Mega Man Battle Network
Review
2025-09-07
What if you were trying to do something and every 8 seconds I gave you a little shove. It'd be really fucking annoying, right? There is a random battle every 8 seconds in Mega Man Battle Network. I timed it. 8 fucking seconds. Even playing the modern collection where you can optionally one-shot every enemy it is mind-numbingly awful.
What are its saving graces then? It's certainly not the tedious, criss-crossing, hard-to-parse dungeons with their basic puzzles and horrible back-tracking (see random battle every EIGHT seconds). It's also not the classic old-school level design where triggers for pushing the story forward are not telegraphed or communicated at all requiring you to talk to every NPC or walk to a very specific point of a map to proceed (just use a guide). Ok the combat, though, is actually Good. Experimenting with different cards and weaving around the little grid, dodging attacks and landing your own is really fun, especially against the bosses. Some of the bosses really creatively use the nature of the grid and how it can be expanded/reduced to great effect. But that wasn't my favorite part of the game.
No, my favorite parts of the game were the art and the writing. I'm not talking about the pleasingly rendered early aughts view of the internet with big "e"s floating in the background, no. I'm talking about how half the people look like mutants. Monster children with egg heads and beaks. Cromagnon, mentally diminished men. Absolute wretches. Ah and the plot. Garbage about the internet being taken over by some guy who had his funding cut. But it's the writing that really elevates it all to something special. I can only assume the end result was a product of the constraints of fitting text on the tiny GBA screen and a bad translation job. Or perhaps the writer was a 12 year old recruited from one of those fan fiction websites. Regardless, the results should be applauded. Here are some of my favorites: