Part 33: Liberation Missions!
Hey, I always enjoy a battle, Colonel, but what was that even for?
Oh, of course, an arbitrary test of our skills. Because we all know that's really necessary by this point. What's worse is that this becomes a recurring theme for this game, people just LOVE an excuse to test Lan and MegaMan. Despite everything done so far. Do you really need another list?
Anyway, meet Colonel's operator Baryl. Why yes, he's the manliest character since Beardman. Stubble, jacket, unkempt and inexplicably blue hair. He really looks out of place, don't you think? Baryl's a likable character, actually. And yes, it's pronounced "barrel". He's quite fun when filled with monkeys.
Trusting him is a great idea.
With Yuuichiro kidnapped, he takes the role of Mr. Exposition for Team Colonel. In Team ProtoMan, we just get Chaud. Anyway, time to live up to the name of the game. The reason for this stupid test was because he's forming an elite team of Navis to free the internet from Nebula.
And the process of doing so forms the main gimmick of the game, Liberation Missions. Lan is at first reluctant for some reason, but Baryl goes on about how this is the best chance Lan has at saving his dad.
Well, he tries to say that, anyway. Yeah, I could easily keep the Fuckup Tally going into this game. There's almost as many errors, anyway, and I'm not even showing them all. A good example is the MarkCannon1 chip, the description for some reason says "DoomerEX locks onto enemy row". Sigh.
The next day arrives, and the bombshell gets dropped. For arbitrary reasons handwaved as Nebula Security, only one person can operate Navis in a Liberation Mission. Lan is very surprised to find this out, that means we'll be operating Colonel!
Baryl's response...
Marks the ONLY time in the whole fucking series...
That Lan gets due credit. Lan promptly shuts up and agrees to operating the team. The reason Baryl won't himself is because he's busy "commanding Officials at the national level", which is something of an excuse, I guess.
Proceeding to ACDC 2, there's still the problem of that door.
Not anymore! Yeah, Colonel and Baryl are a welcome respite from MMBN4. Likable, to the point, and very cool.
With that, it's time to begin the first of the game's many Liberation Missions. MegaMan will always ask for confirmation before beginning, and with good reason. These things are a serious investment of time, and you have limited saves to deter cheating.
I'll be explaining things as I go along. This is the first of the LMs, so it helpfully provides a tutorial that I can also use to explain how things work here. The LMs always open with a brief bit of banter between the team and the 'DarkLoid', which are what the Nebula Navis are referred to as.
Oh, and worth noting, all Liberation Missions use the same music. This is fine, because the Liberation Mission theme is one of the best tracks in the game.
The bulk of the LMs are these: DarkPanels. You 'liberate' these by fighting a battle and winning. Battles in Liberation Missions are significantly different from other battles, however, and I'll go over them in detail gradually rather than one big infodump.
Each member of the team gets one action. You can move around all you like, though DarkPanels block you. You can make the Navis take actions in any order you like, but once all the team has done an action, the game switches over to the DarkLoid Phase, which doesn't involve much yet.
You've no doubt noticed the bar in the top-right. Those are our Order Points, which let us use special Liberation Commands which can liberate multiple panels at once. Each Navi on the team gets its own command. In both versions, MegaMan gets the wimpy LongSword, while ProtoMan gets WideSword and Colonel gets Screen Divide, which functions the same as WideSword.
Aside from ProtoMan/Colonel, the version-specific Navis that will join us later all have unique commands.
As I mentioned, the battles have different rules here. First of all, you only get 3 turns before the end of the battle. The custom screen opens automatically once the CustomGauge is full, making LMs one of the few times in the series where the SlowGauge chip might be seriously worth considering. Not that that's available now anyway. If the 3 turns run out and everything isn't dead, you fail the liberation and the DarkPanel stays.
On the plus side, if you delete everything in one turn, you get a 1-Turn Liberation, which liberates every panel surrounding the Navi! These are essential to clearing LMs quickly.
DarkGuardians and DarkHoles are showcased next. The flaming dog-thing is one of three types of DarkGuardians, which are essentially minibosses. Counter-intuitively, it's actually easier to get a 1-Turn Liberate off of them, because they're a single opponent as opposed to a cluster of viruses.
DarkHoles could be considered 'control points' in LMs. They heal and spawn DarkGuardians, and in general have tougher fights than ordinary DarkPanels, usually a mix of viruses and a DarkGuardian. More importantly though, you must liberate every single DarkHole on the field before you can defeat the DarkLoid boss, as they are protected by special panels that cannot be liberated until all the DarkHoles are gone. Liberating a DarkHole also liberates all the DarkPanels around it, much like a 1-Turn Liberate, and will automatically destroy any DarkGuardian that particular DarkHole had spawned.
These panels with the squares in them can have several surprises hidden inside them. It could be a chip, some zenny, a trap, order points, etc. It isn't random, however.
Also, time to operate Colonel! As you can see, he has more HP than MegaMan, and this is also the first time in the main series we get to operate a Navi besides MegaMan.
In general, the team Navis are all better than MegaMan for now. Once I start racking up Souls (yes, they return), however, MegaMan is the better Navi. The main differences when operating another Navi aren't particularly significant, and don't require a vastly different playstyle.
It's a lot like how the Souls worked. The Navi will have a 'special attack' one-use chip, for example, Colonel's is the ColonelCannon, which deals 80 points of damage and functions identically to how you saw him using it in the battle with him. It comes in C code, which makes it hard to use with my folder. ProtoMan gets StepSword.
Additionally, the Navi will have its own unique charge shot, Colonel's is the ScreenDivide attack, which is a V-shaped slash centered on an enemy in the same row as Colonel. Dealing much more damage than MegaMan's charge shot, it's much more useful.
Certain Navis will also have other effects such as AirShoes, but Colonel and ProtoMan lack those.
There are those panels around the DarkLoid that can't be liberated until all the DarkHoles are gone. The DarkLoid phase usually involves the DarkGuardians moving around and attacking team Navis if they can, HP being restored to the DarkLoid/DarkGuardians that have been bruised up in battle, and if you're in range, the DarkLoids attacking team Navis with their field attack.
They can't do any of that though, so the DarkLoid Phase passes emptily. After that, I move MegaMan up to take on this particular DarkGuardian.
BigBrute: They move around randomly and periodically breathe a + of fire in front of themselves. They're easy, basic, and totally straightforward.
While I can get away with this now in the first, easy LM, this is suicidal in later ones. You see, depending on the position of the team Navi and the DarkPanels, the field conditions in the battle will change.
A DarkPanel with no adjacent DarkPanels will start with more room on the field, like an auto-AreaGrab.
Trying to liberate a DarkPanel while being flanked by another DarkPanel causes that effect to hit you instead, giving you only 2 columns. If you're surrounded like this?
You'll be flung into a very hectic battle with viruses on both sides of the field. Because L and R don't do anything in Liberation battles, as the turns end and bring up the chip selection screen automatically, those buttons will turn the Navi back and forth. These are very difficult fights, not only are most chips not going to hit both sides of the field, but it's a gigantic change of pace from the series up until now. I like them for that reason though, battles are a lot more active.
And we all know Hog Butcher is going to commit a war crime with this sort of thing when it's romhack time, oh boy!
Another empty DarkLoid Phase later, and these two panels get in the way. This is basically made for MegaMan's LongSword command, and you can see that the range matches that of the chip: two panels ahead.
Colonel chooses after that battle to tell us about Passing. Aside from Recovery chips, choosing to Pass and do nothing with the particular team Navi will restore a good chunk of their HP back to them.
And here's what I mentioned about limited saving before. LMs get very long as the game moves on, and you're definitely going to have to save and put the game down at some point in the middle of them. The thing is, to prevent savescumming, you can only save the game once per phase.
And these panels are BonusPanels! Unlike the item panels you saw before, BonusPanels are completely random. They have risks and rewards, but you'll never know what. Given that this one in particular is out of the way, I don't bother with it.
Another feature is the chance to team battle. If you have a team Navi who hasn't already taken an action close by when you start a battle, you'll get the option of fighting with them. I've always prioritized multiple actions over a single, potentially more successful action, however, so I can't comment on the mechanics of this much.
As you can see, I chose not to. I even got a 1-Turn Liberate with Colonel, which liberated an item panel that had Order Points inside. Moving in with MegaMan, I liberated that DarkHole as well, and because there are only two of those in this LM...
BlizzardMan is now vulnerable to attack. After this message, those panels turn into regular DarkPanels. Plus, I can access that Bonus Panel near the DarkHole as well.
I don't want to take on BlizzardMan while surrounded, so ScreenDivide time. That Bonus Panel gave me even more Order Points, so it's not like I need to worry about running out!
After that, time to take on BlizzardMan. The same 3-turn limit applies to DarkLoid battles as well, much to my annoyance. I dislike this about Liberation Missions very much, because it makes the bosses pathetically easy. Why? Because you can send the entire team of Navis after the DarkLoid, and the DarkLoids only recover HP during the DarkLoid Phase (how much gets recovered depends on how many DarkPanels surround them), so I can basically be as reckless as I want, and my folder gets restored for each Navi.
Seriously, I just stop caring period about avoiding damage. DarkLoid battles are ridiculously easy.
Which leads to this, deletion in Liberation Missions. If a Navi runs out of HP, they're paralyzed for several turns before they recover. If the whole team gets locked up like that, you lose the Liberation Mission.
And that's that! Liberation Missions in a nutshell. They all have a target number of phases to clear them in. If I had more firepower, I could have deleted BlizzardMan in one phase with MegaMan instead of having to try again, you can see the whole sequence of events in the video.
That said, for going under par, I get the BlizzardMan B chip as a reward. Had I completed the LM a turn earlier, I would have received the BlizManSP B chip instead.
You can take on the DarkLoid Navis much like regular Navi Ghosts in set encounters and then random encounters, but not until nearly the end of the game. So doing well in Liberation Missions will be the only way to get their NaviChips for a long time.
ACDC Area is free! Cut to Regal, who doesn't really say anything of note except that the occupation of the internet is only a small part of the master plan.
Well I sure hope so, given how stupid the occupation is. Just unplugging the servers would be enough to thwart the whole thing, followed by an offline cleaning, then restoring. It's Dr. Regal though, and he's every bit as retarded as he was back in MMBN4.
Cut to the Idiot Squad debating what to do without their PETs. I mentioned in 4 that the graphics change results in deformed-looking mugshots. Combined with the expressions that DTDS gives people, there are times where the mugshots look like something I concocted in MSPaint!
Dex looks like a plastic toy. Specifically, a plastic toy after it's been subjected to the searing ray of solar death courtesy of a magnifying glass and too much free time. I'm getting 'melting plastic army men' vibes.
They decide to get their minds off of lacking their useless Navis by...going...
S-someplace...un...related...to the net?
What is this blasphemy!? Unrelated to the internet? You're joking, right? Right, haha? They take off to get ready for the beach, the apparent destination.
Baryl interrupts us with a welcome dose of sanity and normality. Oh thank god, Baryl, they were talking about strange, scary things like "going outside" and "physical activity" and, and...oh I can't bear it!
So, being called to SciLab, we get something special, and its exclusive to DTDS. This does not happen in the GBA versions of the game. What is it?
A completely absurd game-breaker handed to us on a silver platter!
This is the Party Battle System. You can change to copies of team Navis at any time during battle. You only get a Game Over if MegaMan is deleted. Yup. It's basically giving me up to 3 Navis to use in battle at my leisure, letting me be as reckless as I want due to that mountain of HP I'll have backing me up.
The only downsides are that I'll need to return to Lan's homepage if the copy data gets deleted before I can use it again, and that I can only change Navis three times per battle. It's still ridiculous.
Although, it can't be used in places with 'bad electrical surges', or in other words, dungeons and Liberation Missions. You'd be surprised how handy it winds up being anyway.
Back on track, Baryl sends us to patrol ACDC Area and see how the restoration is going, as well as see if any Nebula agents are causing trouble.
