Part 100: MegaMan Battle Network 4

Retsupurae Retrospection: Part 1: Battle Network 4.

ABSURDLY FRICKING LONG!

As I described earlier, this temporary project consists of me going back over my older LP works and reviewing them in hindsight.

It is worth noting that this sequence is intended to be not only a self-critique, but also a more formal explanation of what I do. I major in Game Design, and have explained Let's Play to my Game Culture class. For the sake of being able to provide something more academic and readable to my peers and professors, I've begun this.

The big changes you'll notice:

1. This will have a far more formal tone, do not expect me to go off on a swear-tangent like I usually do.

2. You'll see some new vocabulary being used, as I'm going to be analyzing the games' elements of design. These will be explained as used.

3. I'm going to rant about technical details and aspects of the game I do not usually cover out of concern of them not being interesting to conventional readers.

So for some, I fully expect this to be considered a sort of "more boring" version of my LPs, and admit that the focus for this sub-project is being informative rather than being entertaining, though of course I'll try to be at least slightly amusing.

Today, we're starting with MegaMan Battle Network 4, the earliest game I played (also probably the most notorious) that hit the archives due to image host problems with the BN2 and BN3 LPs. I'm frankly grateful that those problems happened, because those early LPs were total junk. With that said, enough explanation, I'll begin.




So, here's the image that sums up the start of the MMBN4 disaster. You get, hopefully, a good grasp of the nature of how things tend to go in that awful game. You have the tail end of Dex, the protagonist's friend, setting up an annoying meeting with other annoying characters, followed by cranking up that LP's F***Up Tally. This first update pretty much sets the tone of the rest of the LP, given I was perpetually angry and annoyed with the game. I had some fairly severe life troubles during the writing of MMBN4, and it really shows. I'm not sure about this, but the MMBN4 LP may be the most profanity-laden Screenshot LP on the entire archive, or at least a candidate for such.

Now, I'll describe MMBN4's design elements, why I hate them, and why I literally intend to write a semester-end paper on examining the multiple serious errors and poor choices in the game, as we go along. For now, I'll explain to the non-SA readers something about MMBN4.

You see that F***Up Tally? The game was translated by Bowne Global Solutions in a way that leaves you dumbstruck wondering how this was in any way acceptable as a finished product. And that's honestly the least of the game's severe flaws. Those, among other flaws, glitches, and self-contradictory/idiotic writing examples, each incremented a counter I spent my time tracking through the course of the LP.

Now, I'm assuming that the reader has familiarity with the MMBN games' designs and commonplace mechanics. This is because I'm ommiting such explanation from this public version, when I show this to my peers in academia it will include an at-length explanation of such things. Where this is being posted online, that's unnecessary.



Onto the second update, you have the game's big features and motifs starting to creep in, as well as my utter condemnation of them. Honestly, I was way harder on MMBN4 than the game deserves, but don't think for a minute I don't regard it as one of the worst games I've ever played.

For starters, the game suffered from the early-to-mid 2000s general trend of "evil counterpart". You literally had Dark Samus (and the SA-X!), Shadow Mario, Shadow the Hedgehog, Dark MegaMan in this game and its sequel, Omega in MegaMan Zero 3 (released at the same time as this game and including a small crossover feature, even), Azel from God Hand, Riku in the original Kingdom Hearts game (to a lesser degree Roxas in 2), Liquid Snake, Mirror Kirby and Mirror Meta-Knight from Amazing Mirror, and so on. It was like every single game developer had this simultaneous compulsion to include an evil version of the main character.

It's one thing to have a literary foil, it's quite another for the antagonist to be explicitly named or designed as a mirror of the protagonist, often with just a dark color palette or other tweaks on an overall similarity. Some did this well! For example, Omega from MMZ3 is remembered as one of the coolest enemies and final bosses of the whole MegaMan franchise, no small feat for a GBA game. Most, however, treated it fairly arbitrarily, or shoehorned the antagonist into the role with no real thought put into it. Mario Sunshine is a divisive game, but the whole "Bowser Jr. is pretending to be Mario to slander his name, succeeding inexplicably" thing is a standout. Particularly given the rather disturbing bits about Bowser Jr. being Peach's son, which while later disproven, was not denied as something impossible by Peach. Ay yi yi.

