Rockman.exe 4.5 Real Operation

When I first heard about Rockman.exe 4.5 I was a bit put off by the fact that it was never released in the US. I mean, it sucks we didn't get the cell phone games yeah, but you can't blame Capcom when the market for cell phone games here just isn't as big. What's their excuse for this game then? It's a Game Boy Advanced game for Christ's sake, the market is here for a Battle Network game! What were they thinking not releas... wait... this one has nothing to do with the other games? It's also really gimmicky? Hmm...

I can't come out and say that American's should be disappointed that this game never made it over here but then again I can't say we shouldn't be. I've played this game a little bit, and I like some of the concepts about it, but I can also see a lot of potential flaws in it. Since this game's in Japanese and pretty much requires you to do a lot of reading I can't get really far enough in the game to make a good judgment on it or not for sure. This won't be too much of a review because I can't get far enough into the game, but I'll write up what I know.

The concept behind Real Operation is kind of interesting. A standard Battle Network game you control Lan and MegaMan as an outside force, the standard position of the player. You move Lan around in the real world for the plot and MegaMan in the cyberworld for the game. Although we are controlling the both characters, we aren't really taking on the full role either of those characters are taking. As Lan, we come up with the chips we want to carry and use but we don't actually work with MegaMan in combat, we just control him. As MegaMan we move around in combat and hope that Lan will load up the chips we need at the right time.

This game serves the gameplay in half and now we take the full role of the Navi Operator while MegaMan fills plays his full role as the Navi. Basically MegaMan operates independantly of our behavior, trying to dodge and attack enemies on his own based on our advice and the chips we load him. Granted, the chips are chosen randomly out of our folder, but we can quickly shuffle them around to generally get the chips we want during combat when we want them. For this game, we interact with MegaMan instead of control him. We tell him which enemy we want his focus to be on and what distance he should keep himself, we tell him when to shoot and when to block but ultimately he makes the choice when to execute these maneuvers and we help out with battle chips.

So we come to the focus of this game. First, this isn't about Lan and MegaMan, in fact Lan's not in it at all. You play as MegaMan's operator (or whichever Navi you choose, among them Roll, GutsMan, NumberMan, ElecMan, Bass and much more). MegaMan will talk to you, ask you questions about yourself and try to form a relationship with you as his partner... or you know, as much a relationship as you can get with a video game character. That's the point of this game though, it's trying to give the player the feeling of an operator from the Battle Network games and the unique take on it is kind of cool, turning your Game Boy Advanced into the PET of the series. And since you can choose different Navi's to operate, each with their own personality and abilities, there are all kinds of opportunities for game play experiences that haven't been achieved before.

There are potential problems with this setup though. After all, we're relying on good scripting to keep MegaMan from jumping head first into enemy projectiles and even though your influence and strategy can minimize this, you can't always prevent it. It's just not as reliable as moving MegaMan yourself and while I can't say for sure that most combat would be difficult for this to come up, I can imagine the frustration a player would have when MegaMan stupidly gets himself deleted against a fight like Bass or something.

While there are no "real world" segments of this game, the rest of it is your typical Rockman.exe fare. Run through the Cyberworld, fight viruses, collect items and battle chips. You can unlock extra Navi's to play as and can only access certain areas with certain Navis. There are also a few minigames here and there to keep you busy, but I wouldn't know too much about those.

Aesthetics wise it looks like every Cyberworld in battle network, and I haven't gotten far enough to really judge the maps. What is cool though in the sound department are the remixes of the old characters themes into this game. Bass, Protoman, MetalMan, GutsMan all have themes you'll recognize, but I can't get far enough to hear any of them in game.

If Battle Network ever gets an anniversary type of collection, I hope they bother to translate this game as I think it has some potential to be a lot of fun, even if it's frustrating. Someone was working on a translation patch for American players and even got out a beta, but as far as I know the project is on hold, the beta patch is severely unfinished and it causes the damn game to crash some times. If this game never does make it stateside though hopefully a real effort will be made by fans to translate it. For now, all of us non-Japanese speaking gamers will have to wait.