since one of his drops in addition to his V2 and V3 chips is LifeAura3. But once you do that, you’ve finally completed the chip library… kind of.

There’s actually one more secret chip that I believe is only added to the library once you obtain it. After getting all five title screen marks, you can input a code on the title screen to play the entire game over in hard mode, and if you clear it, you get Sanctuary. I didn’t play it. I’m not doing the entire main campaign again after spending 59 hours on the postgame. I appreciate it existing, since no other Battle Network game besides… BN4 has any form of a hard mode, but it shouldn’t be the reward for 100% completion.

And that’s everything. I didn’t max out MegaMan’s level because I did not feel like hunting down whatever HP memory I missed, nor did I complete every trade, and I didn’t even completely buy out every shop despite having more than enough Zenny to, but… I don’t really care. I did everything that I would say was important. BN2’s postgame was without question better than BN1, because at least there is something new other than a few bosses, but the grind to get there… seriously, I can’t stress how bad it is. There’s so much bullshit involved in filling the chip library, and because of that, I still can’t recommend 100%ing this game to anyone. It’s not worth it, especially if you’re playing on original hardware or the Legacy Collection where you don’t have save states or fast forward. But I’ve heard a lot of good things about BN3’s postgame on this sub. I’m a little interested in finding out whether or not the hype is overblown.

As the title indicates, I beat Star Force 2, and I was really excited to post about it because I have a lot to say about it. So this will probably be a slightly longer post.

I know that this game has a quality of life patch, but I chose to just play the original game (specifically Ninja). Since SF2 is so infamous, I wanted to play the original to form a proper opinion on it. Also, the way this game handled the three versions is definitely better than SF1, since there are only two separate cartridges, but each one comes with Zerker.

But on to the game. Let’s start with… the soundtrack. I already liked SF1’s OST, but I think this game’s music might be even better. Once you turn on the game, you get to listen to the best version of Shooting Star, and the rest of the soundtrack is filled with bangers too. Hometown, Willshire Hills, Wave World, Sky Wave, and most of the dungeon themes are examples of how they cooked on this OST. The battle themes are also great. I always got hyped when Wave Battle started playing. Overall, it’s safe to say that they didn’t mess up in this category.

But the rest of the game doesn’t really hold up as well. story is probably the most infamous aspect of SF2, and for good reason. The first game had a surprisingly well written plot that was a good representation of depression and insecurity, and I really liked it. This game, by comparison, is much more shallow and inane. There are a couple major issues with this game’s writing that come together to form its really stupid story. For example, there are aspects of the universe that have nonsensical or disturbing implications when you think about it for more than 5 seconds, something that Battle Network games had a lot of but SF1 generally dialed back on. The biggest example of this is Link Power. It’s supposed to just be literal power of friendship—you get more of it as you make more Brothers and deepen your bonds with them—but they decided to go one step further use it to create a classist dystopia. People who have higher Link Power get access to things that others don’t, and people with lower Link Power can straight up be refused services by businesses. I guess the idea is that if you have low Link Power, it must mean you’re not a trustworthy person, but… you know, it’s also possible that you’re just not good at socializing with people. Or you could have high Link Power, but because you’re using people and not forming genuine connections. The game never once talks about the darker aspects of Link Power, even though they could have been genuinely intriguing concepts, which just makes the universe feel more cartoony than anything.

Most of the major characters returning from SF1 have been heavily flanderized. Geo gets depressed when the plot calls for it for the dumbest of reasons, Bud only ever talks about food, Zack mentions the Zackpedia every other sentence, Luna is an insufferable tsundere, and Omega-Xis just constantly talks about violence. Sonia and Hope haven’t changed, but they don’t have that much plot relevance to begin with. It’s pretty disappointing that all of the depth of these characters has been entirely removed. Actually, Zack is given more characterization, but the way they do it is by turning him into a selfish prick for the Plesio Surf scenario, so it just makes him more unlikable than if they were to keep him as a walking trope.

