Game Talk (I'm putting this extra little bit here because the original title was too short)

[Haar_Dragon]

I've never beaten it. I thought I made that clear...

Unnn, I don't want an Easy Mode, though! That's like "Please game, take pity on me!" I might be a nerd who spends half his time on the internet and the other half playing video games, but I have SOME pride.

[Maverick Entity]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGI4kSdUOJQ

Since you can never have enough of the best Pokemon theme ever.

[Cremator of the Sky]

Did I hear people talking about the worst BN game to ever be made? Because I'm pretty sure I heard people talking about the worst game ever to be made.

Friends, site members, people who generally dislike me, lend me your attention.

http://lparchive.org/Mega-Man-Battle-Network-4-6/Update%2001/

Click that link to read something amazing... if you have not already read it before.

[NebulaGregarZX]

Already read it. In fact, thinking about this made me read it again the other day. That's the source of my outright ANGER towards the game, how I didn't even realize how much was wrong with it. ...Plus, I'm planning on using it to motivate myself to continue with DTDS.

Also, on the same archive, they've got an LP of Persona 3 (not Fes, sadly) that poses as Minato's Livejournal, which the LPer supposedly recovered most of, along with snatches of some other SEES members'. It's pretty good storytelling, really, and it makes for a more interesting character than post-development god-like Minato we're used to. ...Even if the one we're used to has serious issues. This guy develops slowly into a hero, and it makes Yukari and Junpei look even less sympathetic at the beginning. Seriously, it makes Yukari have no respect for Minato and gossiping about him behind his back, and makes Junpei even more immature and arrogant.

...And there's one by a guy called Feinne who made one for P4, but it's not as good. His information on The Answer is useful, though.

...Crem, did you play MMBN4 yourself? Because it's hard to tell between hating the game for knowing what it is, and hating the game for having played it. Anybody reading that LP without having played the game is guaranteed to hate it before playing. And honestly, yeah, Haar's right, too. It's not fun to play, but it's not completely, through-and-through broken. It's tedious, stupid, repetitive, buggy, poorly-designed, has stupid storytelling, ignores the plot of the previous games, ignores Lan and Hub's connection in some scenes, sucks away your hard-earned cash, and has several kinds of viruses that are pure BS. But it's still possible to play and beat. I did it three times. I cheated for the postgame content, but in this game, it's perfectly reasonable to cheat. The game can fight back.

[Haar_Dragon]

^this.

I enjoyed it the first time, I'll admit, but that was before I developed taste. Having gone back through it...it's flawed. And I'll note, I played Red Sun, and it doesn't seem to have as many swapped mugshots. I don't know WHY, but it doesn't. I'm betting they made Blue Moon first and caught some of them while doing Red Sun. Then decided not to fix it in Blue Moon. For some reason.

And looking at this, it definitely seems a lot worse than I remember. The commentary is amusing, but everything he's pointing out is a legitimate complaint. Also, it's data. Why do they have souls? Just a plothole.

Anyway, yeah. Like I said, on every technical level, it's a bad game. On every technical level, it's the worst in the series, except in terms of graphics. And playing it isn't as broken as the guy makes it seem, because he takes the time to point out everything that COULD go wrong. Mind you, that thing with Woodman is a VERY legitimate complaint, but all the same.

It's not unplayable (for the most part), but it's definitely not worth the time. Makes me wonder why I have three copies (two of RedSun and one of BlueMoon).

[NebulaGregarZX]

Let's take a look at what you learn from this game:

Spoiler:

That's all you need to know going into the fifth game, you can skip four. And even then, you could figure this stuff out easily, except for the plot twist about Regal. You know, the one that WASN'T obvious as hell.

Ergo, much like Starforce 2 later on, this could be skipped, and a couple of details could be mentioned to make things clear to the player what they missed.

-Solo is MegaMan's rival, and he's a d*ck who hates friendship and never admits he's wrong despite being beaten easily in his fights and only ever winning when he's got some BS plot powerup that'll get broken later. With friendship. ...Basically, Solo is the dumbest rival ever. Oh! And he's from a dead civilization called Mu, which is why he's even bothering with game three.

-MegaMan is famous now.

...That's all you need to know going into the third game, if you've played the first. And that's just because they had to shoehorn Solo into the plot. He doesn't even do anything notable, and his reasons are flimsy and don't make sense anyway! Why would the villain need Murian tech anyway? I imagine they did it solely to piss Solo off.

[Haar_Dragon]

I could totally imagine a conversation like that.