But one thing that truly hurts MMBN4 is that it "broke the balance" the MMBN games had between narrative and agency. Vocabulary interlude:

Narrative: You almost certainly know this already, but in this context, narrative refers to the overall emphasis on the game's story, not just the presence of said story. A "narrative-centric" game would be much like the stereotypical JRPG that plays out like a story you earn by level grinding. I will admit to being heavily biased against this genre, and loathe JRPGs for primarily this reason.(*)

Agency: Agency, put simply, is the idea that "what the player does matters". Essentially, a player needs to feel like they have an impact on the game world, that they as the player make a difference and can influence events. The most dreaded words a player or playtester can say of a game are not "this is terrible and I hate it, it's full of huge flaws", no. The words that haunt a game designer's nightmares are "I don't care about this". If a player has no personal investment, they're a lot more likely to think that nothing in the game is worth even paying attention to.

As you can imagine, Narrative and Agency are opposed forces in designing a game. It is, with current computer technology, fundamentally impossible to create a game world that both lets the player do anything they want while also having a cohesive, solid story. You can think of the Mass Effect games (branching subplots and decisions, ultimately only a few different pre-defined endings) and Skyrim (sheer number of possible things to do, but the main story is pretty direct) as examples of the two ideas being used together, but it'd be impossible to, for example, add a deep, complex story to something like Minecraft where the player is given free reign to do whatever they want.

What I'm ultimately saying here is that if you have a story that plays out in a given way, you can't expect to add a free-willed wild card player to the experience and have it proceed as planned. Let's even imagine that you have the most immersed, roleplaying player imaginable, who is truly acting as their character would. You're still going to have moments where the player is thinking differently than the writers are, simply because the player is a wholly different PERSON than the writers and is bringing a completely different set of experiences and traits to the table. More likely, you'll get a player who is doing what sounds fun or interesting, and also probably completionists who want to see every possibility.

Basically, it's a lot like a tabletop roleplay game such as D&D. Show me a Game Master who has tried to develop a beautiful narrative with a coherent storyline and I will show you a broken shell of a person who either had to pigeonhole their players or give up on their ideas. Similarly, imagine how Tolkien's works would have gone had Frodo, Feanor, or Aragorn for example been under a player's control, and imagine yourself or people you know/have seen playing that. Such a story would have had to either heavily railroad the player, thus crippling Agency, or give up entirely on a Narrative that would have to take into account, for example, the player trying to usurp the One Ring's power for themselves.

(*)Seriously, if you want to just have a story, play a freaking Visual Novel, level grinding is a completely obsolete means of game-time extension that was only needed in the past for the sake of having play lengths greater than 3 hours. In the age of far more powerful computers and expanded game potential, it infuriates me that designers cling to a worthless game mechanic that literally serves no purpose other than to make the player perform the same bland monotony over and over. Forced level grinding in an RPG is shorthand from the designers to me for "we have refused to acknowledge the progress of time, preferences, and technology, now buy our stupid garbage because we're a big company and you're a consumer." I could write an entire thesis paper on why JRPGs are the worst genre of games. I cannot believe this garbage is a consumer delight in Japan especially, but also elsewhere.





Let the record show that I find Japanese game aesthetics to be frequently asinine. In the words of Anatole France: "If 50 million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."



What do I mean by "breaking the balance between Narrative and Agency", in MMBN4's case? The tournament scenarios. The game is arranged as such:

1. Intro
2. Dungeon 1, Plot Setup
3. 3 roughly 20-45 minute "tournament scenarios" that focus on a situation with a random character
4. Plot is given some attention
5. Dungeon 2, player confronts the "starter villain" and sets in motion the later game events
6. Another 3 tournament scenarios
7. Very minor plot details
8. Another 3 tournament scenarios
9. Plot is addressed in full to the protagonists
10. Travel around the game setting, buildup to the game's conclusion
11. Plot climax, Final Dungeon, final boss
12. Ending
13. Credits

This doesn't sound so bad in theory.



Let me inform you that there was a contest established among the readers, started by Zebrin, in which 20 dollars (10 from him, 10 from me in theory, but system difficulties led to user StarkClamp footing my bill) of Something Awful account upgrades and features would be given to whoever could most accurately guess the F***Up Tally's count by the end of the LP. Guesses ranged from the hundreds to the thousands, by this point in the game there had already been 52 of them counted.

