In the first two parts, we analyzed the story and constraints of the developers. In this final part, we shall examine the other technical aspects and see how they did or did not contribute to the Battle Network series' fall from grace.
In absolute fairness, Battle Network 4 did do a lot that was sound technically, despite the limitations, and for that they receive credit. Regardless, what they did poorly just hammered more nails in the coffin. We shall examine these things below.
1. Boktai Crossover
Battle Network 4 was the first game to include a "guest" series crossover. The Boktai series by Capcom was lent to the developers for an in-universe crossover. Overall, it was mostly good, with one major flaw.
We got some new battle chips out of this, which were well-balanced and would be returning elements in the later games. The overall theming did not feel out of place either.
The thing that was glaring weakness is that this crossover highlighted a glaring lack of original story in BN4. The theme park arc is essentially a huge series of Boktai shoutouts but otherwise is just an excuse to give us a reason to fight Shademan, who is vampire themed and fits the Boktai canon by extension. Unfortunately, while this section was well written, if you removed the Boktai elements, it had almost no original writing to work with, and in a game where the story was already so thin it was appalling, this was just further proof that without extensive padding, this was a game largely without point or meaning.
2. Graphical Changes
This game heralded a major shift in the graphical direction of the series. Ever since the first Battle Network, they used a rough style that harkens back to the earliest days of the GBA being released. The first game in particular had a lot of rough edges.
Lan and his mother looked like they had a congenital liver defect. Higsby looked like a constipated Carrot Top. There was a huge lack of gradients and a horrible amount of overly poppy colors. The internet "overworld" was the worst of all, having no delineation between areas, meaning you could wind up in the Undernet not long after the second boss without realizing it. The unusual isometric 2.5D coupled with the rounded corners and samey texturing made it a nightmare to navigate without a guide.
The dungeons weren't much better, with some being tedious like the Waterworks and the Power Plant area was one that almost all first-timers would need a guide for.
The second and third games massively upgraded the worst of it and overall showed a lot of lessons learned. Areas were clearly defined in all places in the game. Character art massively improved across the board. The bizarre rounded corners and samey textures of the first game were exchanged for a squares and grids style layout in most areas that fit the intended aesthetic of a futuristic world.
This still had some problems. Some perspective issues were still common, with Megaman and other characters appearing incredibly elongated in some areas. Character animations like Lan running still looked pretty rough (with Lan having some odd frames that made his knees look like broken hinges)
Battle Network 4 is when they switched wholesale over to the art style favored by the then-running Battle Network anime. This proved a great decision.
All character art was standardized everywhere. Face and character animations were finally competent in all regards. The resized dimensions allowed for more to be shown onscreen without the weird perspective issues and camera angles that plagued the first three games.
The fourth game attempted a partial return to the rounded corners of the first game internet overworld, and unfortunately, the lack of dungeons and a lot of corner-cutting resulted in a lot of areas, both old and new, being oddly small and cut down if you removed the extraneous eye candy elements.
The fifth and sixth game returned to the squares and gridded patterns and restored the detail work the fourth game missed. It's also worth noting the fourth game was the last one with a tedious "gimmick" like the C-Slider, similar to compression pathways in MMBN3.
3. Sound and Music
Overall, this remained high quality. In fact, they even cleaned up the sound font in some ways since MMBN3. Not as many memorable tunes, but what we heard was quite good considering they were using the GBA's sound engine.
4. New Game Plus
Battle Network 4 was a game that finally had a proper "NG+" for the first time. All BN games are typical "one save file" affairs where you can save before the final boss, beat the game, then be sent back to before then with the ability to unlock new content before beating the game again.
Battle Network 4 had an actual "NG+", in which beating the game resulted in unlocking actual new content for each story run, up to a total of three times. While a good idea in theory, in practice, this was clearly a way to disguise the sheer amount of padding.
The tournaments were semi-randomized per playthrough, meaning you could only unlock up to two of a total of six Double Soul abilities per run, requiring three NG+ to acquire them all. While chip folders and upgrades for Megaman carried over between game runs, certain very tedious things like the C-Slider had to be acquired from scratch each run, which was quite annoying. Worse, since a lot of the tournament arcs were plotless filler, most runs could be rather dull.
Finally, they controversially made each run harder by unlocking harder and harder enemies to fight each completed game run. On top of this making so it was impossible to get all battle chips in one game run, it also further padded out one's playtime. Honestly, it was a chore to want to play more than once because of this for me and thus I opted to not do so after realizing this back in my younger years, and even now I'm loath to do this again.
Battle Network 5 modified this so it did NOT require NG+ and went back to the one save file with post-game unlocks after the final boss was beaten once. Battle Network 6 went further and removed the progressive difficulty of the fourth and fifth games and returned to the model used by the second and third games for enemy and difficulty progression.
While Battle Network 5 had a less tedious progressive difficulty, having it gated to the Liberation Missions and post-game content so I could complete my chip folder was still tedious. Battle Network 6 thankfully excised these elements entirely.
5. Stability
In this area, the ball was dropped hard. Given the short dev time and the fact they were having to make an entire game from scratch in a year with less help than before, it was inevitable we'd get stability issues.
Both Red Sun and Blue Moon had several typos, glitches, and some bugs so bad both emulators and real hardware had certain section be unplayable. It was so bad the game had to be reissued in a new revision to paper over the worst of this for the original Nintendo DS model.
While the Legacy Collection thankfully includes all these fixes and runs on optimized and refactored code that makes these games run well technically, it still makes going back to the originals via emulation or original hardware about as much fun as getting your hands smashed with hammers.
6. Conclusion
Technically, the horrid New Game Plus and abysmal stability issues did MMBN4 no favors, despite all the other things it did surprisingly well.
Overall, MMBN4 was a game doomed by unrealistic expectations forced on the developers, too short a developer time limit despite the issues they faced, and the fact corporate greed made it impossible to provide the care and polish such a game would deserve before it put a bullet in the skull of the series continuing much further.
Again, more is the pity if you ask me.
No comments:
Post a Comment