Dev: Hey, Solo, we need you to--

Solo: F*CK. YOU.

Dev: But--

Solo: Oh, hell no! You made me a Saturday-morning cartoon villain in my first appearance! Why the hell should I reappear?

Dev: Because you need Murian tech.

Solo: WHY ON EARTH DO I NEED THAT?!

Dev: Because we wrote your character and we say so.

Solo: ...Good God I hate you.

[NebulaGregarZX]

Of course, SF2 is better than BN4 on the ground that it lacks the same absurd problem with typos, and it lets you break it over your knee from the moment you open the menu if you have access to the internet. Not access on your DS, access to the internet for info. And the postgame expects you to have done this.

[Zeldaman2.0]

Gregar, could I have a direct link to that LP? It sounds super interesting but I'm afraid my computer won't quite let me navigate that site for whatever reason. My connection has been slower lately so that's probably it. That, and I'm terrible with searches and search engines XD

[Cremator of the Sky]

...Crem, did you play MMBN4 yourself? Because it's hard to tell between hating the game for knowing what it is, and hating the game for having played it. Anybody reading that LP without having played the game is guaranteed to hate it before playing. And honestly, yeah, Haar's right, too. It's not fun to play, but it's not completely, through-and-through broken. It's tedious, stupid, repetitive, buggy, poorly-designed, has stupid storytelling, ignores the plot of the previous games, ignores Lan and Hub's connection in some scenes, sucks away your hard-earned cash, and has several kinds of viruses that are pure BS. But it's still possible to play and beat. I did it three times. I cheated for the postgame content, but in this game, it's perfectly reasonable to cheat. The game can fight back.

Yes I have actually. In fact, I own both RS and BM. Now let me say this, these games could have been much worse than they are. They are playable for sure and only one or two things can make them unplayable/unwinnable. When it first came out, when I was but ignorant and young, I paid little to no attention to the games flaws and just rolled with it. Years later, having played the entire series I came across the LP, gave it a read, and I reflected upon it.

If anyone had to ask me what the worst part of the entire game is, I would have to answer with Duo. Flat out. Duo is BS to the highest amount you could ever think of for a BN Final Boss. I cannot tolerate the fact I cannot go farm for stronger versions of chips because I'm on some cycle that isn't the third one. At that point, the fight doesn't boil down to a showdown of skill, but to luck and hoping you never miss with any of your attacks. I've beaten him once and that's enough for me.

Another thing I don't like are Souls. The idea is somewhat interesting, but the execution is horrible. It also leaves much to be desired when compared to Styles. On the other hand, this is where I bring up Crosses and how I absolutely love everything about them. Sorry, but I don't like giving up a chip and getting a new form for only three turns, it really irks me. Just give me my hard earned power and let me have it.

Everything else I hate about BN4 just balances out from there honestly. I've played games with dumber plots and some without them, the enemies are full of BS but then again some other games (SMT) are like that as well, etc.

[Haar_Dragon]

I have a dual least-favorite: Coldman and the Undernet/C-Slider. Coldman because...it's a giant f*ck you to anyone who doesn't meticulously grab several copies of every chip (for subsequent playthroughs), and the C-Slider because those stupid rails taunt you throughout the entirety of the game, then to actually access it, you not only need to scour the other countries, but also get lucky enough to find them, because they're HIDDEN UNDER THINGS. If it was optional, that'd be one thing. I could deal with that. But this is a REQUIRED THING, and I believe it happens in multiple scenarios! WHAT THE HELL? It's the kind of bullsh*t I hate, where if the game was in first-person, it'd be no problem to find, and thus falls under "having a shitty camera." If the only thing preventing me from seeing things is the camera angle, we have a problem. And this seems to be incorporated intentionally! Playing the game three times, I just kinda had to pray and hope that I could find this crap again, because unlike the guy doing the playthroughs, the images didn't get burned into my brain, they got blocked from my memory...damn...

[NebulaGregarZX]

http://lparchive.org/Persona-3/

Knock yourself out, Edgar.

The thing about a bad game is, if every element is bad, or most of it is bad, then you turn against things you normally wouldn't notice or care about. And it makes you hate it for not having redeeming qualities, not for every aspect being worse than anything else.

[Cremator of the Sky]

You know what the worst part about BN4 is?

It killed the series.

