Mega Man Battle Network (2001)

This game didn't give a strong first impression for the series, but thankfully I heard this is probably the worst one so it goes up from here.

• Ability to save anywhere
• End game spoiler: I found it funny that as the WWW lab is self-destructing, Lan, Chaud, and Mayl walk away casually instead of run.

• Encounter rate is super high
• Mega Man has their health restored at the beginning of every fight. This is all well and good, except the difficulty is balanced out by having every enemy do a ton of damage, making it easy to lose any encounter. This really starts to become noticeable by about the midway point in the game.
• The game is pretty cryptic with what you're supposed to do and the hints aren't great. I remember early on in the game, the hint tells you to play outside and then go home, so I thought there was supposed to be an event outside of the house. That isn't the case, the real objective is to just go home and sleep.
• The game could've benefited from having a map. It's pretty easy to get lost when environments are just the same hallways and backgrounds.
• Dungeon designs are incredibly tedious. Particularly the waterworks and the power plant.
• Getting upgrades can feel pretty grindy with how expensive they are at the shop

Ended up enjoying this game MUCH more than I expected to! Though now that I'm near the end of the main story I don't particularly want to spend many hours grinding for money to get the last few upgrades, so it's time for a little cheating. For anyone interested in playing this I don't think I'll NEED the last few upgrades to beat the game, I just want them. :p

I don't know if I am judging this game fairly based on the fact that it came out in 2001, but so far this is a pure trash experience in my opinion.

The battle system is cool, but the role playing experience, puzzles, sense of direction and soundtrack is absolutely awful. I will give it a couple of more hours, but if nothing interesting is happening soon, this is by a large margin the worst Mega Man game I have ever played.

Finished this today. Very confident in my original 3/5 rating. The concept is fantastic, and the general loop of the gameplay is enjoyable but there are a lot of rough edges. I'm going to play the sequel at some point and see if they hammered out some of the details.

Also they did the weird thing that happens in so many games where the second to last boss is the hardest and the last boss is pretty easy. Weird how that happens so often.

So after playing a few more hours I'm beginning to understand my 3/5 more. I enjoy the chip collection and the flow of the battle, but the random encounters are a slog. Also, it has this weird habit that I feels possibly due to a technical limitation. There are a bizarre number of story beats that only appear after LEAVING an area. For example, if you have to go to the Ham Sandwich Emporium to pick up a Ham Battler v2 you'll go in and poke around for 15 minutes. The Ham Battler v2 will not be there. However, once you get frustrated and leave the Ham Sandwich Emporium (triggering a map change) you'll get a message that says "Hey, I just got an email. It turns out the Ham Battler v2 is actually at the back of the store! Let's check there!" and now you'll go back into the previous map it will magically be there. This happens with such frequency that it has to be a technical limitation. Maybe the map loading is wonky, and this was a way around it? It's so tedious, it couldn't be a design choice...right?

.........right?