GBA · Classic Vidya Review
Mega Man Battle Network
Completed 12 May 2026
Cover Art
Ending Screen
- Like the MMBN2 review, this is only a 1-star completion; it doesn’t have any of the postgame stuff like the Bass fight
- That being said, the main game sure does have some PROBLEMS.
- The overworld is small and boring and full of empty space
- The internet-world all looks the exact same and is not fun to explore at all, there is no payoff for curiosity. It’s just a big pointless maze.
- Playing as Lan and finding hidden places to jack-in is probably the coolest part, because you never know what object in the overworld has a jack-in port. When you go insid they all look distinctive and provide the opportunity to collect chips that you may not have got elsewhere
- In my MMBN2 review, I complained about this game being too simplistic, even though I hadn’t ever finished it before. Now I have finished it and that opinion has not changed at all. It never ramps up and becomes more complicated.
- The simplicity cuts both ways even: the enemies have very little variety, and as a result your own chips have very little variety. Seriously you can cruise through pretty much the entire game once you can stack your folder with DynaWave3
- In RPG terms, this game does have ‘dungeons,’ with boss fights at the end, but said dungeons could have used a lot more work. There are very few puzzles which are rewarding and make you feel smart, they’re pretty much all tedious and make you feel like you’ve wasted a bunch of time. The power plant / battery puzzles are notorious for this and while it’s true they are the worst in the game, the other dungeons aren’t THAT much better. What in the hell kind of puzzle is “guess a number between 0 and 99”??
- However, for all the problems I’m complaining about here, let us not forget that gameplay conquers all. Truly excellent gameplay can paper over SO many problems, that is the entire point of a video game. And you can tell (and I think Capcom could tell) that they had a real diamond on their hands in terms of gameplay design.
- The battle system is incredible; there is nothing really like it, and it is a complete solution to the usual JRPG “press A to win” problem. Yes you can grind to a degree, but there’s not that much of a reward for it; the game never stops asking you to have some skill when it comes to combat. Yeah the enemies are simplistic but that can be fixed, which they did in later installments. The thing that cannot be fixed is bad systems. The game has good bones, you could see it from this very first installment, Capcom knew it, and refined it and wrung all they could out of it over years of making new games in the series.
- For that reason, this game is sort of ‘worth it’ to play as a reference point for all that came after. Even the parts that will make you mad are not necessarily THAT onerous because the game isn’t very long. My 22hr time was a fairly slow pace even.