Part 40: Someone say weaboo? I think someone said weeaboo.

Golly gee whiz, can you spot where this line was probably changed? Given what the series got away with earlier, the occasional swear, the entire Airplane Rap-Off, etc., you can see why one of my complaints with the series as it went on was that it seemed to be getting kiddier and kiddier. The whole Souls N' Darkness plot focus didn't help this.



Oh yes it will, for you. That super-duper game-pulverizer I've been building up to? I'll show you it in a few pictures.



Anyway, some time after MegaMan returned to normal, Baryl's called the first personal meeting of Team Colonel.



The first reason is that this is the first time all the operators have met in person. And look who's standing next to us?



How you doin', Pride? Credit to notoriousman and Maple Leaf for starting the first of many thread-contributed mugshot edits. SmugLanSP is the first, and you, archive readers, will soon wish it was the last.



Second item on the agenda is the introduction of a new teammate! And we didn't even have to go through a silly conflict to meet them.



Of all people! Sadly, no, we don't get any discounts at the shop. It does make a later plot-point fit more smoothly with the rest of the game, but...Mr. Higsby!?

On one hand, Team ProtoMan gets SearchMan and Raika returning from MMBN4: Red Sun. This is terrible because it involves MMBN4 being acknownledged, and also because Raika's a commie. However, it makes a bit more sense to call in backup in the form of a Spec Ops guy. It also causes a few other problems in a bit, but this whole upcoming chapter of the game is filled with those. I consider from here to the next Liberation Mission the most painful part of the game.



Higsby is pretty much the goon stand-in on Team Colonel. Basically, Baryl let him on the team because he somehow found out about it and pestered Baryl nonstop. Anyone remember those scenes from the Men in Black movies with Michael Jackson wanting to be an agent?



Higsby really doesn't fit in, does he? He's sort of the standout of Team Colonel thus far.



Yeah, Lan says it all, pretty much.



We have Baryl, Colonel, Dusk, ShadowMan, KnightMan, Dingo, and TomahawkMan here, Higsby. If your strategy is to try and absorb the excess testosterone they vent, I can't fault you for it.

And god damn it, you guys in the thread, don't you get any fucking ideas from this line.



Okay, let's give him credit for motivation. That's plenty admirable.





I'm not much of an anime fan, but good lord, you can feel the Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann vibes.



And here's an actual justification for Higsby being on the team besides being a chip supplier: raw analyzing power. NumberMan makes the NSA look like a bunch of high school students in a Computer Science I class.



Topic 3 is the upcoming liberation of EndArea5. Ugh, yes, EndArea has 5 areas and two Liberation Missions. Worth noting is that at pretty much every Dr. Regal cutaway, they reveal the next Darkloid, but I've purposely been cutting those sections out. EndArea is a hell to navigate, even with the in-game map function that DTDS has.

But as Baryl says, we'll have liberated the entire main internet once we clear this next one! Don't you go thinking this'll be the last LM, though, not by a long shot.



Lan asks why we're not doing a recon mission first, and the answer is simple: With NumberMan, we don't need one!

Yeah, that kind of makes more sense with SearchMan.



After that giant-ass Wall-O'-Cutscenes...seriously, this has all been continuous since the defeat of DarkMega. About time we get control back. We have Email, but who's it from?



ChaosUnison? Welcome to the ultimate gamebreaker in the entire Battle Network series! And honestly, considering that the game literally drops this into your lap and you don't have to do anything out of the way of the plot for this, I consider it one of the bigger gamebreakers ever. The sender is Anonymous, but I have a theory about who it is. That can wait for much later when that spoiler becomes relevant.



This has enabled us to use ChaosUnison. Remember way back in MMBN4's second playthrough against ShadeMan, I mentioned that Blue Moon players could Soul Unison with the DarkSword chips provided, and that was the only chance to do so? It had o effect in MMBN4, but in MMBN5, Capcom seems to have been either inspired by that, or it's a coincidence.