I'm not exaggerating. Go look up the data for units sold throughout the series. Notice how everything just wanes after BN4 happens. Which is a massive shame, because I was really digging BN6's Crosses and would have loved that game more had Capcom of America not completely ruined the Post-game stuff for it. Hell, if BN5 was BN4 instead, the series would have probably gotten two more installments and Regal wouldn't have an emoticon dedicated to his existence on SA.

[NebulaGregarZX]

That's the reason I HATE SF2 as opposed to just not caring for it. It killed its own series, too. With BN, I accept it. It had six installments, it lived a fulfilling life. SF got three, and it only just hit its stride when it was ending.

While more Battle Network games would have been cool, they ended the series in a satisfactory way, which is more than most CAPCOM series can ask for. MMBN6 was great, even if the postgame content got cut out. Of course, there are ROMs and patches that can be used to make it everything it was meant to be, y'know, because people care that much. CAPCOM may not care, but other people do.

[Haar_Dragon]

Well...let's be fair here, I'm not sure Starforce was going anywhere anyway. I'm not denying that they're fun, as I've said, I greatly enjoy all of them. But when you use playing cards--not Tarot cards, a standard deck of playing cards--as the basis of your everything, you're out of ideas. I do approve of the Sword cards being...not shit like they were in Battle Network, but on the contrary, combined with the lock-on system, they were a little bit broken. The fact that you get an infinite-use shield is also broken.

But even from a story perspective, they resolved Geo's main character...thing, since I don't want to call it an issue or a conflict. But they resolved it. I'm not sure there's anywhere else to go after that. Also, they put such a big emphasis on BrotherBands in the game that it got dated. Pretty quickly. Unless you have multiple copies and multiple DSes, you're going to be really limited in that respect.

With that said, I greatly enjoyed Starforce, and I'm sad we didn't see more of it, but...I don't know what else they could do with it. Plus, Keiji Inafune left CAPCOM. Likeliest thing is, we won't be seeing any more of Megaman. They've cancelled what, three Megaman games that were in production? I think the best we can hope for is that they disband and give their series' rights to their creators, wherever they may work. Least then we might see something from those series.

[Maverick Entity]

"Looks at KH COM"

Cards, heh...

At least Keiji Inafune was working on a spiritual successor, unless that went down the development drain (I haven't kept up on news much).

I just recall one of my favorite multiplayer fps of the ps3 era, MAG. Why did Zipper have to be idiots and view it only as a testbed for the failure that is SOCAM 4? I miss being a merc in SVER.

[Haar_Dragon]

Far as I've heard, Mighty No. 9 is still coming. I can't comment on anything else in that post because you play lots of games that I don't.

[NebulaGregarZX]

I... I laughed when you suggested that Mighty No.9 might go down the drain, Maverick. Because that was the most ironic thing I've heard in recent memory. ...They have so much funding and support that they don't know what to do with it. THANK you, Kickstarter! And, hell, Keiji Inafune started work on the game before receiving this funding. This guy is just, like, concentrated awesome in the shape of a game developer. CAPCOM? They don't care. Keiji Inafune? He cares. A lot.

Yeah... swords were pretty powerful. But that's kinda preferable. Plus, the shield was to compensate for the lack of 3x3 grid movement. It added another dimension to evading attacks. For some, you could/had to block. A lot of attacks were NOT blockable, and you had to exercise discretion in which way was best to not get hurt. In BN, you could often move more than one way to evade attacks, and had to think about where you should be to attack the enemy.

What they could have done with Geo may have had to do with him learning the problems with friendship, and having the struggle to maintain them despite this. That would be a decent theme to continue with, after having him open up in the first one. The second game should have had a subplot about making Solo open up and admit he was wrong, so he could become a better person and character and create a better parallel to Geo, rather than a cliché rival who refuses to change or listen to anybody. I suppose that's true isolation, though, when you won't even listen to what other people have to say.


...I heard, distressingly, that the rights to Mega Man were sold to another company, who realized they didn't know what to do with it, and so they put him to rest. My source isn't the most trustworthy, though. And I'll be unbelievably sad if that's true...

[Haar_Dragon]

...CAPCOM...sold the rights to Megaman? No. No. No, I won't believe that. I refuse to believe that anyone, anywhere, in any company, in any country, in any parallel universe, could be so unequivocally, irrationally, undeniably, adverb-wastingly stupid! And how in the hell do you run out of ideas for MEGAMAN? That doesn't happen! Most of the bosses in the series, as I recall, were fan-made! It is literally IMPOSSIBLE to run out of ideas!

