The Mega Man Battle Network series follows the story of Lan Hikari and his trusty Navi Megaman.Exe. It happens in an alternative universe of the Mega Man series, where pretty much everything is connected to the internet (that part aged really well considering our current time huh?). You will be able to fight against various viruses and other Navis, gaining their powers via Chips after you defeat them.
What really makes those games so special to this day is its unique combat. It's a tactical RPG where you fight on a 6x3 grid, with Megaman.Exe on the left and the viruses on the right. Megaman can move around in his area and either attack with his Buster or with Battle Chips. Battle Chips are basically cards, and Megaman has his own Folder that you can customize and put the Chips that you get throughout the game. It's a really unique gameplay style that very few games tried to replicate.
This collection has Battle Network 1, 2, and both Blue and White versions of 3. Battle Network 3 having 2 versions was from when they copied the trend that Pokémon started back then. Sadly, they're almost the same game, so you're really getting 3 games instead of 4 in there.
When you open the game, you will be greeted by Megaman.Exe himself, with a beautiful 3D model. Megaman has multiple unique lines for different things, such as time of day, or if a specific event happened in one of the games. They even got the voice actor from the anime to reprise his role. The developers really went all out in this part of the game, making you feel like Lan himself using his PET (PErsonal Terminal).
It has the usual stuff you would expect a collection to have. An Art Gallery where you can see a bunch of official artwork and a Music Player allowing you to listen to the entire sountrack of the games.
But of course it also makes changes to those games and adds some extra features. It fixes a bunch of bugs, translates parts of the original games that were left untranslated, allows you to apply a filter to smoother the pixels and even apply a border around the game. They even translated it into another language, Chinese. Both the tradicional and simplified versions.
One of the best things they added was the Buster MAX Mode, where uncharged shots deal 100x times damage. It might seem really overkill, but those games are old and haven't really aged that well. Trust me, having this is a massive convenience. It allows you to grind for Chips faster, get to a specific area quicker, or recover progress faster in case you get a Game Over and forgot to save for a while.
The collection also gives the ability to download Event Chips. The original games had some very powerful Chips that were only accessible through real life events, so being able to just easily get them is a huge boon.
But by far the best thing is the online features. It allows you to do PVP and trade things with other, such as Chips or Styles. This is honestly the biggest reason to get this collection.
However, that's kind of it. While Battle Network is by far my favorite of the Mega Man series, and it is nice to once again pIay those games that I played back when I was a teenager, I would be lying to you if I said that they aged well.
The games from the previous collections didn't really had any kind of massive problem with them, with some exceptions (*cough* Mega Man X7 *cough*). But in this one, every game has issues.
Those games have several archaic game design decisions. The biggest ones being random encounters, a massive reliance on luck to get anything, and how grindy it can be.
The Battle Network games needed so many quality of life features. Such as a map (would have been really nice to have in BN1), bestiary, slider for enemy encounter rate, faster movement outside of fights, autosaves. But the only thing we got was a cheat to deal 100 times damage with the Buster. Don't get me wrong, it's a really helpful thing, but we could have gotten much more.
Not only did previous games such as Rockman EXE Operate Shooting Star already had some, even the collection we got afterwards, the Star Force Legacy Collection, also had way more.
The only unique feature is online trading and PVP, but it's a nightmare to make a proper folder.
For example: Wanna get a Firesword chip? Pray to get the enemy encounter, pray that you get a good starting hand to get rid of them quick enough to get the chip, pray you get the chip from the right enemy if others are present, and pray you don't get money instead despite getting an S rank. Now do it 4 to 5 times to put as many copies as you can in the Folder.
You basically [b] need [/b] to use the [url=https://www.therockmanexezone.com/wiki/The_Rockman_EXE_Zone_Wiki] Rockman EXE Zone [/url] website to be able to find what you're looking for.
And even if you have everything you want, the PVP is very unbalanced anyways, so it's not really worth getting into it.
Also, if you want to get access to the Hard Mode in Battle Network 2, you need to play the PVP, and get lucky on specific Chips as a reward. And if you wanna get access to the Omega version of the bosses and their Chips in Battle Network 3, you need to trade Chips with others. There's very few people still playing this collection nowadays, so you will struggle to get access to those.
The collection also lacks a unique feature like we had in the other collections (Challenges in Classic, X Challenge in X, Z-Chaser in Zero/ZX). The only "unique feature' is online pvp, but that's the bare minimum, and there's all the issues I previously mentioned.
They didn't retranslate any of the games. While they did translate some parts that were originally left ustranlated, typos and other things are still the same.
Only English, Japanese and a new Chinese lamguage option is available. Capcom made a system to overlay most of the original text and somehow only bothered to add Chinese as a new language. I actually first got into this series thanks to a ROM Hack that translated the first game to Portuguese.
Sure the previous collection didn't translate the games into other languages, but you didn't need it to be done to be able to finish those games. You don't need to know what "Metal Blade" means in your language to be able to use it Mega Man 2. You don't need to know what Zero means by yelling "What am I fighting for!" to be able to beat X4. Sure, you will not be able to fully understand the story, but the games are still perfectly playable. But the Battle Network games? Games that have tons of dialogue and that will ask you to do a very specific thing to be able to proceed? Yeah, those really needed it.
And an option to make the text pixelated like the original games would have been nice. You eventually get used to it, but it does look a bit out of place, specially considering that it doesn't replace all of the text with the smoother version. Kinda reminds me of those old Flash animations people would do using GBA or SNES sprites but then use whatever is the default font from Word on it.
[h3] Conclusion: [/h3]
While the collection isn't bad, it doesn't really do anything to stand out from just emulating the games yourself. This collection really needed more quality of life features and similar things that we had in the other collections, such as the Challenges from the Classic and X, or Z-Chaser from Zero.
The only reason I recommend is due to convenience. It's far easier for me to tell you to just buy this collection and play the games, than having to ask of you to get an Emulator and the ROMs for the games. And it's also easier to get into PVP due to it being online.
Overall, it's a 5/10, it's ok. I assume my thoughts will be very similar to Volume 2.