In any case, ChaosUnison is identical to DoubleSoul, but uses DarkChips instead to fuse. I did say that there were DarkChips for each chip affinity, after all, and 12 DarkChips = 6 ChaosUnisons, one per version of the game. The ChaosUnisons are all palette-swaps of the normal DoubleSouls, and function mostly identically, but there are some key differences:

1: They only last for one turn. Not even the SoulT+1 program in the NaviCust will increase this.



2: The DarkChip you sacrificed for the ChaosUnison becomes your fucking charge shot!

Now mind you, there's a drawback to this. Unlike normal charge shots, charging up a ChaosUnison DarkChip shot will result in the charge flashing between a purple "stable" and a green "unstable" state once fully charged. Firing with less than a full charge is just a normal buster shot.

Releasing the charge shot when the charge is stable, and MegaMan will use the DarkChip with no penalties whatsoever. Period. No taint, no max HP loss, nothing. Just raw fucking power.

An unstable charge shot, however, will unleash the darkness against you. In other words, MegaManDS appears on the enemy side of the field for about 10 seconds and starts flinging attacks at you. You can't kill him, just wait him out, so this can be very, very dangerous.

But still, this is absolutely not any sort of fair balance for the use of ChaosUnison. It's a massive payoff with a medium risk. And getting multiple successful charge shots off in a single turn is entirely doable, 2-3 is my norm. However, one easy way to make this even more broken is simply to pause the game while the charge shot shifts between green and purple. If it's purple, release the button and unpause the game. If it's green, keep holding the button, unpause and pause again until success. Presto, game fucking broken by 100% accurate on-demand no-penalty DarkChips!

And while this is slightly a spoiler, MegaManDS won't appear from a failed charge shot against the final boss, leaving you free to use ChaosUnison all you like against it. This is in stark contrast with MMBN4, in which you were unable to use DarkChips period against Duo.



One DarkChip, however, stands head and shoulders above the rest in terms of gamebreaking. DarkInvis, remember that? It turns you into MegaManDS for 10 seconds, who acts randomly, pulling P.A.s, MegaChips, and so on out the ass and obliterating things most of the time. You are completely invincible during this.

So ShadowChaos, the term used to refer to ShadowSoul ChaosUnison (they all follow that pattern), allows you to become an invincible killing machine that whips out your most-used heavy firepower at will, with no penalty at least once or twice when you get the timing down, and an infinite number of times if you use the pause trick. The only time that won't work is during a Liberation Mission due to the time limit, but even then.

Holy fuck.



I need some sort of awesome quote for this moment. This. This marks the point where I'm confident I could defeat any boss in the game with my current resources except one very special guy. But yeah, I need something that sums this up.

"I. AM. BATMAN!"

That'll do.



Feeling bad about the fact that TomahawkMan is basically overshadowed by NapalmMan completely during the Liberation Missions, I gave him a spot on the Party Battle System. Also, the Collect program is over here, and I still love the thing to death, but my NaviCust grid is just too small for it at this point. I need the second ExpandMemory.



Guuhgrh. EndArea3 and 4 are completely nightmarish to get around at all. Take a roller coaster schematic and run it through a fractal-generation program and you'll have a rough idea of how fucking convoluted this is. I recall the UnderNet actually being LESS annoying than EndArea to get around, though that may prove faulty in the future.

Also, this thing is a mock-up of GargoyleCastle in EndCity. Call this speculation, but I'm guessing that EndCity and DenCity are analogues to Tokyo and Kyoto, not necessarily respectively. I'm only basing that on how Den and End are simple anagrams, though. Anyway, GargCastle is also the primary center of network communications for Electopia.

Er, wasn't the Main System at SciLab the...Well, one or both of them is the Mother Computer of the game. I think GargCastle is the main transmission and communications center while SciLab does the actual hosting of servers and such.



