This is my 'Definitive' Review of Mega Man Battle Network, after having beat it twice. Once recently, and once in the past.

Graphics =-=-= 8

The graphics are pretty wonderful! There's a lot of color and charm with what the developers did and had to work with. Very few points of this game are dark and dreary, and you can always tell what you're looking at.

The Net area is cyberspace themed, and is made to look personalized depending on what machine you have connected to. In there you will get to see repeating patterns in the background, but the digitized cutscene that plays when entering machines is still cool for the time that this game came out in.

Sound =-=-=

The music can get a bit grating at times but I also understand this was the GBA era. I do wish there were multiple or different battle area themes, because hearing the same one over (Even for bosses, unfortunately except for like the last one and some secrets) can get bland.

Addictiveness =-=-=

If you're a mega man fan, then great! You'll probably recognize some of the characters based on their names and appearance. That's a bonus!

If you're new to the franchise, then I'd say the most addicting aspect is the (hopefully) quick and snappy fighting mechanics, along with the 'deck building' aspect in the form of customizable attack lists. There is a minor 'collectathon' aspect but really it's more of 'let's get more of X because it's good' and not 'I NEED TO GET EVERYTHING TO WIN'.

The story is decent enough to pull you along to see what happens next and what you'll get into, but I can definitely say that this is a decent basis for the rest of the franchise. It's cool seeing characters you already know about be remixed and changed up in appearance. It's also fun to collect the chips for attacks and see how fast you can defeat opponents. The faster you beat them, the more likely you are to get rarer and more powerful attacks to use later!

(Also if you want to 100% the game you'll need to get the fastest times or get REALLY lucky with RNG)

Story =-=-=

The story is pretty alright for what it's worth. It's not The Next Odyssey worthy but it's also not 'The worst Fanfiction'. It plays very much like a Saturday morning cartoon, with simple villains and linear progression. There are SOME more serious elements to the story that are a bit more surprising for an E rated game, though you can absolutely miss them if you are speeding through the dialog.

One thing I will comment is that there are a few moments of 'huh? Where do I go?' that the game does not really give you much clues for. The first instance comes pretty early on when you are searching for someone's child. The only hint that you have is that it's related to another character, but... there's nothing else that tells you where to start your search!

I happened to stumble upon the accident almost by accident by interacting with a random car that was 'out of place', meaning it was just now put in a spot where I could interact with. There wasn't any build up or 'hey, maybe I should check back in X location since that's where he was last spotted' comments from NPCs.

That's probably the only time I had trouble progressing the plot. On the other hand, if you play the game for a while and then stop, you may have bumps in figuring out where to go or who to talk to next without a guide. The game can give vague hints such as 'Wow we need to talk to someone who was a former villain'. Like there isn't much 'ok where to?' you can go off of if you were just handed the game randomly. Definitely one of those titles that's best played in multiple consecutive sittings.


Depth =-=-=


Difficulty =-=-=-

At it's Best
Megaman's highlight moments come from the characters + their designs, as well as the customizable 'folder' of attacks you are able to choose from.

You are able to customize your entire playstyle around fast attacks, elemental advantages, or multi-tile targeting moves! You can even opt for hard-hitting melee attacks if you get enough 'chips' to enable a closer fight style.

Of course you have to collect the attacks yourself, and there is a bit of a learning curve to understanding how to best build your deck.

In an ideal world, your 'folder' will have mostly attacks that have one or two 'letters', allowing you to string multiple attacks together without having to wait extra time and dodge enemy attacks.
But to ADD to this, there are also special moves called 'Chip Advances' which can activate if you queue up certain attacks with the same letter or type. For example, if you select Cannon A, B, and C, you will get a super move called cannon-Z that gives you unlimited cannon ammo and 3 seconds of invincibility.

To balance the game however, you can only include 10 of 1 type of attack in your 'folder' of 30 attacks. This rule does not care about the letter of the attack. This means you can only include 10 cannon cards, no matter what letter they are.
At it's Worst


I'd say that the absolute WORST aspects of Mega Man Battle Network 1 have to be the Net area for ElecMan, and the wandering around the larger Net for some aspects.

See the biggest issue this game has is there isn't a 'map' that gives you a general idea of where things are. You have to remember shortcuts, paths to take, and more importantly some paths are only mentioned by NPCs. Talking to NPCs to get hints and where to go is fine, but some of them have dialog that's REALLY important such as puzzle hints.


The InterNet area that makes up a large portion of the game's middle-late game is labryinth like without a guide or map, and the worst part is that when you play the game for the first time you won't know which path is the one that will take you to where you need to go. Many paths have dead ends with items in them, but finding these ends while searching for the UnderNet late game means that you have to backtrack and fight more enemies when you're trying to progress plot.

I don't think that's where most of my docked points come from because there are some areas that have special encounters with some previous bosses, making dead ends turn into "Oh s*** it's a secret fight' moments.

ElecMan's Net area gets the slap of a ruler because it's kinda not that fun. You have to follow invisible paths to get to the worst part of the game.
The absolute WORST part of Mega Man Battle Network is the 'pick a door' battery aspect of ElecMan's Net area.
The rules are simple. Place batteries in slots, and then flick the switch to see if your guess is right. If not, you have to turn the switch off and re-place them. You only get two guesses before you have to 'recharge' the batteries by talking to a nearby NPC. The only hint you are given is that the solutions involve patterns with non-adjacent battery slots, and later on, you will need to find the minimum batteries necessary to proceed.

Without a guide, this is hands down the worst part of the game because you will spend plenty of time guessing patterns to succeed. Save states are definitely helpful here. This area has the most frustrating puzzles in the whole game, and that's saying something when the first puzzles the game throws at you are sliding ice puzzles with janky movement.

ElecMan's "Pick a door"-esque battery puzzle is smack dab right in the middle of the game, and the boss fight afterwards is sufficient enough of a threat to make it alright. Not super unfair, but this portion of the game just feels like blatant padding that could easily have been solved with something easy like NPCs on hidden paths that give more hints/solutions, or indicating what row matches to what light. On the bright side, there is no 'Wily' version of this puzzle, just the invisible path aspect later on. Which is alright because there are at least hints this time that are less vague.


OVERALL SCORE: 8.4

Final Thoughts:

This game is a good start for the franchise, but there are some obviously clunky elements that will hopefully be improved upon in future titles, such as the Chip Advance system, and more customization options for the attacks. Nothing sucks more than entering a boss fight with chips you can't synergize with and then having to spend more time trying to scramble together damage while learning attack patterns on the first time.

The 'retro future' aesthetic and cyberspace story is really cool, and I hope that is expanded upon in future titles of this franchise.

Overall this game isn't too bad, but it's a start. It has some cool things going for it, and it's rather cool for the time period that it came out in! (It even predicted self driving cars, wow!)