Part 16: The cycle of abuse begins anew!

So much for that idea. Was he the guy who got his name spelled wrong?



Here we go with Playthrough 2. Same exact unskippable intro crap!



You even have to do the tutorial fights over, although thankfully the actual tutorial dialogue and forced chip folder limitations don't apply. Your folder stays exactly the same as it was, rendering the early game ridiculously easy. Even with the virus upgrades. See how those are Mettaur2s now? Barring certain specific areas, all viruses in the game have had their HP and damage values increased, and they carry support chips more often.

Navis are similarly powered up, I think the actual increases vary between each one. It might be a block "All values x 2" sort of thing.



All of the Mystery Data in the game gives out better stuff, several thousand zenny most of the time. Sadly, we don't keep our items, so these doors and the C-Slider rails are all off limits yet again. We'll have to repeat the Django subquest and buy all the C-Slider parts over again.



It's as obnoxiously unenjoyable as you'd imagine.



Most notably, there's a new Chip Trader Special by Jomon Electric. The payouts on this thing are the best in the game. Naturally, 10 minutes later, I'd given my folder a few satisfactory upgrades.



Literally, there are no differences at all between playthroughs save for the upgraded viruses and Navis out side of tournament scenarios. And everything outside of the tournaments was pure boring, occasionally torturous crap.



Thankfully, they don't get any more difficult, the actual tasks are identical. 3-4 CyberBats, 10 seconds, blah blah. It's probably one of the laziest things I've ever seen a major gaming company produce. Playing through the game in 'full' is just playing the same game 3 times over. Just go reread the last 15 updates 3 times over, and you'll have this game.

I mean...there are always criticisms like "Oh, (company) is rereleasing/porting an old game, how original. They always do that, there's no innovation!" for video games. This is one of the only games I know of that captures that same feeling in a SINGLE game.



And we all know that the exactly-the-same non-tournament content was of such high quality, after all. Real fucking enjoyable.



You thought the game was monotonous before? How about when you've already done everything already? I want to note this as a Fuckup, because this is just a fundamentally horrible game design decision. Who at Capcom actually thought that doing everything over, even if they thought the game was passable or even decent, was something gamers would enjoy?

Most likely, it was done out of pure laziness to try and make an easy profit from a cheaply-produced game. Considering how this game did so badly, I want to call this a Fuckup for business decisions as well:

For background comparison's sake, MMBN3 was originally released on Dec. 6, 2002. It recieved a remade version, Black, on Mar. 28, 2003. These were released as MMBN3 White and Blue in the U.S., respectively. By the end of 2003, the original version had sold 535,836 units in Japan, while Black sold 168,946 units. Wikipedia only had info for Japan, okay?

Both versions of MMBN4 were released in Japan on Dec. 14, 2003. In Capcom's fiscal report for that year, the game sold 535,836 for that year. In half a month. People were anticipating the game like hell, obviously. It sold an additional 393,014 units over the course of 2004. So yes, half of December outsold the entire following year. Doubtlessly, some gamers had caught wind of how terrible the game was by then following the initial rush.

Now let's look at MMBN5. Released Dec. 9, 2004, Team ProtoMan sold 255,061 units by the end of the year, less than half of what MMBN4 had in even less time. Over 2005, Team ProtoMan sold 211,099 units total. Team Colonel, released On Feb. 24 2005, sold a mere 194,472 units total.

As you can see, after MMBN4, Capcom received an enormous cut in their sales. Tallying up the total sales of MMBN5 yields 660,632 units sold by the end of 2005. That's not a hell of a lot more than MMBN4 sold in the first month. MMBN4's total sales tally up to 928,850. Capcom sold roughly 33% less overall, on the game they put MORE effort into.

Capcom, my business education is limited to a high school Financial Management single-semester class, but something tells me you fucked yourselves on that one.

So MMBN4 was a colossal Fuckup in terms of game design and business.



Ugh. SparkMan. On the bright side, this means that the rest of the tournament will be new content. We haven't seen SparkMan before, the game will force AquaMan to lose so we can get NumberSoul, and so then comes NumberMan's scenario.



Terry's a sniveling asshole, sending Lan an Email under the guise of being a Jomon Electric employee offering free PET maintenance to tournament entrants.



Lan being the naive dumbass that he is, hands the PET right over. Thankfully, Terry doesn't outright wreck the thing, but he does set the annoying gimmick for the scenario.



Much like the N1, our chip folder has been overwritten with an Extra Folder! The -Folder is absolute crap.



While it has a very uniform code structure, the chips are pathetic. The highest damage is WideSword, it's about the same strength as the game's starting folder. And yes, it's the same folder every playthrough despite the viruses getting stronger. Screw you too, Capcom, you lazy fuckers.



Fuckup Tally: 204

No, no we can't.



Going on a hunt for someone who can repair this, we come across the head of Jomon Electric. Annoyingly, just talking to him won't trigger the cutscene, you have to talk to a random generic NPC in the area who was already there before first. Graugh.

Anyway, here's our gimmick, password assembly.



Fuckup Tally: 205

Terry dropped a paper conveniently with various password hints for each digit.



Fuckup Tally: 206

Most of them are simple. One's even just a simple math problem. But this one...Way to fucking go, Capcom. There are multiple hotdog related things, god damn it. The others are things like "How many trees are in this location" or something, the password and corresponding hints actually do change per playthrough. Go figure, they put in the extra effort to screw the player.



The saving grace of this is that you can brute force the password easily. The old man tells you how many digits you got right, so only testing them one at a time, you can easily figure out the whole thing in a few minutes. 7 digits have 10 possibilities each, so at max this takes 70 tries. Most of the digits, however, have hints that provide a rough idea, and the math problem is basically a freebie, so it takes around 35 tries total for me to figure out every digit.



A little while later, 9651345 is my password, and that's literally all there is to this dinky scenario.



Lan didn't know until now that Terry was his opponent, you see.



Fuckup Tally: 207

SparkMan's kind of a jerk too, in that he warps around slowly and avoids our row, while his main attack winds up being more difficult than it should be due to my own reflexes.



Reword this a bit, and you get something Dr. Regal might say.



Terry, as you can see, is just a bratty asshole.



And the grandson of the head of Jomon Electric.



Who has had enough of his crap and disowns the snot. Bwahaha.



Missed this one the first time!

Fuckup Tally: 208



Coming up next, bland monotony! Followed by boring shit! And afterwards, dull crap, with maybe a hint of terrible gameplay and hellishly stupid scenarios. They won't all be like this, Tournament 1's scenarios are all very basic. The other two are much more annoying.