WuNote: Another of the "fucking weird" category of viruses along with Drixols, the WuNote virus remains mostly motionless. It will move to another panel on its column before it attacks. The attack consists of creating three 1-HP bushes in the front column of MegaMan's side of the field, and the one on MegaMan's row will sprout a giant wooden nose Pinocchio-style to stab at him with. Unfortunately for the WuNote, damaging the bush as it sprouts that nose will damage the WuNote virus itself, much like a Viney and its vines from 3.

This screenshot also shows one of the only circumstances using DarkInvis to murder everything is not the ideal solution, as it would certainly wind up breaking the mystery data.



Giant honking security door?



Cue NumberMan and a bit of grammatical weirdness! MegaMan asks if we should wait for the others.



Nah, might as well show off! Colonel interrupts and admonishes NumberMan for being rash, however.



Team Colonel, ASSEMBLE! Yes, they all teleport in at once. Bypassing all of fucking EndArea at will. God damn it all.



What. No, NO! Higsby, WHY!? You were such a likable character! Now...this! All of the ensuing events over the next three updates can be blamed on this one fucking moment right here.



In a quirk of the retranslation, they left Ms. Mari's name untranslated for her full name, Ms. Mariko. I'll still call her Ms. Mari because 6 goes back to doing that. And yeah, this makes a hell of a lot more sense with Raika, who receives orders from a military higher-up that intrude on this.



Right, because Nebula totally doesn't know we're right outside their last stronghold on the internet, and will do nothing to fortify the position. Thankfully, Nebula is, as has been established, dumb as fucking hell, and so this is precisely true. It's like working with negative numbers, two bits of catastrophic stupidity wind up working out fine.



Colonel's...pissed. You do not want an angry Colonel. What's odd is that the others don't seem to hear Higsby's reason, though Lan brings it up later. That reason being that Ms. Mari's Navi is going out and she wants a bodyguard. Yeah, NumberMan. Even NumberMan objects to that one, but Higsby has a crush on Ms. Mari, so that takes priority!



See, they don't seem to know why. Although, KnightMan probably wouldn't object to protecting a lady and all. Given that Ms. Mari's first impression of Higsby was her tying her up and gagging her in the school supply closet while he was a WWW operator back in MMBN1, though...





I know, TomahawkMan, I know the feeling. Damn you, Ms. Mari! Damn you, Higsby! Damn you, NumberMan!



Once everyone leaves, however, Lan provides a startling degree of competence. When Yuuichiro was kidnapped, he was trying to show everybody something, remember that? Let's go try and find out what that was, it might provide a clue about what Nebula's after.

Although, Lan doesn't have any reason to suspect that Nebula is up to something besides the takeover of the internet, so that falls kind of flat.



No, Lan, making that face won't help you. It's not MMBN4 levels of characters knowing things they shouldn't or not knowing what they should, but really. Credit once again to Maple Leaf.



Riiight, the SciLab security. That's probably going to be trouble. Although the Main System had a security system a 3rd grader could work out easily, so how hard could it be?



How MegaMan sees Higsby is a mystery. See those shrubs and partition? The graphics are to scale now since MMBN4's graphic overhaul, so that thing's about as tall as Lan is.



Yeah, isn't he supposed to be guarding Ms. Mari's Navi?



Let's just forget this ever happened.



Why the main system isn't protected like this is anyone's guess. We'll have to hack the security!



I wonder who? Really, even Lan knows, geeze.



'Sup Higsby. Hey, that old DarkChip merchant guy there, you might, ah, wanna stay away from him.



See, more RPGs need to do this. The text just skips all the repetitive exposition in favor of getting to the agreement. This is a good thing.



"Security analysis", AKA "Hacking into one of the most heavily protected computers on the entire fucking planet", yeah. Higsby is a smidge surprised at the request.



Can't be a new haircut...I think it might be the plot weirdness that surrounds this chapter in general, yeah, that's probably it.