Now, let me elaborate how the above structure ACTUALLY plays out...Get a snack folks, this is going to be very long even by my rambling standard.

1. Boring Intro, featuring characters only one of whom is even given a name, before cutting to the protagonist's casual day, which goes wrong quickly.

2. Badly-designed and glitchy dungeon spent chasing bats with extremely poor hit detection around on a timer, repeatedly, followed by a subplot entirely reliant on the protagonist behaving irrationally and stupidly while the player is powerless to do anything competent.

3. The problem with the tournament scenarios (besides being utterly boring if not painfully tedious) is that not only do they focus primarily on characters never met before, though pre-established ones crop up often enough, but they give you so little time or reason to care. Every single tournament scenario is self-contained, has absolutely no ramifications outside itself besides the occasional powerup, none of the new characters are ever seen again, the player gets at best 5 minutes of dialogue to care about the characters involved, the protagonist throws himself into every single situation arbitrarily, they're written incredibly poorly, and worst of all in terms of Agency, nobody in the game world cares that it is happening. The game does not contain any NPCs not directly related to the scenario at hand (barring one gate guard as an exception) who will even acknowledge that what the player is doing is even happening at all. This is a perfect example of how to destroy Agency utterly, where the player's actions aren't even acknowledged. On top of all that, the scenarios all occur on the general overworld rather than in any unique areas of their own, meaning that you never really see anything new or go anywhere you haven't been already. The game does not care about the player, why should the player care about the game?



4. By "some attention", I mean about 100 seconds of cutscene. The game's central plot, an impending asteroid, is seldom addressed, the subplot of a crime organization trying to corrupt the world with DarkChips is brought up only occasionally relative to the tournaments. Worst of all, what I mentioned in point 2 hits the absolute pinnacle of awful writing. I have literally never seen a plot point handled so shamefully by a major corporation. This is the kind of thing that would be expected from someone writing their first story ever and not knowing what to do with it. What do I refer to? The protagonists spend a few sentences discussing how the plot device, the DarkChip dropped by the first boss of the game during retreat, is absolutely dangerous to keep around, and they discuss how it could be having nasty effects on MegaMan already. Our protagonists than immediately decide they're going to do nothing and keep it. If someone were to ask me what the worst writing I'd ever seen was, this is it right here. The characters fully state exactly why what they're doing is the worst possible idea, and then do it anyway for no reason other than the Darkchip subplot being over in seconds if the protagonists just pounded the infernal thing with a rock, or perhaps just ran a magnet over it. The player is fully expected to go along with this example of distilled stupidity and contrived writing, powerless to do anything half-intelligent. This is an example of something that attacks both Narrative AND Agency, that is, forcing the player to do something stupid for the sake of a stupid story. Why should anyone care about a situation that is not only poorly written and utterly arbitrary, but also prevents them from taking any more reasonable action?



5. Dungeon 2 is notorious even among the game's defenders for being very unenjoyable. The player is expected to re-construct a few fairy tales from the area's story, as it takes place at a sort of fantasy theme park. The thing is, the player is given almost nothing in the way of Affordances. Vocabulary time.

Affordance: I describe this as "form indicates function". Namely, when you perceive something, you should know what to do with it, or be quickly shown how it works. Here's a perfect, famous example in video game history of Affordance being used extremely well:



Even without looking one second at the instruction manual, the first screen of level 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. will swiftly teach the player how the game works. Press a button, Mario jumps. Press the directional pad, Mario walks around. Holding the other button makes him move faster. Okay, testing the buttons has clear results, time to move on. The player has a score, something anyone who plays games, even just Tic-Tac-Toe, will understand, a little gold circle counter, familiar representations of real-world background objects like clouds and bushes, and...uh oh, something with an angry face is coming towards Mario! The player perhaps might contact it and die, losing a life and having to start the level over, immediately making it clear that touching frowny-face brown thing is BAD. Well, Mario can jump over it, it's pretty small. However, the blocks are positioned in a way that if the player tries to do this quickly, such as after having learned that the thing is dangerous, they'll bonk off the blocks, land on the Goomba, and kill it. Presto, the player has just learned how to defeat enemies: jump on them. The process of hitting the block also got the player a coin, playing a nice little beep noise and incrementing the gold object counter on the interface. Time is decrementing, and anyone can understand what having a time limit on something is. So, the Goomba had an angry face and was going at Mario, what happens if you keep hitting those blocks? You're small Mario, so you can't break them, but there's more blocks on top of them, so might as well see what's inside. More coins can't hurt. What results instead is a mushroom! And it's moving away from Mario, signifying that the player is supposed to chase it down, because unlike the Goomba, it's trying to avoid the player, and is thus something worth pursuing, as per basic chase instincts. Mario touches the mushroom, and presto, he's gotten bigger and stronger! The player now has been taught every single fundamental thing about playing Super Mario Bros., right on the first screen.

