Oh goodness... oh NO!

While I am one of the USA's biggest mark for the Mysterious Murasame Castle and I am all for versions of it being released not on a system with kinda bad buttons/D-pad, this is a truly awful week.

Rockman.EXE Battle Chip SP is notoriously both the worst game in the Mega Man Battle Network franchise as well as the worst game Capcom ever shat onto the GBA. While technically not a broken or unplayable game by any means, (A title that Mega Man Network Transmission very nearly takes) Battle Chip Challenge is essentially a prophetic vision of the sort of ture garbage capcom  and other Japanese devs would pass for 'social games' these days. Although it lacks the outright fleecing for money these mobile titles are nefarious for, Battle chip challenge is what ammounts to a text cutscene simulator with battles you have little to no control over that are hollow and empty. You also have no control over overworld movement or anything. it's just reading through text and maybe organizing your chip deck, and that's -IT-

In regards to Murasame, I played that sucker on my original launch day 3DS. That was before I played an XL for any extended period of time, so I guess I just didn't know what I was missing. I beat the thing, which was kind of a chore, but I don't recall the d-pad giving me hell or anything. At least the Wii U has a d-pad not made for baby thumbs.


Yikes. I had no idea that the second Battle Network game was so damn awful. Clex, I'm glad I read your response and didn't throw down for that piece of garbage!

the numbered games are pretty much where you want to stick to with Battle Network. Network Transmission for the Gamecube and the one for the Wonderswan Color are just really bad platformers that try to be Classic Mega Man with a Battle Network Skin and they're just not as tight or nearly as well designed.

Battle Network 4 is thought of as the weakest of the main line ones because they couldn't think of a main plot and just filled the game with fetch quests from the bulletin board to drive story progression forward.

Rockman.EXE 4.5: Real Operation is... an interesting experiment, I guess? The real idea there is that rather than actually playing as Rockman.EXE or the other 'playable' navis, you more or less play as their operator, guiding them and sending them battle chips and watching Mega Man Battle Network style random encounters play out with a bad AI playing instead of yourself. I suppose this would be closer to what the Battle Network Universe worked if they adhered to logic, but it really doesn't work.

Battle Chip challenge as I said is a little bit of sparce menu navigation and the battles practically play themselves. there's no traversing an overworld, no exploration, no virus busting... just a watered down battle system where you set up a list of programmed attacks that the game randomly chooses from during the battle.