The new characters aren’t much better. The villains of each scenario, besides Terra Condor, are just assholes instead of being well meaning people who were manipulated like in SF1. And the main villains are just as poorly written. Honestly, Hyde would have been a good character if he only appeared in that first scenario, since I liked his hamminess at first, but I just got sick of him after a while, especially since he has virtually no character, and the only reason he’s working with Lady Vega is because he’s a simp. Solo is just a generic edgelord. All he ever does is talk about how worthless bonds and friends are despite technically working with other people for most of the game. They do nothing with his character other than that. He’s experienced loss like Geo has, and he’s supposed to be Geo’s rival, so why not have him be unable to move on from the destruction of Mu, which is what makes him different from Geo? Idk, literally anything else would have been better than his current backstory and personality. Hollow doesn’t really do that much other than acting mysterious, but it makes sense why he’s like that, so I can excuse him. And finally, Lady Vega actually has a good backstory and doesn’t feel like she belongs in a game as shallow as this. It’s kind of weird.

Normally I don’t spend that much time talking about the plot, but it’s one of the main problems with this game (and unlike BN4, it’s not like the plot was too non existent to talk about), so I felt like I had to go in to detail to explain exactly how it’s bad. It’s written like it was a Battle Network game, but it still wants to tackle more mature themes like SF1 did, which pretty obviously doesn’t work. However, while the story is bad, the gameplay being good can possibly make up for it. So how does the game fare on that front?

As far as the combat goes, it’s mostly the same as SF1. The main new addition is Tribe On, which is this game’s transformation. It’s handled far better than the Star Force was in SF1. I liked it, and I also liked the addition of Auto Brothers so people who don’t know anyone in real life who have this game can still use features like Double Tribe. There’s also Tribe King, which was just incredibly broken. That does make it really fun to use, especially in the more obnoxious parts of the game… which I should probably talk about now.

So while the combat on its own is fun, it gets very frustrating when you’re forced to fight viruses every two steps. This game’s infamous encounter rate is as abysmal as everyone says it is, and it makes a lot of bad sections of the game even worse if you don’t stock up with Cloakers at all times. An example of this is the Sky Wave. The only good thing about this place is the music and atmosphere. Other than that, it’s just a huge area with tons of dead ends, and the encounter rate is so bad that it takes forever to get from one place to another, and sometimes you’ll even forget what direction you were headed which wastes even more time. And it’s not like this is an optional area either, this is the only way to get to half of the game’s locations.

The dungeons are also not very good, even though most of them are only two areas long. The first two were fine. Rogue’s scenario was irritating, but the second they introduce the Sky Wave is when things really go to shit. Not just regarding the dungeons, but in general now that I think about it. First there’s Plesio Surf’s dungeon, which is one of the worst in the series. The gimmick of digging for Hertzes and mystery data while making sure not to dig up any viruses is basically just Gemini Spark’s dungeon except worse, but then you also have to deal with fucking horrid encounter rate. Whazzap Ruins was another one I didn’t like because of the encounter rate, especially since you’re forced to backtrack because the Hertzes only show up in the order the game wants you to collect them. And Bermuda Maze’s only real redeeming quality was having a surprisingly low encounter rate. Other than that, it was slightly less bad than I anticipated… the first time around, at least. Not the second visit. I had to use a guide for that shit. But I think you get the point, the dungeons aren’t fun, and traversing the world in general isn’t fun.

I think the last thing of “note” before talking about the endgame is the Matter Waves, which are basically Navi Cards from SF1 except even more shoehorned in. Most of them are only used once and aren’t even at least interactive. It really makes you wonder what the point of including them was, especially since they get a dedicated spot in your inventory as if they’re important.

