Overview

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Review

Release Date: 03.02.2004
Platform: Game Boy Advance
Developer: Capcom Co., Ltd.
Publisher: Capcom USA, Inc.

Reviewed by Ash Paulsen on 3.26.2004

Review Rating: 6/10

User Rating: 6/10

Late in 2001, Capcom took their beloved Blue Bomber to a new (at the time) platform: the Game Boy Advance. Creating a new Mega Man continuity and turning the boy in blue himself into the Net Navi (think a kind of Internet avatar that handles your essential real-life tasks for you, but has a soul and personality of its own) of spunky fifth-grader Lan Hikari, Capcom produced the first chapter in its Rockman EXE series, which would soon come to be known as the Mega Man Battle Network series here in the US.

About two and a half years and three chapters later (one for the GameCube, no less), here we are with Mega Man Battle Chip Challenge, the latest adventure starring Mega Man.EXE and Lan. This marks the series' first attempt at branching out into something other than action-RPG gameplay: namely, that of pure strategy. Make no mistake, folks; this is not your ordinary Battle Network game. Capcom's thrown the whole "action" and "total interactivity" parts out the window: what you have here is a game where you'll be doing nothing but creating attack plans, strategizing, and then watching the outcome of your strategies play out automatically. It's different, to be sure, and more than a little shocking, but it somehow manages to work. It doesn't amount to anything amazing, but it does work.

Those who have followed the Battle Network storyline know what's going on here: during the events of Mega Man Battle Network 3, a giant NetBattling tournament called the N1 Grand Prix was held. Lan and his rival Chaud (with his Net Navi Proto Man.EXE) made it to the finals and were all set for a final, decisive showdown, but terrorist organization WWW (World Three) hijacked the tournament at the last minute and used it to wreak havoc. Now, five months later, after Mega Man and Lan proceeded to uncover the WWW's latest plan and defeat the all-powerful Alpha, a new replacement tournament - dubbed the Battle Chip Grand Prix - has just been announced to see once and for all who the ultimate NetBattler is, and the infamously powerful duo of Mega Man and Lan have been invited to participate.

Lan's not the only one, though: several of Lan's friends and rivals, plus a couple of new faces, have been invited to participate as well, and you'll find that Battle Chip Challenge marks the first time in the series that you're able to play as a duo other than Mega Man/Lan. Namely, at the start of the game you can also choose to enter the tournament as Mayl (with Roll), Dex (with Guts Man), Chaud (with Proto Man), and newcomers Mary (with Ring), and Kai (with Turbo Man). Each of these six prime contenders has their own reasons for competing, and depending on who you choose you'll see the tournament play out through different eyes. Essentially, this means there are six storylines to see and you'll have to see the scenes in every one to get the entire picture and all the character development.

This isn't really as much as it sounds, however, because this particular installment in the series is extremely weak on story. Essentially, this is filler material to sate fans' appetites until Mega Man Battle Network 4 comes out later this year, and it shows. More importantly, this is Capcom's obvious way of milking as much extra money out of this franchise between major installments as they can.

This might be something I'd have an issue with, but much like the GameCube's Mega Man Network Transmission, this is quality filler and a complete game all on its own. Really, as far as this game goes, as long as players can deal with a pretty much nonexistent story, they'll find a lot to like here.

Battle Chip Challenge is all about gameplay, and what you'll find here is incredibly deep. Yes, it's true that battles play out automatically and it is also true that there's a random element to everything, but you have more than a little control over how your Navi performs in battle.

The very basis of the game is known as the Program Deck, and it's here that your entire performance in the tournament will be decided. You have nine slots to which you can assign Battle Chips from your Chip Folder (which can hold only 30 Chips, so choose which ones you want to draw from wisely). During battle, the game will randomly select a path through the Program Deck (known as the "Command Line") which decides what Chips your Navi will use in that round. There are three lines of slots in the deck (two slots in the first line, three in the second, and four in the third), which means you'll typically have three Chips chosen per round (but this can and will change, more on that later). As for the Chips themselves, there are 243 unique ones and they all have totally different effects, properties and stats. Some Chips are, of course, more powerful and useful than others. So why not just fill your Program Deck with nothing but powerful Chips as you acquire them? Because each Chip has assigned to it a megabyte (MB) capacity, and your Program Deck, likewise, has a maximum amount of MB it can hold. Reach the MB limit of your deck and you won't be able to put in any more Chips, and you'll be left with holes in your deck which will leave you open in battle. Obviously, more powerful Chips require more MB to load into your deck, so it's better to use a mix of Chips to achieve a balance of power and versatility. Or not. It's your decision, and you'll have to decide how you want to play and what works best for you.

Making things more complicated is the fact that each individual Chip has its own HP (hit point) value, meaning that your Chips can get damaged in battle. Typically, the Chips that are selected for use during a round are the ones that are open to damage; when a Chip runs out of HP, it gets deleted from the battle, meaning you can't use that Chip for the remainder of the fight. Essentially, the more Chips that get deleted the less your Navi has to work with during battle, making you more susceptible to enemy attacks. Complicating things further is the fact that both Chips and Navis - and even the panels you and your opponent are standing on - can all have elemental properties, and thus can heavily influence the net damage dealt to you and your opponent, so it's absolutely essential that your folder of Chips be well-balanced in a lot of ways, including elemental properties, HP values, and overall versatility (some Chips deal direct damage to the enemy Navi, some damage Chips in the opponent's deck, etc.). There's a whole lot to keep track of, which is where the heavy strategy element comes. Randomly decided or not, the Chips you have set up in your deck are essential to your success.