An anti-example of Affordance would be....well, virtually any puzzle-adventure game by Sierra, or the likes of Myst. In those games, the player has no idea what they're supposed to be doing and are given no information regarding it. Essentially, the player is expected to try every combination of possible actions until something works, typically in a way that only makes a fraction of sense to the writer alone. People criticize modern games for hand-holding, and this is justified, but a lack of Affordance is the exact opposite problem, where the player is expected to play the game without actually being given any indication of how to do that.

You see the concepts of Affordance being used in interfaces for...anything that has an interface these days, really. Look at your web browser. You have your page title, which communicates immediate information, you have the URL bar (or omnibar in Chrome) used for navigation that easily stands out from the rest of the top-screen content, and you probably have a myriad of symbols up there. A little envelope icon to denote your email, perhaps, or the red stop sign of AdBlock Plus, or even just the simple minus sign to minimize the window or X to close it. On Macs you get a "traffic light" system instead, which is equally recognizable.

Back to MMBN4's second dungeon. I said there was a lack of Affordance here, and what I mean by that is that the player is given no indication they were expected to learn the fairy tales they need to reassemble in the (quite short) window of time they were able to do so at all. So the player is now forced into guessing how the stories went or resorting to trial-and-error, having to slog back and forth through the dungeon (while annoying music and difficult enemies plague them) trying each story option out.



And then the player gets to the end of it, and confronts the first boss of the game again, who is hellbent on getting the DarkChip he dropped at the start back. Now, it's worth noting that the crime organization he's a part of has the goal of distributing and corrupting people with them, as they're addictive and quite obviously an analogue to performance-enhancing drugs. DarkChips aren't exactly rare either, they're proliferating dangerously in fact. The only reason the villain wants the DarkChip back? The player is treated to one sentence explaining that it has "special data" on it, and that's all. The villain even messing with the protagonists at all is completely arbitrary, contrived, and stupidly-written. Noticing a pattern yet?



Then MegaMan proceeds to dramatically destroy the DarkChip right in front of the villain. Like he should have done hours of gameplay ago, but arbitrarily and inexplicably did not. As I mentioned in point 4, this is literally the worst writing I have ever seen. Defenders of the game claim that it's not so bad when you look past the shoddy translation, but that's ridiculous, considering that the inherent situations are so badly-made. You can see me going absolutely ballistic in the LP over this, because I quite enjoyed the previous games, especially MMBN3's quite intriguing subplots. Most of all though, as a would-be storyteller, I'm furious that people were given paychecks to churn out this utter garbage. Although I suppose that some people thinking this trash is a cool moment proves that even the stupidest writer will attract an audience. As if anyone paying attention to popular culture didn't know that already.



The villain is then defeated in a very anticlimactic "boss fight" that forces the player to use the DarkChip, which has permanently corrupted MegaMan due to such a prolonged exposure period. Nice job, protagonists whom the player has no control over. The player is, as I repeatedly emphasize, powerless to do anything but nod their head and go along with every last idiotic decision made in the game that anyone with a functioning brain would realize is a terrible idea. It is worth mentioning that the "boss fight" is more of a cutscene that plays in the battle interface. The player does nothing for several turns, maybe taking damage due to glitchy hit detection, and can't hurt the villain. Then the DarkChip comes up, which has a range of two-thirds of the entire enemy field and automatically moves MegaMan into position to use it. The DarkChip defeats the villain instantly, leaving the player with nothing resembling a fun boss fight, which I shall remind the reader is the basis behind the entire MegaMan franchise, especially the MMBN RPG series which lacks platforming elements outside of the (extremely difficult) GameCube spinoff.