Unfortunately, the game doesn’t really pick up in the last scenario. Despite the time in the image I linked, this game is actually really short. I guess that’s for the better, but still, I was expecting at least one extra scenario. Anyway, like I said, the revisit to Bermuda Maze sucks, but what’s even worse about it is that there’s no way of fast traveling to Mu, which is the final area. So if you decide you want to stock up on anything before the final boss, you’d have to go all the through the Sky Wave and Bermuda Maze just to get back to Mu. This wasn’t an issue for me, but it’s really stupid that it was designed like this. Like every other final dungeon, Mu’s theme is a banger, but how is the actual level? It has two gimmicks, and I didn’t really like either. The first one is trying to avoid the Murian security guards, and if you touch one on accident, you have three seconds to trace the pattern that’s shown on screen for a second or get forced into a rewardless fight with MurianGs. Since my emulator is on my phone, it was easier to trace the pattern than if I was playing on a PC and had to use a mouse, but sometimes the pattern just flashed too quickly for me memorize it and I was forced to waste time dealing with these enemies. Then the other gimmick is reading these four scripts and tracing the patterns on them to unlock a door, and the order you have to do this in is based on the order that the events in the scripts happened in. I also used a guide for some of these because, like the final dungeon in SF1, it wasn’t really fun to memorize the patterns and the order they go in.

I haven’t described the plot events that lead to any of this happening because I don’t care enough about this game’s story to do that, and I doubt you do, but once you get to the end of Mu, you find Lady Vega, and learn that there’s this god named Le Mu who created all EM Waves in the universe… even the ones in space… despite… living on Earth. Whatever. Then you have to fight it. Confrontation with a God is such a banger final boss them, especially the intro, it goes hard. Le Mu itself is a pretty infamous boss among Mega Man fans, but honestly? Ehhh, Duo and Alpha were worse. At first I used Tribe King, but I was utterly decimating it, so I decided to start over without it, and while it took a few tries, I was able to beat him. It isn’t very clear how to destroy its shield since the shield’s health bar is invisible, but once you get past that, the rest of the fight is mostly just a war of attrition. I think part of the reason I found Le Mu less bullshit than Duo or Alpha is that there aren’t as many cards that just don’t work on Le Mu. Plus, Star Force has better card balancing than BN4, so it’s not like the only good cards are the ones that you can’t use on the final boss. Oh, and also the fact that you don’t fight anyone right before Le Mu, so while I just made a save state before the fight, if I did want to change my folder, I wouldn’t have to fight another boss like I would have to in BN3 and 4. It’s not really a good boss, but I’d still take him over Duo any day.

The way they concluded Lady Vega’s character was beyond stupid and goes against whatever theme they were seemingly setting up, but this is Star Force 2, so what did you expect? I feel like this post didn’t really encapsulate how unfun I think this game is and how awful its story is, and that’s because I felt like it was just unnecessarily bloated, so there are plenty of issues I didn’t mention or go into detail about. This game isn’t complete trash or anything, and I’d play it sooner than BN4, X7, X6, or maybe even BN1, for example. But… yeah, it’s still pretty bad, and it wasn’t an enjoyable experience. It sucks. Definitely one of the worst Mega Man games. Even in the Legacy Collection where you can turn off random encounters, I can’t imagine Star Force 2 suddenly becomes super fun. I can see how this game, combined with general Mega Man fatigue, killed Star Force. But it seems like they went all in and actually locked in with Star Force 3, and since I’ve already started that game, I’m excited to see how much better it is.

I’ve been working on the postgame for BN1 for a few months now, but I started locking in the past few days, and finally 100%’d it. So now I’ll say what I thought about it.

BN1’s postgame doesn’t really have that much new content. There’s three new bosses and that’s it. So I’ll just spend this post talking about the chip library. This is the only time I’ll talk about it, because I can’t imagine it’s that much better or different in the other games, and those games have more interesting things to talk about anyway. I’m not going to sugarcoat it, the process of filling the chip library is bad enough to single-handedly make this game that I’m already not a big fan of 5x worse. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but I would seriously never recommend this to anyone unless they’re deathly bored and have absolutely nothing better to do with their time.

Starting with the standard chips. For most of them, I just checked TREZ to find out what location that virus has the highest rate of spawning in and farmed there until I got the chip. It was pretty monotonous. However, there were a few chips that I had zero interest in finding normally, so I used the chip trader for them instead. I just made a save state in front of the chip trader, put in chips, then reload every time I didn’t get a chip I wanted (for some reason the chip you get seems to be determined once you put in the chips, so I couldn’t just save after I’d already loaded the 3 or 10 chips. I had to load them again each time). This was also extremely annoying and mind numbing, and it took a couple hours while using fast forward, but I got a decent amount of chips this way, which helped cut back on the amount of time I needed to spend on this game’s shitty internet maps.