The one action-esque element of battles comes into play through two extra slots in the Program Deck, which are used for "slotting in." The Chips you have set in these slots can be slotted in (via the L and R buttons) during battle whenever you feel you need them, but they can only be slotted in once per battle and success isn't guaranteed (a bar at the bottom of the screen that fills gradually as battles progress indicates the probability that slot-ins will succeed). Slotting in the right Chip at the right time can totally change the tide of battle in (or against, if it's your opponent slotting in) your favor. (Take it from me - I know.)

The one other strategic element to battles I haven't touched on yet is the Navi Chip. The Navi Chip is the cornerstone of any Program Deck, and which one you have installed represents which Navi will do the actual fighting for you during battle (each Navi has a different max HP, so this is important), and also determines what extra attack you'll get at the end of each round of battle, once all Chips are used (this is the actual Navi's attack, and each Navi has a different attack skill). As you progress through the tournament you will win the Navi Chips of your opponents, and you'll find that these can often surpass the abilities and stats of the default Navi Chips (Mega Man, Proto Man, etc.). Which Navi you end up using in battle is obviously important to your overall success.

In a strange design decision, the "random" element is not only limited to battles. As you would expect, there are Chip shops from which you can buy new Chips between tournaments and battles. But unlike in previous installments in this series, you don't have a selection between them: in this game they come in packs of one or ten, and which Chips you get are entirely random. Usually the game is pretty nice about giving you increasingly good ones and non-repeats, but suffice it to say you will be wasting money more than a few times and nothing is guaranteed.

It is this element of the game that will really decide whether Battle Chip Challenge is right for you or not. This game is one that requires only limited input from the player; for the rest, the game takes your input and decides outcomes and events in an entirely automated fashion, and this is understandably something a lot of players won't really enjoy, especially after the action-intensive past games in the series. In other words, this game is all about thinking and not at all about actual gaming skills; most of the time you'll simply be holding the Game Boy watching the fruits of your mental labor (hopefully) come into play.

The rest of this review is totally extraneous as a result. Before you read on, decide whether or not the above paragraph sits well with you. If it does, you'll enjoy this game. If it doesn't, stay far, far away - I don't care how much of a fan you are, you will not find Battle Chip Challenge fun.

Now then, on to the other stuff. Graphics are your standard series fare - very colorful, well-animated, and detailed, though in this game's case, just a bit lazy. This is because most of the Navis (really all of them other than Mega Man, heh) were clearly never intended to use anything other than their own original attacks, and as such don't have animations accomodating much else than, well, those attacks. Sure, Mega Man's arm may morph into the sword he's about to use, but don't expect, say, Skull Man to do anything more than a generic animation while the sword appears in front of him. It doesn't really detract from anything too much and the flaw is an understandable one, but it does need to be noted that the only one who looks like he's totally animated enough for fighting in this tournament is, indeed, Mega Man. Otherwise, there are no complaints here.

Aurally, this game sounds vastly different from past installments but still outstandingly good. Capcom second-party Inticreates - who has chiefly developed the Mega Man Zero series - also handled Battle Chip Challenge, and the use of vastly different synths and musical effects shows. As a result, this game sounds a lot less "Game Boy-ish" in favor of exclusively electronic guitar-sounding synths, but it doesn't really matter. The actual songs here are incredibly catchy regardless, and I was kept entertained. Seeing as almost the entire game is spent battling, the main battle theme can get really reptitive, but I still never seemed to mind too much... the music is that catchy. Sound effects are entirely unchanged from what you've heard before (all of them are reused from past games in the series). They never really needed to be changed, however, and they work fine.

There's a lot of lasting appeal here. There are the usual (for this series) post-ending, diehard-experts-only intense challenges to take on, and - assuming you can find other people who are playing this - full support for NetBattling with your friends through a link cable. Aside from that, though, and actually extremely cool, is the fact that every Program Deck created in every copy of this game is assigned a code, and that these codes can be inputted in order to fight, theoretically, anyone in the code whose deck code you have. Program Deck websites have already sprouted up everywhere in the 'Net, so you can go online, get some deck codes, and take on the decks and Navis of people across the country. You can even go so far as to set up massive tournaments (up to 128 participants!) that include a combination of game-generated opponents, your friends' decks/Navis, and deck codes you obtained off the 'Net. So if you end up being one of those people who gets hugely obsessed with this game, there's a lot to keep you playing for an extremely - EXTREMELY - long time.

By now you know whether or not this game is for you, so I'll skip most of the closing formalities. Series fans who are into the plot, don't fret - having beaten it with Mega Man/Lan, I can say that there's not nearly enough story here for you to miss if you don't pick this one up - and you'll go into Battle Network 4 not having missed a thing (and besides, if you're really anal like me, game scripts'll be popping up on high-profile Mega Man sites soon, no doubt).

Whether or not it's because I'm a series fan (and Mega Man fan in general), I can honestly say I enjoyed Battle Chip Challenge a good bit, but not enough to play through it with more than one character, at least not for now. Perhaps if there were more story value to the game I'd be more inspired to play through it with other characters, but this one truly is for the gameplay whores out there. You already know whether or not you fall into the category of fans/gamers that will enjoy this title, so my job here is done. That's it. I am NOT writing any more. I... must... stop.

Except for one thing...

Bring on Battle Network 4! :D

Box art