Higsby can hardly resist the appeal of going through with this, another reason why he's the goon surrogate. But even then, he's a tad cautious. This is even more extreme with Raika, who it should be remembered is an arm of the Sharo government. This is like giving a Russian lieutenant access to the Director of the CIA's computer, I think treason is even brought up specifically. Info, Walterion?



I'm pretty sure Lan's response is about the same in both versions, though. To be fair, considering they're both on Team Colonel, Lan's probably sure that Baryl could smooth anything over if people objected. This is important anti-Nebula activity, after all!



You have got to be shitting me. All that security for the computer the size of a small garage and the only thing is a single fucking .txt file!?



I suspect this may be a callback to the end of MMBN3, though that's unlikely given what the message really said as revealed by the ending of that game.



....Pet-handling instructions.



And that wording is pretty awkward. However, let's be fair, this had to be an absolute hell for the translators.



It's a coded message! Yeah, given this, you can see how this would be a nightmare to translate from language to language.



Well shit.



Higsby's goony glee is pleased all the same, despite the anticlimactic result.



A good point. Let's crack that code!



And here I thought I'd be clever and overlay the messages. Well, it turns out that due to uneven character spacing, that doesn't work, so we'll have to do it manually.

Box 1:

Line 1: 1, 8, 12
Line 2: 11, 12, 13
Line 3: 7, 14

Corresponds to:

DOG
HOU
SE

Box 2:

Line 1: 8, 9, 16
Line 2: 10, 13, 17
Line 3: 1

Corresponds to:

OUT
BAC
K

So, a doghouse out back?



For once, even younger me originally playing this game could figure out how to solve that word puzzle, if you could call it that. However, I was lazy, and figured "A family pet? Let's ask Lan's Mom." And indeed, Haruka mentions that Gow is an old dog Gramps Hikari had. Then I noticed the doghouse right there and checked it.



Bam, same result, much less work to get there.



I don't remember if I cut this from the Oran Island update or not, but yeah, there's an air conditioner at the mine.



Yup, there it is. Ah, Battle Network. Even with all the quality improvements in MMBN5, what's there to say to this? Yes, a random island in the middle of fucking nowhere that we just so happened to visit before, and by amazing coincidence we met Princess Pride at, just so happens to be a place where Dr. Tadashi Hikari, the creator of the goddamned internet, hid something of great importance. Let's all recall the events of MMBN3, when this guy has something hidden, it's something pretty fucking big.



We found some Order Points! Wait no, it's MemData.



More of Gow. Dogs do tend to love fish, yes. You might think this has something to do with the harbor, but nope, time for a new area.



Yeah, I cut most of the exposition screenshots out, but the GargoyleCastle's gargoyle is a giant ornamental pair of fish. So, we finally get an overworld shortcut to End Area, meaning many fewer slogs through EndArea.



It's also a tourist hub, making it especially annoying how we couldn't access it before. Recurring Fat Guy shows up, naturally, as overweight manchildren and Japanese tourism go hand-in-hand after all.



Replica katanas are the main souvenir, for crying out loud.



Whaddya know! Higsby again! Weirdly enough, Lan tries to thank him but only gets this in reply. Higsby has no idea why, but hey, why turn down a thanks?



Unfortunately, we can't get up to the Gargoyle because the castle is closed. Seems as though someone's screwing with the broadcast program thing we passed before in EndArea. Urgh. At least there's a nearby Jack-In point shortcut.



Aha, we've caught the perpetrator in the act!



Er, wait. Hey, NumberMan?



NumberMan jacks out immediately. But the broadcast program thing is just fine, so the only conclusion is that, well, NumberMan was repairing the problem. How helpful?



"Extremely menacing look", it says. Hah.



Thank the fuck for that. Well, Lan's on the roof of a national monument, no safety railings, no security stopping him, the usual.



The eye over here pops out and gives us an old key and another clue. Jesus Christ, it's like we're playing National Treasure: Electopia here.



How straightforward.