Mega Man Battle Network 5

At one point in time I didn't ever think there was a way you could screw up Battle Network. 4 had some really annoying points to it sure, but only it only got really bad when you had to push yourself past the end game to the post end game. Yes, Battle Network 4.5 had some real potential to be painful, but I think it had some cool ideas in it as well. I just didn't think there was a way to make the game out right horrible.

Certainly you could reduce its quality amongst the series, screw up balancing, give out some really crummy chips and program advances, write a really bad story... well I guess bad stories are par for the course in Battle Network anyway. Battle Network 5 proved me wrong however, and it showed me you can easily fuck up a Battle Network game. All it takes is to have a boring situation take way to fucking long. On paper Battle Network 5 doesn't even sound like it would be that bad and has a lot of ideas that have merit but end up being really fucking boring. Battle Network 4 seemed unaware of how tedious it was making the game, Battle Network 5 on the other hand just revels in it.

There are three versions of this game. The Game Boy advance games contain slightly different stories and characters while the DS offers both versions of the game with new music a few voice clips and a few other features that you'll probably discover as this is the only version available on the market these days.

Story
Lan leads a pretty modest life for someone who literally saved the world last game. One day Lan and his friends get called down to Sci Lab to see something Lan's father had been working on when Nebula operatives attack the Lab with knock out gas. They kidnap Lan's father Yuichiro and Roll, GutsMan and Glyde, Lan's friends Navis. They would have taken MegaMan, had Lan not luckily been an inconvenient ten steps away from them all.

Anyway Dr. Regal is alive and has a new scheme to take over the world using Yuichiro's knowledge of his father's work. Meanwhile Lan gets an E-mail telling him to head down to Sci Lab about his father. There he sees Chaud... or actually he sees Baryl... or actually it depends on which version you have but essentially for either game you switch the roles of Baryl and Chaud when needed. Since Baryl is the new guy though and plays a pretty big part in Battle Network 6 I think Team Colonel is the canon version but it doesn't matter either way.

Chaud/Colonel are building a team to combat Nebula and want Lan to join because complex military operations are always best suited for children. Nebula has completely fucked up the internet and covered it with Darkloid excrement, and Lan will be playing cop/janitor in cleaning it up. Chaud/Baryl give Lan ProtoMan/Colonel and Lan goes out and takes part in what will become a very overplayed, very long, and very boring minigame that will take up the most of the game.

During the game of course we have the interchangable scenario chapters where Lan ends up recruiting new members to his team based on which ever version you're playing. Princess Pride/KnightMan, Dark Miyabi/ShadowMan, Ding/TomahawkMan, Higsby/NumberMan and Ribitta/ToadMan for team Colonel, and Tesla Magnus/MagnetMan, Charlie Airstar/GyroMan, Fyrefox/NapalmMan, Raika/SearchMan and Jasmine/Meddy for team Protoman. Since Lan's friends Navi's are kidnapped, don't expect jack shit from them.

At some point during the story MegaMan gets kidnapped and corrupted by Nebula's dark chips and his team saves him and brings him back. Then ProtoMan/Colonel get kidnapped and corrupted to and you do the same thing to them. These are really the only two interesting scenarios and seeing as how they are almost carbon copies of each other with roles reversed, they could have been better.

Eventually we find out about Dr. Hikari and Dr. Wily's old research on something called SoulNet which would link all human's hearts and minds together, but they never completed their research. Regal's plan is to finish SoulNet, link all human minds together, then introduce a virus named Nebula Grey into the mix to fuck everyone up basically and create a world of chaos because Regal is evil... I guess cause someone's gotta be the bad guy?

MegaMan defeats Nebula Grey with "The Power of Friendship" TM and SoulNet goes down. Regal's volcano base starts to blow up and everyone runs out except Yuichiro and Regal, and Yuichiro tells Regal to attone for his crimes and work for a better world blah blah blah, and he passes out. Then Dr. Wily shows up (he's Regal's Daddy) and he overloads SoulNet so it'll fuck up Regal's brain so he won't remember the past ten years of his evil crimes. Wily is doing this because he doesn't want Regal to follow in his footsteps as a criminal mastermind? Did he do it as a loving father or just because he hates the competition?

Anyway Lan get's his friends PET's back and Baryl (not Chaud, we know who Chaud is) breaks up the team and heads to parts unknown. Dr. Regal gets a job at Sci Lab and reforms from his evil ways. Yuichiro talks about how the new generation will have to build strong bonds and build world peace and that the new generation is in good hands and blah blah blah philosophical crap roll credits.

Post Game

Nebula may be gone but their shit is still floating around the net. Lan reassembles the team to clean up the rest of it. Afterwords he heads to the furthest reaches of Nebula's network to find a mysterious portal Guess who comes out? What's up Bass? You fight Bass, leave and come back, then you can fight a powered up Nebula Grey, then leave and come back and you can fight MegaMan's dark soul powered up, then leave and come back again to fight Bass' final form. Doing this is such an incredible pain in the ass because you have to go through a timed boss gauntlet each time, hence why I didn't feel like getting a screenshot of Bass this go round because... god fuck that shit.

Aesthetics
I suppose I'm grading two different games here really. We've got the DS enhanced version and the regular versions. We'll get the regular games out of the way first.