One may argue that the work had evoked a very strong response from me, which many an artist or writer would be delighted to see in response to their works had it been intentional. The thing is, this quite emphatic emotional reaction is one of utter hatred for the game and the people who wrote it, not against the actual story elements of the game. If a writer creates an utterly vile villain and people hate them intensely, that's a sign of good writing. If a writer creates a story so drenched in horrible writing that it incites the reader to genuine anger at having to suffer such a thing? Quite different.



6. Following THAT series of bland/frustrating/enraging (the only satisfying choice a player gets to make!) escapades, the player is dumped into tournament 2. Only, you need to qualify for it despite having come out on top of tournament 1. As described above, this means collecting points from the entire available game world, being a scavenger hunt. Considering that tournament 1 was all about running around the available overworld repeatedly anyway, this is an eclectic blend of boring, repetitive, tedious, and frustrating.

Then you get to the actual tournament.



These consist largely of "navigate an obstacle course and get to the most distant available internet area".



Or, if you're really unlucky, being forced to play terrible quicktime event minigames.



But no, it's mostly obstacle courses on the overworld. To this day, I can recite the route to the back of ParkArea 3, simply because you spend several hours of gameplay just going there over and over. I'll even draw a route and then compare it to the game maps, though you'll have to take my word for it that I'm not cheating:





Pretty much spot-on.





Very flawed, only remembered one of the teleporters, but the overall route is intact.





Missed the shortcut route, but that's likely because it's usually blocked off or harder to travel along when the game is forcing you to go there.

So overall, yes, the route to Park Area 3 remains seared into my mind, albeit with holes. The last time I played the game was for a charity event that people donated money to see in August of this year. This is pretty much all that tournament 2 makes you do, over and over.



7. We have two back-to-back plot cutscenes between this point and the protagonists getting sent off the tournament 3. The first of which is confronting LaserMan, the first villain's (ShadeMan) superior in the crime organization. You actually do have a quite intense boss fight at this point, but it's essentially randomized if it'll be difficult or a letdown due to randomized behavior in the enemy AI. The boss, a Dark MegaMan-possessed character from earlier in the story depending on which version of the game you bought, is a quite impressive attempt by the programmers to duplicate the player's battle behaviors with an AI by measuring their tendencies and what attacks they use over the game. Again, though, it's a very randomized behavior, and worse yet the AI-player copy has little in the way of health. So the fight, which had the potential of being very climactic, is really just a glorified dice roll. The randomized attacks the player draws from preset inventory versus the randomized attacks the AI pulls from their history of use.

This sounds like a lack of Agency, and to some extent it is, but managing the random aspects of what attacks the player has available is a key element of the series, forcing a player to adapt to using the tools they have available on a given round of combat, and also strategically planning their setup to optimize this system. The problem is that it falls apart in the face of a randomized opponent, who the player cannot compensate for bad draws for with skill due to a wildly unpredictable pattern. It's worth noting that the "Dark MegaMan Player AI Copy" battle concept was revisited in the sequel game, MMBN5, and was such an amazingly fun battle that I keep my save files parked in front of it so I can pick up the game and duel myself again occasionally. More on that when I do this for that game. What I'm saying here though is that MMBN4 executed the concept poorly, mostly due to mutually low HP on both sides of the fight that meant that one or two chance moments would end it in the player or AI's favor.



Immediately after, the plan to divert the asteroid (remember that thing?) from hitting Earth with a laser is put into action, only for something "unknown" to sabotage the laser, which could only fire once due to frying itself in the process of producing a powerful enough beam. As you can see, I took the opportunity to mock LaserMan for being such a boring cliche dump. This sort of dialogue is very common to MMBN4 and MMBN5's villains, and I dubbed it "Mad Libs Dialogue" while LPing them. As in, there's so little creativity present that you could just cut out the proper nouns and subject matter and apply the lines anywhere.

For example: "I, the evil (name), will conquer the world using the power of darkness!"

Mad Libs Dialogue is, in essence, utterly generic writing that is so bland and cliched that it doesn't even matter what context it's used in.

It's also a common trick in Let's Playing a game to satirize a character and give them a sort of alternative personality. The most well-known user of this among screenshot LPers is The Dark Id, who is known to employ Photoshop and things like Garry's Mod to set up entire joke situations. You'll probably see the sort of "parody interpretation" in any given LP you look at unless it's very serious, as many LPers quite enjoy making sarcastic remarks and pulling a Stephen Colbert by presenting a pastiche of someone.