I hope for the sake of my own sanity that your source is wrong, because...f*ck's sake, I don't care what company you run, YOU DO NOT SELL THE RIGHTS TO YOUR MASCOT! I haven't even taken a high-school level business course and I know that! If true, then that is, quite literally, the SINGLE STUPIDEST BUSINESS DECISION I HAVE EVER HEARD OF.

[NebulaGregarZX]

...SH*T.

I looked it up. They sold Mega Man to Nintendo. ...I have mixed feelings about this, as it means that while it's no longer in the hands of its original developing company, so it might change for the worse... it's in the hands of people who are competent at very least. And there was nothing about it being laid to rest, so I assume that was misinformation.

And while it's a STUPID decision, it's not like they've got other options: they've lost their legendary devs, and most of their funding. If it's a choice between selling the Blue Bomber to Nintendo and sinking, what would anybody do? This is ultimately for the best. ...Unless Nintendo proves to be even worse than CAPCOM about this, but why would they? They've got MEGA-FREAKIN'-MAN to use. He's an icon on the same level as Mario and Link. And they're good with making cutesy, cartoonish stuff, so they would probably work well with the classic series. Of course, those hoping for X9, ZX3, and Legends 3 just had their dreams crushed. Especially X9.

...So, yeah, mixed feelings. I hope we don't regret this later, but there's hope that this will turn out well. You don't put Mega Man into the new Smash Bros and then not develop any games for him. Fan backlash would be absurd.

[Haar_Dragon]

OKay. Okay. Well. That's okay. Nintendo, I feel I can trust with him. Thing is, it's not really a choice between selling him and dying. I know they've lost their major developers, but...I dunno, maybe try effort? I know this is the company that introduced us to Battle Network 4, but...still. Kinda serves to prove my point, actually.

And seeing Megaman's Final Smash gives me hope for the future.

...Why would they have problems with X, ZX, and Legends? I could maybe comprehend the first two, being on the darker side, but Legends? I haven't beaten it (nor am I likely to, sadly), but what I've seen of it seems pretty lighthearted. And besides, Nintendo can do dark. Look at Zelda: Majora's Mask. It's not like they haven't done anything like that before. Or are you referring to the hardcore sci-fi elements? Being that a good chunk of the X series was on SNES and the ZX games were both on DS, I figure that at least SOMEONE competent has played them. And with a hybrid of competence and knowing your source material comes producing something good.

In short, your statement that X, ZX, and Legends have been wiped off the map confuses me.

...Maybe wishful thinking on my part, but I could see them making a BN7 that takes place in between BN6 and its epilogue. Again, though, wishful thinking.

[NebulaGregarZX]

...His Final Smash? What's it look like?

Oh, Legends has its darkness. Like, mass genocide almost happening, and you being informed that it happens on a regular basis, every time an island becomes too populated. Still pretty goofy and silly, but the horrors are still there, lurking in the shadows. ...Plus, there's the fact that Legends 3 got canned, and how it was Inafune's dream to see it completed. It won't ever happen unless Nintendo latched on to the idea and asked Inafune and Comcept to work with them on it.

...Well, in the case of X, the first minute of their first PlayStation game has a whole city of innocent people getting killed. The series got much darker once it left the SNES. As for ZX, I think the DS is a bit more lenient about it. Think of all the games for the DS that weren't nearly all sunshine and rainbows. Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, for example. Again, MASS GENOCIDE.

ZX3 would need to have an involved plot that relies on writing a villain introduced as a good guy in ZXA, and that would require Nintendo to think like CAPCOM's writers and figure out how to do it without being drastically different in tone from the other two games. And even then, they would have a different team than CAPCOM's working on graphics, so it wouldn't look the same.

So, really, it just seems unlikely that they would continue to work on them for a variety of reasons. X8 looks strikingly different from stuff Nintendo makes. Legends 3 got partially developed, then shut down. ZX3 would require a lot more effort than it should. Zero ended, and it would basically be everything that makes X and ZX hard for Nintendo to handle, all mixed together and made ten times worse for 'em. Battle Network ended, though I could otherwise kind of see them working on it. Heck, they might even improve the story, but the battle mechanics wouldn't be quite the same. I can't see them developing Starforce, though.

...Basically, I can't help but picture Mega Man Classic being the one they really use. I hope they surprise us, though.

There is that one fan project that's trying to be BN7, though, and it shows some promise. It's designed to be for expert players of the original games, so there's less hand-holding BS and more insane, fast-paced action and strategic depth. On the other hand, it's a fan project. Of course, they're working on it, so it will hopefully improve a lot. It may take five to ten years, but it might turn out a game of equal quality to the official ones, possibly even better!