More importantly, we have gender confirmation for the Fat NPC. Yes, the obese NPC with the lipstick and pink shirt is male. God, why did they make you a recurring minor character!?
So, the Party Battle system also creates a transparent image of the Navis we have with us at the time. We can change who to bring along with us at Lan's homepage, but since Colonel's the only option and you can't have duplicates, all we have is Colonel.
These images will be shut off 'whenever the system decides they are not needed', as the game puts it. Translation: They don't show up in cutscenes.
Oh, yeah. These golden Mr. Progs (which is, weirdly, what they've begun calling Programs now) will allow you to replay Liberation Missions at any time. You keep your folder, so they'll be substantially easier if you revisit them later on in the game, allowing for easy rewards.
The last thing to note about the Party Battle System is that if you get Full Synchro status and then switch Navis, you'll activate a decently strong combination attack that varies depending on the Navis involved.
The patrol goes off smoothly, so we're free to enjoy ourselves with our beloved NPC friends. Fuck. Also, Higsby's still isn't open yet. Fuck!
Yeah, a trip to a deserted island is the only way to get away from the internet. Go figure. It used to be a coal mine, but after demand for coal dried up, this being a vaguely and debatably utopian future where fossil fuels are a thing of the past, it's abandoned now.
Once we arrive, courtesy of Yai's private boat, Dex begins talking about changing into a swimsuit without having to get naked.
According to various goons in the thread, this entire situation is recycled almost word-for-word in Starforce.
It apparently involves wearing underpants, the swimsuit, and then normal pants in layers. Take off the pants, and then somehow contort in ways that would make a yoga instructor proud to get the underpants off from under the swimsuit. Dex gives it a shot as the girls arrive.
Not even 3 seconds later, all is well, though. Cue "fun at the beach" montage.
And then it's time for fishing! It's very reminiscent of Okuden from way back in MMBN2. God, that was back in July. Here we are in November, still going at this series. Much like Okuden, it's pixel hunt time.
Or not. We're interrupted by Baryl. Gosh, isn't it just so convenient that the network of an old abandoned coal-mining island just so happens to be one of the major sets of areas for the game?
Even for this series, this is contrived as hell!
We meet up with Colonel in Oran Area 2. Nebula has, shockingly, actually beefed up security quite a bit after the liberation of ACDC Area.
Yeah. Ehehehe. I freely admit that watching those gigantic cannons blast away at MegaMan is very entertaining. We have no choice but to retreat. In Team ProtoMan, this makes very little sense due to ProtoMan's StepSword ability and infamous knack for teleporting behind things to slash them, or pulling off the usual slash-right-through-something technique.
Which leaves us free to go back to enjoying our friends. The worm and bamboo are easy, but the FishLine...well. Look closely, and you can make out the 13 pixels of Lan's hair or so!
Blah blah stupid fishing cutscenes that have no point blah. More importantly, after that's over with, we get the NaviCust back! Compression codes make a return in this game, thankfully, but other than that there's no difference from how it worked in MMBN4.
And then it's time to go exploring. The OldMine is a mess of tunnels and old caves, so naturally, in we go.
Onwards!
Downwards!
Ah, god, I just love seeing those three suffer.
Anyway, this now turns into a rescue mission. Dex keeps in contact via the SubPet he has, but the interior of the mine must be navigated by Lan alone. It's a deep, dingy, dark place, and surely the rock walls on all sides are a big change in scenery, but it's easily done.
Arriving at the very bottom, we hear a voice. Someone's here!
Making a return from MMBN2, it's Princess Pride! Operating a gigantic assfuck tunnel boring drill, no less. Dex, Mayl, and Yai are trapped in the room below it!
Pride is on our side, this time. She's reformed after that whole Gospel thing, and really, mutilating Dex, Mayl, and Yai with that drill is just about the best gift an NPC could ever give. I forgive you and welcome you with open arms, Pride.
Well, sadly, that isn't the case. Oran Island has vast reserves of
Anyway, she'd stop the drill, but the magnetism has driven KnightMan berserk.
Only in MMBN could a manual override shutdown consist of 4 different computer networks that need to be navigated in order to activate the emergency switches...
Dungeon time.