Getting the boss chips was where I actually started to lose my sanity though. I initially wanted to get as many of them as I could using the chip trader, but I realized it would take so much time and chips that it would probably be easier to get them the normal way. Most of the Navis who have operators were simple enough. Besides SharkMan. Fuck SharkMan, he might just be one my least favorite bosses in Battle Network. I just filled my folder with as many ElecMan3’s as I could and save scummed until I pulled a good amount with the add button (since it only takes three to kill him) in order to S rank him. I’m sure there’s a better strategy but I don’t care, I ended up getting all of his chips and had multiple SharkMan3’s—which are great for virus battles—and that’s all that matters.

For the ones that don’t have operators, getting their chips obviously involves finding the internet area that they spawn in, encountering their V2 version, and running around in circles aimlessly until you can encounter them again. Even with the ability to save at the beginning of every battle, this was unbearable. Since it’s this game, I not only can’t run away from any battles I don’t want to engage in unless I draw an escape chip (I guess since you need so much money for all the PowerUps and HP Memories, it was kind of a good thing that I had to fight so many viruses. But still), which just has to sit there wasting a slot in my folder, but I don’t have access to any other quality of life features like sub chips, regular chips, actual battle mechanics, a good add button, or even the ability to see the code of a chip without hovering over it. Save states meant that even if I didn’t pull the chips for one of the few good program advances in this game (GutsShoot), I could still keep going with the chips I did get and MegaMan’s overpowered buster until I got the right rank and got the chip I needed and not just Zenny. But actually finding the boss in the first place was a total slog.

Most of this game’s bosses are pathetic, so what about the postgame ones? Well, PharaohMan was also a complete joke. The only part of the fight that posed a remote threat was the one where he summons a sarcophagus that spawns Rattons, and that was only until I realized that if you stand adjacent to the panel in front of it, none of the Rattons can hit you. ShadowMan required more effort, though. You actually need to try if you want to dodge his AntiDamage shurikens, and he can also make clones like in his fights in later games. His pattern was still pretty basic, but I was kind of surprised how this felt more like a boss from any other Battle Network game. Or, since he appeared in this game first, I guess it’s technically the other way around. Finally, Bass, who just… appears as a random encounter in the final Undernet area rather anticlimactically once you get every other chip. No cutscene or anything. Anyway, it’s probably just a skill issue or because of my folder, but he actually gave me a bit of trouble. He has a regenerating 100 damage aura, which is too strong to destroy with the buster. His attacks are also fast, and I think he has more than any other boss in the game (he has a normal buster attack and three charge attacks, while most bosses only have one or two moves). He took me, like, 40 minutes to find, while using fast forward, so I just brute forced it because I was not changing my folder just to spend another half an hour looking for him. Thankfully, I realized that you don’t need a good rank to get his chip, so I stopped caring about doing well and eventually got LifeAura P, completing the chip library.

Not only does Bass show up without fanfare, but when you defeat him, you don’t get a picture or even a title screen mark. So the save menu was the only thing I could really use to show that I 100%’d the game. A fittingly underwhelming end to an incredibly underwhelming postgame.

To be honest, I didn’t completely finish the game. There are a few things, like the NPC trades or other side quests, that I had no interest in doing. The only thing I did was fill out the chip library and max out MegaMan’s level since I was close to it, and I did any trades if they gave me a chip that the trader was refusing to spit out, namely WoodAura and BusterGuard. But I have no desire to return to the game and finish the rest, so I’m fine with this. This postgame wasn’t especially infuriating or anything, since, again, it didn’t have any new content. But that’s also what makes it so disappointing. You do all of that work getting every chip and you don’t get a new area to explore or anything. I’m not sure if I’ll think it’s the worst postgame by the time I 100% Star Force 3. But I can say for sure that I’m never doing this again and never touching this game again.