[Haar_Dragon]

I heard about that. The villain is some guy called Raven, right?

His Final Smash is him and four other Megamans (or Mega Men if we're going with ZX) standing behind him all firing what appear to be buffed-up charge shots. From left to right, we have Megaman.EXE, Megaman X, Geo, and Megaman Volnutt, with Classic Megaman standing front-and-center to them all.

But between the fact that it was partially developed, plus that Inafune wants it, wouldn't that make Legends 3 more likely?

Dude, the SNES has some dark times. Like FFVI, in which

Spoiler:

Why would the villain have had to be a good guy in ZXA? The villain of the first game wasn't exactly the posterboy for happiness. It's pretty clear from square one that he's evil. In fact, I think you can call who the villain is going to be within the first minute. And if you could advance text on your own within that minute, it'd probably be more like ten seconds.

You provide a decent reason for the X series, but, um...I dunno, I think they could handle it for some reason. Besides, not everything that gets dark has to stay that way. It can still have fun with itself later.

Um...isn't the premise of the Classic Megaman series that "Wily made robots that are attacking things! Get them!"?

Well, for dark DS games, there's Digimon World: Dawn/Dusk, there's 999, I could name a few. Pokemon Black/White toed the line a couple of times, but never stepped over it.

[Cremator of the Sky]

I actually kind of liked Star Force, if only for the concepts it was running on. Battle wise I hated it, but plot wise I liked it, especially after reading an LP for it that has now stagnated and probably succumbed to the grisly hands of development hell. And then SF2 happened...

Just like... nothing happens. At all. Nothing. I mean, the only contribution it has is your typical loner angsting animu mofo has joined the cast and is running around in the world and that's it. You know what I liked though? The fact that all of the bosses were based on Cryptids. And you know what? They completely dropped the ball with their executions so the game actually had potential to be exciting at various points.

And are... you guys doubting Nintendo's ability to handle dark themes?

[NebulaGregarZX]

Yeah. Something like that.

Oh, I looked it up in the meantime. It gives me hope, too, and I coincidentally found CAPCOM's April Fools' Day joke: a brilliantly re-designed Mega Man X image on their site, which when translated it's actually just a figure... expect it has ridiculous specifications, marking it as a silly joke. ...THEY WASTED. THE X EQUIVALENT OF MYTHOS ZERO. ON AN APRIL FOOLS' DAY JOKE.

No, not really. Those programming assets, the teams who worked on them... well, Haar, it's HARD to program a game that's already been started by other people. On a level I can't comprehend, since I don't know much about programming. I DO know that having to look at somebody else's code and try to build off of it is a nightmare.

Oh, that? I mean the secret ending, where they pretty much TELL you who the next villain is. And he was a good guy who showed up to give you his support in person before you went to the final dungeon. He was practically a reference to Dr. Light. And I'm more getting at the idea that they won't be able to capture the same dark-ish feel. ZX and ZXA had a certain vibe to 'em, and who knows if Nintendo developers would know how to capture that.

The X series canonically ends with the world going to hell and X having to establish Neo Arcadia just to keep people happy. ...This is explained in more detail in the Zero series. I think it can be done, actually, I'm just expressing slight doubt that it'll happen so soon. Of course, Nintendo would probably gain a massive chunk of fanbase if they pulled it off.




Crem, I liked it too. I can appreciate what they meant to do with the battle system: it wasn't just making it simpler and taking away the strategic depth, it was trying to make it more action-oriented. Some people were probably frustrated with how Battle Network required so much strategy, and not so much with reflexes. Look at Classic Mega Man: if you're really good, you don't need to tackle weak Robot Masters first, heck, you might take them all down with the buster. If you're not so incredible, you can just follow the weapon weakness cycle. It's balanced out like that: strategy vs. action, leaning on action. BN fell more towards strategy, and those who didn't pay enough attention to it were doomed from the start. Not to say that's bad, just that Starforce tried to go back to action.

SF2 had a lot that doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Everything about Solo, for example. Oh! That reminds me, I didn't actually point out that I liked your little skit about him, Haar. Sorry, I forget to compliment people sometimes.

Dude. Crem. I would never doubt their ability to do dark. Majora's mask is probably the most obvious example. I just don't know about their ability to produce the same atmosphere as Mega Man X or its brethren. I don't know if I want them to or not, either.

[Sponsored content]