Mega Man Battle Network 2

"Childish, but extremely fun!"

Capcom has been making Mega Man games for a long time, and even RPGs. The Mega Man Legends series did not hit it off and no one wanted to buy the many sequels it had. This new series Capcom is now working on, Mega Man Battle Network, is completely different from every RPG so far. It links future, with ''online,'' with computer talk, adventure, and a good old fashioned ''Save the World'' theme.

This game at first glance may seem like nothing but another Mega Man game in which you run around with a buster and blow things up. Many people also think that Capcom is incapable of making a good Mega Man RPG

Well I thought the same thing until I played this game. It has incredible gameplay with a highly addictive leveling up system and the story makes you want to continue and see what happens next. Sadly, it seems as though this game was made for pre-teens: people between 9-12 or so. The characters are, apparently, this age and as expected they act as so. With common expectable plot events and nothing too exciting, the characters often seem to die out. There are many times in the story when your characters seem to have the sudden urge to go somewhere, and of course it leads to some sort of trouble that you just happen to be there to solve. That gets very annoying and repetitive, but at least the main plot is good once your main character stops straying away from his main objective.

Gameplay (10/10): The battles are extremely fun and difficult--which is sadly a rare thing among RPGs these days. Your main character plugs in or ''jacks-in'' an adapter to a PC, and Mega Man's data is in there now and you fight viruses as enemies. All the fighting is done on the net as Mega Man, and you have to jack-in every time, and you can jack-out any time as well. When entering a battle, Mega Man appears on the left side, the enemies on the right. You have 9 squares and so do they, 3 by 3 each. You can move freely on the these squares unless they are broken or if there are objects in the way.

At the start of battle you can choose a certain number of ''battle-chips'' that you use to attack/heal/assist with. They have to be of the same letter to be used in the same round. The enemy has set health, and so do you, and if your chip does 40 damage and the enemy has 40 health or less and gets hit, it dies. Pretty simple and easy, right? Wrong.

There are many combinations of chips that lead to summons and other such things, and you can even summon the spirits of previous bosses to aid you in battle. You gain these chips from ''Data,'' the games treasure chests, and defeating enemies in a certain amount of time will gain you more chips. With 250+ chips and all the combinations, there are many fun things to experiment with.

There are styles that Mega Man acquires later in the game as well, depending on how you fight. If you fight with your buster a lot and use fire chips as well, you will gain ''HeatGuts,'' which allows you to fire a flamethrower with maximum attack power. There are 10+ different guts, but you can only choose between 2 at a time. Learning a new one requires losing your old one, if you chose so.

As you can see, there are a lot of things that you get to customize in your preparation for battle. None of it is very boring, in fact it is rather fun and challenging. The battles are fast-paced and require good reflexes and choice of chips. After getting the hang of it, you can dash across the screen, destroy your enemies panels, and slice them up with a sword or two made of fire and ice.

Story (6/10): This is the game's major downfall. It has the typical Mega Man story--some evil computer genius wants to rule the world and has powerful little slaves to go and try to kill you and a lot of people in the process. The worst part of the story is having to go through the useless trips and such you have to do to progress through the game, such as going camping, going on vacation over seas; and it all seems to lead to a disaster on the net. Although this is the downfall of the game, it isn't bad enough to force you to stop playing the game. At least a few characters are pretty interesting.

Graphics (9/10): What can I say? For GameBoy Advance, these graphics were quite nice, if cartoony-looking is ok with your taste. I didn't mind since I am used to all Mega Man games being 2d and looking as such, and at least nothing looks bad enough for you to see the pixels or wonder, ''What IS that?''

Sound (7/10): Yet again, the GameBoy Advance isn't advanced enough to have good quality sound. The actual music itself though it endurable, but not something you would like to hear for pleasure. Usually, people turn off all game music for the GBA and listen to something else, but if you really have nothing better to listen to, this isn't that bad.

Replay (9/10): Although hard and about 60 hours to do everything, you will want to play this game another time or two. Going through it again knowing exactly how the battles should be played out will make it very easy and fun, and will allow you to get all those things you missed the first time around.

To buy or rent? Definitely buy. It is at least 50 hours to beat the boss without trouble, and another 70 to get every item and such. Plus you might want to get 100% completion by getting all the requirements to do so, which takes a long time. If you rent it, you will regret having to return it back!

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 05/04/03, Updated 05/04/03