Random thought I had. I think it’s because of the oval shaped eyes and lack of a mouth

A few weeks ago I beat Star Force 1, and just like I did with the Battle Network games on the BN sub, I wanted to post about my thoughts on these games as well. This should have come out a long time ago but I just didn’t feel the urge to write it. But it’s out now so that doesn’t really matter anymore.

Anyway, instead of playing all three versions of the original DS release like a maniac, I just played Star Force DX. I think the quality of life changes introduced in this patch probably makes me think more favorably of the game than I otherwise would, because it seems like the original wasn’t really that good, which I’ll talk about later.

But one of few things that the original did do well, and wasn’t changed in this SF DX, is the story. This game’s plot is really good, and definitely one of the best in the entire franchise. I thought all of the important characters besides Zack were well written and sympathetic (especially Sonia, we love Sonia). I’m not going to summarize it, but there are some things I wanted to talk about. I’m sure his reception has changed with the release of the Legacy Collection, but apparently Geo used to get a lot of hate for being too whiny, which I don’t agree with at all. The way he’s acting is reasonable for someone who lost his dad when he was seven. After beating the game I watched KNIJohn’s video about it and he said he didn’t like Geo’s short depression arc after Gemini Spark’s scenario, but I don’t agree with that either. I think it does make sense that he would go back to being a recluse when the only thing keeping him from getting close to someone—the fear of losing them—actually ends up happening.

Another thing the original did well is the music. The soundfont fits the tone and theme of Star Force perfectly, and the compositions themselves were also great. Hometown, Rocket Shooter, Dust Crash, Ride On, Wave Battle, Agonizing Wish, Loneliness, and obviously I can’t forget about Shooting Star, which is just such a spectacular track in every one of these games. I’d put this version above every Battle Network title theme, and not only is this not my favorite version of Shooting Star, but all of the Battle Network title themes are all bangers so that says a lot. Another one of my favorite themes from the game is Now Study!, which is unique since it’s the only track that uses the BN5 Double Team soundfont. I don’t know why they did that, but it goes hard anyway. Also, I appreciate how the music doesn’t reset anymore if you get into battles. It’s very refreshing to not hear the bgm start over every 10 seconds.

And then there was the presentation. Not much to talk about here. It looks nice. I could see people being disappointed that the overworld just looks like BN6, but I think the battles being in full 3D makes up for it. This is a DS game, so of course the models aren’t the best, but they’re good for what they are, especially in the Legacy Collection where you can see how they look without the compression.

Now for the gameplay. I’m going to assume you already know the basic gameplay loop of Star Force (dodging attacks, lock on, countering, etc.), so I’m not going to talk about the major differences between this series and Battle Network’s combat. If you wanted to know which gameplay style I prefer, I don’t really have a preference. I could go with either but Battle Network probably edges out slightly since it’s more complicated. Anyway, as for what this game has to spice up the battle system, it’s surprisingly basic. In the original, at least. I was shocked when I learned that all the Star Force transformation does in the original is change your charge shot and element, let you select cards to the side, and give you the SFB when you counter attack. And to make matters worse, you only get one for the entire game, which is based on the version you’re playing (and then, that’s pretty much the only version difference too, which is nothing short of absurd for a game that has THREE separate versions). That’s all to say that the way the base game handles transformations is very lackluster, and definitely feels like a downgrade from 2-6. I guess it makes sense since it was the first Star Force game, but it is kind of disappointing considering that the series ended up only having three games.

However, that isn’t to say that this game does nothing better than 2-6 on a gameplay front. One improvement is the greatly reduced backtracking. The amount of time spent running back and forth across areas you’ve already been to is a lot closer to BN6 levels, but it also didn’t feel a bit too short like that game did. And then there’s the dungeons, which I liked. Aside from Queen Ophiuca’s dungeon, they all use the touch screen for the gimmicks, and even though Star Force DX makes them optional, I think they were all fun and good uses of the DS’ gimmick. The dungeon gimmicks themselves were interesting too. Gemini Spark’s dungeon was the only bad one, which I think most people would be able to understand.