I tried my hand a few times at writing parody dialogue for various games I've LPed, but it never really worked well. It kind of disappoints me as a writer and aspiring storyteller that I'm just not good at that, honestly. That said, my narratives and commentary have a habit of casting characters in a different perspective, simply because a given reader of my content is experiencing the characters through my own lens.

This reached the (il)logical extreme when in-joke versions of characters from these games got brought up elsewhere, or fanart was drawn. The majority of that came in the MMBN5 and MMBN6 LPs, however, so covering them now would be getting ahead of myself. What I will note is this fella right here:



As this will be presented as a series of images with a PDF document to the academic side of the readers, I'll elaborate. That is the "more evil" emoticon for Something Awful, and StarkClamp paid 30 bucks for that little gag, which rose from a few aside jokes in the next game. It features the main villain of MMBN4 and MMBN5, Dr. Regal, just pressing a button to flash the word "EVIL" over and over, which might as well replace every spoken line he ever had.

8. After that, and a brief gameplay interlude grabbing keys, the player gets chucked into the last of the game's 3 tournaments, the most painful one of them all.

Tournament 3 is characterized by incredibly difficult-to-control minigames and/or navigating the entire internet or worse yet the unreasonably difficult UnderNet. MMBN4 is quite a strong candidate for also being the hardest game in the main series, simply because the player is given nowhere near enough in the way of usable tools to confront the most difficult enemies in the series. It's worth noting that by this point in the LP I had abused a thing called the Number Trader. The Number Trader is a recurring gizmo that essentially allows the player to break the game on demand. Across the game world are 8-digit codes, and you can plug these codes into the Number Trader to get a reward of some kind. Only, there's nothing ever stopping the player from looking the codes up online and getting things they weren't meant to have until after they'd defeated the final boss.

Let it sink in that I was abusing that thing to the fullest and still having problems with how weak MegaMan was in relation to utterly brutal enemies.

Even the speedrunners of this game have problems with how woefully underpowered the player is. It's actually faster to load MegaMan up with equipment that enhance his MegaBuster default weapon, which is in all other cases considered a sidearm to the BattleChip attacks. That is how bad MMBN4's chip availability is, when not using them at all is more efficient.

If I have to make anything clear right now, I have to stress this point: MMBN4 is unreasonably difficult, another point against it. It's worth noting that I've made it a point to romhack the other games in the series for the explicit sake of setting up insane boss fights to challenge myself with. I am a gamer who likes a challenge. MMBN4 is not challenging, it is unreasonable. The player is flat-out not given the tools they need to meet the game's challenges sufficiently.

I'll explain a very important reason WHY this is the case later, when I give you the game's big reveal.



Terrible minigames? Check.

It's at this point we reach, however, the "highlight" as it were of the LP. Most people I've asked for review of my LPs have told me that this is the most memorable thing I've ever written. That's because it is the most hatred-soaked eruption of outrage I've produced to date. You see, I mentioned earlier I was having an intensely difficult time in my life while this was made, and this exact update was written in the middle of a nervous breakdown when I realized I'd failed my Chemistry class due to my severe anxieties and other assorted life problems. It would later lead to some intense follow-ups, psychiatric attention, being medicated, and eventually failing out that college. I think what I was trying to do was distract myself by playing the game and writing the update. What resulted was pure, seething, primal and neurotic fury.



The premise of this tournament scenario is Chaud (rhymes with cow), ProtoMan's physical-world partner, having been forced to use a DarkChip himself. Nevermind that this is a setting where anyone can log off or "jack-out" of the internet at any time to escape a situation. And that ProtoMan has been deleted before with no lasting consequence because Chaud himself programmed him. So the whole situation is based on stupid, contrived behavior, as is the game's norm. My commentary is frustrated, but things aren't particularly worse than usual.



Then things start going downhill. Chaud's computer terminal or PET, the device ProtoMan resides in when not on the internet, proceeds to magically fly across the room and connect to the internet itself. The only thing said about it is Chaud wondering if that's an effect DarkSouls have. You can tell that even by the abysmal standard set before it, this scenario is already going to be one of the worst. It later turns out that, yes, it IS the worst!