There hasn't been a lot of growth in this series graphics and the internet stages are pretty dull in color for the most part. The real world locations feel a lot smaller than the game would try to pretend they are and I don't find them as interesting as the last game.

We got a whole host of new characters and Double Souls to look at for each version which are pretty interesting. Shadow Soul is one of the few I use, and the screenshot of it shows how cool MegaMan looks in it.

The DS version doesn't add much in the way of graphical enhancements. We get a refined GUI with MegaMan rendered out for us on the bottom screen and a few interesting animations and still shots in the introduction but that's about it. The bulk of the games graphics are just ported straight over from the GBA games.

Sound
Pretty decent sound track but nothing that blows me away. I still think they should have stuck to the original theme through out the series. The DS version features a number of remixed tracks with higher sound quality and they sound much better there. It also has a few voice samples that get repeated until you want to strangle Lan but they sound interesting the first time you hear them. The voice actors they got sound close to the same as the NT Warrior North American voice actors but it isn't them. Be warned though if you've never seen NT Warrior (and who could blame you for not watching it) you'll be in for a bit of a shock to learn how... um... distinct Lan's voice is for an 11 year old. It's not like it's a bad voice like say Mega Man 8, but it'll probably grate on your nerves after hearing "JACK IN!" for the one millionth time.

Design
So we've got Double Soul which works exactly the same way it did last time. MegaMan takes the form of another NetNavi to have some enhanced powers. Unlike Mega Man classic's universe however, not ever character besides MegaMan is a villain, so the next logical step if you think about it is to let the player try out some other Navi's. Well that's not a bad idea at all!

But hey, why stop there? Why not add a whole new minigame that's kind of like a strategy game where we can use a team of these Navi's. Ok, why not? Now let's take our strategy game, add some ludicrous restrictions to it, make each segment of it take fucking forever, and have the player do it about 900 times!

You now have what is wrong with Battle Network 5 in a nutshell. There are other stuff I could get on about this game like how the dungeons are some of the most annoying in the series and how you have to run through some of them multiple times, I could get into how most of the double souls are useless and some of your Navi team mates are even more useless, I could bring up some of the balancing issues that went into this game absolutely killing most program advance folders, but no, what is wrong with this game are these pain in the ass Liberation Missions.

Basically you have a grid of infected tiles. To remove the infection you have to clear a virus battle in 3 rounds with the terrain altered depending on how you've setup the grid. With some characters, this is a cake walk, with others, such as NumberMan, it's an incredible pain in the ass. And since the game wants you to be pretty damn quick about it to get some of the special chips for beating the stage in a certain number of turns, often times the terrain is not in your favor. There are few things more frustrating than having to take down Dominerds on cracked tiles in 3 turns when MegaMan is the only one you can give air shoes. Some of these segments are really fucking long too, and just drag the game on way to long.

This game loves it's tedium and even the post game content has it's share of these places which can take up to an hour or so to clear, and if you're really unlucky, much longer. Even if you clear these things once and for all the tedium isn't over if you want to fight Bass, MegaMan DS or Nebula Grey 2.0. Doing this requires a timed boss rush fight you must do every time you want to fight any of these bosses, and the game damn near requires you to be perfect to do any of that.

On top of this, we have new battle chip rules. You may only perform a program advance once per battle. No more stocking up on Life Swords and the like so adjust your folder building techniques. If you look past all of this tedium the game hasn't changed in any other significant way and you might enjoy it, but I didn't have any fun with this one.

Choosing between the two games just leaves you with a different team mostly with the story substituting characters where appropriate. Their motivations may slightly change to reflect their character, but their actions will stay the same. I personally found Team Colonel's giga chips and Double Souls more useful however. You're probably going to pick up the DS version which has both games, but I recommend going through Team Colonel's adventure over Team Protoman's.

Playability
The one program advance per battle rule is a killer, but I want to clarify that it is one program advance of a certain type. So for instance you could do Life Sword once in battle and then follow it up with Zeta Cannon in the same battle, but you could not perform Life Sword twice in a single battle.

More than ever though this game wants you to set strategies for different situations and build folders for each one. You'll want a Navi fighting folder, a virus busting folder and probably a Liberation Mission folder.

This game is definitely on the easy side as far as these games are concerned though.

Extras

• Want some easy zenny? Cosmoman's Liberation mission has 1800 Zenny right at the start of it. Just grab it and restart the mission over and over.
• Nebula Grey's strategy involves him wrecking your ability to move around by destroying the ground below you. Give yourself some Airshoes however and the guys a cake walk. Shadow Soul works wonders on him as well.
• One of my general strategies for Battle Network is to set an Invis* chip as my standard chip. That way it'll come up every fight and you'll be safe while you get your bearings.
• Area Steal plus Airhockey fucks bosses up, except for Nebula Grey.
• You can save during a Liberation mission and they don't have a time limit so don't torture yourself playing them for to long like I did.

Battle Network 5 is easily the worst of the series because it slowly drains all the fun out of the game. I like the combat engine as much as anyone but it doesn't prop the game up by itself and the more restrictions you put on it the harder it is to enjoy it. Battle Network 5 is a game that can bore you quickly and then asks you to stick around much longer than you want to be there. The DS version has bells and whistles attached, but it's still the same boring game. You're not missing anything by skipping this one. Do not miss out on Battle Network 6 though!

Playthroughs
N/A