Oh, and I guess there’s the Navi Cards. Honestly, these just felt forced. At certain points in the game, you’ll need to slot in a Navi and use their ability to continue, but they were just another excuse to use the touch screen. Some of them are kind of cool like PropellerMan, but some really did not need to exist, like ThermoMan, where all you do is press a button to change the temperature. They’re fine, but I don’t think anything would be lost if most of them were replaced with cutscenes.

That’s basically everything I have to say about this game, so I’ll finish off by talking about the endgame. I really liked the idea of it being the space station that Kelvin was in being the final area. It makes for a great atmosphere and the music is the cherry on top. The space station itself has a mysterious and somewhat melancholic track playing (being the full version of a track that had only been heard in cutscenes and in the Space Sim before this), and StationComp has, in Battle Network final dungeon tradition, absolutely fantastic music. It’s not hype like the most of the previous ones, but the tone that they went for instead fits how Geo feels in this moment and how he’s developed throughout the game so perfectly. It’s a little sad, slightly regretful, but determined at the same time. Just go listen to it yourself, this track is excellent.

On the gameplay side of things, it was… fine. The overworld gimmick of having to use Navi Cards to move forward was actually pretty neat, despite what I just said about them a couple paragraphs ago. The dungeon gimmick was kind of annoying though. Like, the idea of making the constellation of the boss you’re about to face is genius. But the process of going back and forth over the displayed patterns on the ground to memorize was kind of tedious, especially because of how many branching paths there were.

After you get to the source of all of this EM Wave energy, you come face to face with the FM King Cepheus. I thought his design was… kind of unfitting, until I watched the aforementioned KNIJohn video and realized that he’s supposed to look like a brat and it made more sense. Anyway, some plot stuff happens, and he sends his ultimate weapon, Andromeda, at you. I’m not sure how I would rank this as a final boss since while I beat it on my first try, that was just through sheer brute force and not because it’s an easy fight. I didn’t even realize that during his second phase, you’re supposed to hit him right before he attacks, I was just spamming cards, which is made easier since DX lets you pick more cards on a turn than usual. If you’re not just using Recover300 whenever they show up and actually focusing on dodging attacks, you would probably have a lot more fun than I did. I’ll probably redo the fight with an actual strategy later. The final boss theme is pretty epic as always, but I feel like it’s not as good as Duo’s, Nebula Gray’s, or the Cybeasts’ battle themes. It’s definitely better than LifeVirus’ theme and probably better than Alpha’s theme, at least. It’s also unique in that it’s not a remix of the regular boss theme, which I’m pretty sure applies to the other two games as well.

After the fight (or before, I don’t really remember because I did this fight four weeks ago), you learn that the reason Cepheus did any of this is because he was extremely distrusting of others due to having been betrayed so many times, and Gemini exploited his paranoia to convince him that planets trying to make BrotherBand with him were actually planning on destroying Planet FM. Gemini had no real reason for doing this other than the fact that he’s an asshole and hates relationships that much. But Geo is able to convince him to go through with the BrotherBand. The Satellite Admins show up and ask Cepheus for his help in rebuilding the destroyed Planet AM, to which he complies. Omega-Xis, however, is fine with staying on Earth with Geo, and doesn’t join them.

But when Geo is about to head home, the space station starts breaking apart, forcing him to take a space pod, and is left floating through space for some time. Even though all hope seems lost, Geo is reminded in a dream by his dad about the strength of bonds, and thankfully, all of Geo’s friends are waiting on Earth and use their Transers to create a beam that reaches him and shows him the path back home. Thus ending Mega Man Star Force 1. That’s just a synopsis of what happens, but I really liked the ending, and I love the credits theme, it’s definitely one of my new favorites.

So, my final verdict is that Star Force 1 is a good start to the series but definitely has room for improvement. SFDX is easily better than BN4, BN1, and probably on par with BN2. If we’re talking about the original game, then it would probably only be better than BN4 and BN1. The next game I have to play is Star Force 2, which I’ve already started and already have some… opinions on, but I’ll save those for the post about that game.

ESPECIALLY their hardest variants, since I’ve just been finishing off my third playthrough of this stupid ass game. Jesus Christ they might actually be some of the worst enemies in any Mega Man game ever, and that’s saying something considering how many annoying viruses there are in Battle Network alone