I should mention that these games were the ones I pretty much grew up playing during my early teens and formative years, so there's a lot of nostalgia and reflection in them. When I play Battle Network games, I think of my childhood in the increasingly-far past, before, frankly, I started being plagued with recurring psychiatric issues and life problems. They're a sort of memento of the kid I used to be, and hold an emotional bond to me similar to that of a childhood blanket or favorite toy you might find buried in a closet sometime. Simply put, my childhood toys.



Image choice very much deliberate.

To get to the UnderNet at all, where ProtoMan wildly ran off to, the player needs to assemble this thing called a C-Slider that will enable MegaMan to traverse narrow wire paths. The problem is that you need the parts, and they're hidden behind/under paths spread across the entire available internet. Unless you use a guide or GameFAQs (something a game should NEVER require, ideally), you are going to have to scour the entire internet top to bottom. When you find the people who have the parts, they charge you 3000 or 4000 game currency for them. Note that MMBN4 soaks the player for cash constantly and provides extremely little of it in return. 3000 Zenny is what you'll have if you spend 10 solid minutes savescum-farming random battles to get the best results, and the total of 10,000 Zenny for all 3 parts is a severe problem which there really isn't an answer to besides mindless grinding.



Obtaining the C-Slider, and having spent about 40 minutes scouring the game world, I headed to the UnderNet, where the real profanity fireworks start. I sadly can't explain why the random encounters in the UnderNet in MMBN4 are so incredibly unfair without explaining the entire battle system, so just take my word for it when I say that the UnderNet is the sort of game experience that leads to players yelling. Not only this, but you have to perform a pixel hunt for invisible items. This is the worst thing in the game, and it's got a loving layer of absolutely idiotic writing applied to, which I, enraged, point out. Nebula, the crime organization behind the DarkChips, apparently has a security system that consists of hiding keys, then when someone finds them and breaks in, they hide them in the same place every time.

You know, a sentence I wrote earlier into things sums it all up pretty well. If the developers didn't care about the game, and the game doesn't care about the player, why in the world should the player care about the game? Trust me, if I hadn't committed to doing the Let's Play, I'd have thrown it out like the trash it is. Although, for the sake of recording and such, I was using an emulator copy of the game rather than my old cartridge.



This is the point where I start to break. The title of the update is simply "Meltdown" for a reason. Given the following rant from the update is all text, I'll quote it here rather than take a screenshot of the archive:


Drives you insane? Well, you can see that happening pretty well here, but I repeat that this was written during what was a nervous breakdown already. I look back on this and start laughing though, I admit, because things like "E'mag-sidkuf (spell it backwards), the Emasculating Excrement" are actually pretty funny to me even today. Mind you, I'm not happy at how my commentary degraded into the screaming of a lunatic, but it's an interesting look into the mindset of someone who is going completely nuts. What's even more entertaining in hindsight is how comparatively trivial that rant-inducer was.



Remember, MMBN2 was lost due to the image host I used going down. So, here's the point that snapped me, and counter-intuitively it has nothing to do with gameplay or the (completed) key hunt.



Yes, MMBN4's designers literally reused map data from a previous game and applied the MMBN4 UnderNet graphical tileset to it. That is how amazingly little effort was put into this.



This left me a husk. I think getting to the area and having something to blow up on just wound up releasing the pressure that had built up over the course of the night. I'm laughing at my past self though, mind you, because it's a pretty insignificant thing. All the stupidity of this game comes to head, and this is where I break? On something that has no direct consequence on play and arguably makes navigation EASIER because I'm familiar with it?

I should note, the "one tally point out of sheer hatred" was the only one I counted the whole LP, otherwise there were no spite-points.

The next several images don't matter, so you'll get a sense of what state I was left in by this point simply by reading the commentary:


Just by reading this whole thing itself, you can tell I'm very overly rambling and, if nothing else, descriptive and articulate. Hell, this thing has already passed the 40,000 character mark, I'm actually worried I'll hit the 50,000 character post cap on Something Awful. The fact my commentary/brain was reduced to single words and sentence fragments really says it all.



I took a break from writing at that point, returning more articulate to finish things up. ProtoMan got rescued in a very stupid way, through the power of friendship and trust from Chaud being literally beamed through MegaMan into ProtoMan like some kind of antenna. But that's not what caps off the infamous ProtM situation. Here's the fight video.

In case a PDF file screws up the link, which is likely, I'll put it simply: I accidentally broke ProtoMan's AI. By just using an AreaGrab chip to move into his side of the field, ProtoMan proceeded to just start moving back and forth between the same two panels while I stared in disbelief. It made for an easy boss fight, but it really summed up how fundamentally broken the game was...



...And how broken it had left me. That was the end of the ProtM update. If I recall correctly, the first comment on SA someone posted in response was roughly "I think I can feel pure hatred radiating from my screen".

For the sake of post size, I'll skip the ColdMan scenario, which itself was very bad but not AS bad.

9.



Now the end-of-game plot-defecation ensues. First on the list of idiocy is the asteroid plot, remember that? Well it turns out that not only is the asteroid artificial, but it's compatible with earth's internet.

As anyone who's rigged up a wireless connection can tell you, getting IDENTICAL systems to connect is a misadventure in technical sorcery. And here Capcom's writing staff is, claiming that the asteroid's internet is compatible with Earth's, and that the winner of the world tournament (the protagonist) was being co-opted into being the Earth's best chance to take control of the asteroid. The laser from earlier had been retooled into an optical transmitter to broadcast MegaMan to the asteroid.

This is often cited as the dumbest, most absolutely low, utterly idiotic point in the game's (possibly franchise's) writing, but I insist that it's less awfully-written than the "HEY LET'S KEEP HOLDING ONTO THIS EVIL THING EVEN THOUGH WE'VE JUST SAID WHY THAT'S BAD" moment.



I wish I could say this was a joke, that there was no such thing as MMBN4 and all of these screenshots are clever forgeries. No, Capcom actually wrote this. Just like in The Core, one independent group has hacked the entire internet and usurped control over it. I have nothing left to say about how stupid this game is.



"God, fuck all of you" is one of my favorite lines from the LP. I wonder why I can't write things that amusing anymore. Pop culture references are very integral to LP humor, but I do sincerely hate these three characters. Do you even REMEMBER them, reader, if you haven't played these games? They have done nothing since the start of the game. Every MMBN game features these three, MegaMan and the protagonist's friends, and the basic format is that they're useless or exist solely to be captured or endangered by a situation's events. Towards the end of every game, they save MegaMan from a contrived situation (that in one game was their fault) and supposedly justify themselves to the player. It doesn't WORK, how is the player supposed to like characters that do nothing helpful, have to be babysat repeatedly, and only ever do something useful when control is taken away from the player and MegaMan has gotten himself into a situation he could easily handle without them.

It's a pretty good example of What Not To Do.



Cutting ahead to the final dungeon, here's the asteroid itself. The main gimmick is having to navigate a series of pathways in a specific order so MegaMan crosses over specific field points. Those points then cannot be crossed again, changing the route. As I say here though, here's an example of a dangerous lack of Affordances. One thing I'll never forget from the thread of the LP was when one of the game's few defenders said "ARE YOU KIDDING ME!? YOU CAN AVOID THE BLACK HOLE!?" in response to this update. That was someone who liked the game, played it, and never learned that you could do that, making the asteroid dungeon almost unplayable.



At the end of the dungeon, after beating LaserMan, MegaMan comes to the control system, which is honestly what you'd expect. If the end of the game wasn't idiotic, it wouldn't fit with the rest.



Duo, the final boss, conjures up Dark MegaMan again, who is curbstomped effortlessly, for the sake of "testing" MegaMan. As I say there, though, he then insists that nobody can ever overcome their inner evil, rendering it utterly pointless.



After beating Duo, more stupid garbage you'd expect follows, such as MegaMan getting powered up by everyone on Earth cheering for him so hard that the atmosphere vibrates. See that angry pink face? It has remained my Something Awful avatar ever since that update was written, and is something of my "signature" online. It comes from one of Duo's attacks. I proceeded to rant over the credits, swearing at everyone involved in the production of such a terrible game (especially the Debug Supervisor).

That whole routine was basically stolen from the aforementioned The Dark Id LPer from his Dirge of Cerberus LP in which he did the same thing. So the bit by which I'm visually recognized is more or less a copied joke. Go figure.

And now comes the punchline. Punchline? I've concealed something about the game over this whole rant. It's all been a setup for this:



You have to play the game at least 3 times over to see all the content.

I will leave you with that, my academic peers. It speaks for itself.