As of right now, Mega Man Battle Network 3 is the most recently added game to my Top 100 list. Despite me being a die-hard fan of its spiritual successor, One Step From Eden, it took me quite a bit to get into the Battle Network series. I tried the first game a little over a year ago but fell off it for a number of reasons, and I only decided to give the series another shot a few months ago. I haven't even gotten around to play 4-6 yet, so it says a lot about how much of an impact Battle Network 3 made on me that it managed to shoot up my list so quickly.
Being the end of a trilogy, before we can talk about Mega Man Battle Network 3, we need to talk about the first two games and the series as a whole. Mega Man Battle Network is one of many Mega Man subseries, and it aimed to reboot the franchise as a Pokemon-esque RPG while maintaining the spirit of the series. It's a very tough ask, but I think Capcom pulled it off really well. All of the redesigned Robot Masters (now called Navis) including Mega Man and Roll themselves look both fresh and accurate, and the more the series went on, the more I was excited to see how certain characters and plot-points would get contextualized under the Battle Network canon. While the first game was a bit of a shaky start with confusing level design, easy encounters, and some weird design decisions, it still showed the potential of the Battle Network concept with a unique and fun real-time battle system, a charming story with a pretty impactful endgame plot twist, and a banging soundtrack by Akari Kaida. Battle Network 2 refined the formula by improving on the overworld design and the battle system, adding a beefier post-game, and introducing an absolutely wild story that shamelessly tossed the cast of the first game into several terrorist plots, though it also had my favorite antagonist of the three. BN2 still had its issues like a particularly drawn-out and unfun scenario near the end, but it was already a massive improvement.
But Battle Network 3 is the game that perfects the formula on pretty much every level, starting with the story. Battle Network 3 may not have the absolutely bonkers setpieces that its predecessor haves, but it makes up for that with way stronger overall writing. The main plot may just be about the return of the WWW, the main villains of the first Battle Network game, but all of the scenarios the cast gets into do a fantastic job at balancing fun hijinks, compelling drama, and some much-needed fleshing out of the cast. The first half follows a pretty fun tournament arc to keep the game fun and engaging while the plot slowly builds, while the second half turns into pure nonstop drama befitting the end of a trilogy.
But the strongest element of Battle Network 3 is its character work, which took a massive step up over the last two games. Many of the major characters beyond just Lan like can feel a tad sidelined for stretches of the last two games, but in BN3, they get a lot more time to shine, from the introduction of Dex's little brother to Chaud's subplot about his distant father to Yai's shocking injury halfway through the game. But the best character writing in BN3 actually has to go to Lan himself, who practically gets dissected over the course of the game. Battle Network 3 is entirely dedicated to digging into Lan as a character to see what makes him tick as he struggles to grapple with what it means to be a hero throughout the first two thirds, before making a pretty crushing mistake that puts him on an engaging path to redemption. It all culminates in an emotionally heartwrenching finale that ties up Lan and Mega Man's relationship so well that it could've easily been a perfect series ender on its own.
But even with all that great stuff, I didn't even get into my favorite part of Battle Network 3: The hospital scenario. It's right after the tournament arc, and Lan's friend group is fracturing. Yai is in the hospital from that aforementioned injury, and Dex spontaneously springs on everyone that he's moving out. That moving out scene is surprisingly emotional and realistic because of how sudden it is, and it leaves Lan pretty isolated for a bit. However, while visiting Yai at the hospital, he meets a wheelchair-ridden kid named Mamoru who he quickly befriends. Lan soon learns that Mamoru has the same heart condition that his now dead brother had which causes him to encourage Mamoru to get a surgery that could save his life. However, right at the start of the surgery, a WWW operative attacks the hospital, so not only do you have to stop the WWW once again, but your new friend's life is now on the line. BN3 does an incredible job at getting you attached to Mamoru making for one of the most emotionally investing and tense scenarios I've played in a video game. And on top of that, Mamoru's character arc gets paid off incredibly well by the end of the game. The sheer depth, maturity, and effort put into the writing of Mamoru's story is miles ahead of anything the series has done prior and it does so much to elevate Battle Network 3 on a narrative level.
And I haven't even gotten into the gameplay yet! Battle Network is an RPG set across the real and virtual worlds. In the real world, you play as Lan as you follow the story, chat with the NPCs, and do sidequests. The virtual world is where the real action happens though, as you play as Mega Man and explore the internet, fight viruses, and stop WWW operatives. The overworld exploration in this game is the best it's ever been, with the real world settings being vaster and more fun to explore and the virtual world settings being more streamlined than ever before, thanks to the addition of colored paths marking where the important landmarks are. Compared to the mazelike internet of the first game where everything had the same backgrounds, Battle Network 3 is a massive improvement and boasts which is easily the best internet so far. The dungeons you visit are also big steps up due to how much cleaner and more linear they are. Compared to the first two games where I felt I often needed a guide for the dungeons, BN3's dungeons are more straight-forward while still being inventive and fun, with my personal favorite being the hysterical zoo dungeon where you blow up animal-themed viruses in a variety of silly ways.
Battle Network's battle system was always incredibly fresh and fun, with a nice blend of real-time shooting action and deck-building strategy. The second game already improved the formula with the better chip adding functionality, addition of environmental hazards, escape button, multiple folders, the introduction of styles, and * chips, but BN3 takes even more steps up in refining all the remaining quirks. Battle Network 2 is a very unbalanced game with a chip distribution that lets you break up super easily super early on, but Battle Network 3 has a much more gradual difficulty curve and feels far less easy to crack. There's more variety in the environmental hazards, the bosses require a bit more strategy, there are some fun bits where you're forced to use a set folder of chips, everything just feels more thoughtful and developed in BN3.
But Battle Network 3's biggest addition has to be the Navi Customizer, an incredibly unique and fun take on character upgrades. In the last two games, you'd find upgrades scattered around that you could use to boost one of Mega Man's stats, pretty simple stuff. In this game, you get parts that you can slot onto a board, ala Resident Evil 4's inventory system. However, there are also a bunch of rules you need to follow on where you can put each piece, turning allocating your upgrades into a surprisingly engaging puzzle. Eventually, you even get codes that you can input to bypass certain rules, or you can just break them and deal with Mega Man glitching out every once in a while. There really is a lot of freedom in how you can organize the NaviCust and finding a way to fill up the board with upgrades feels incredibly satisfying to do. Genuinely a brilliant piece of game design.
Battle Network 3 is also an absolutely massive game, not only boasting the longest campaign of the trilogy but packing in a ton of fun side content. Beyond simply getting all of the chips, you can take on the 25 job requests the game offers, explore the overworld for all the powerups and parts, do a bunch of boss time trials, capture and breed a bunch of types of viruses, gamble and win big, battle your friends, and visit a pretty massive and brutally tough secret area in the game's impressively beefy postgame. Battle Network 3 is a game you can easily sink tons of hours into even beyond beating the main campaign, and it's admirable how fun a lot of that side content is.
In terms of presentation, Battle Network 3 is a typically pretty GBA game, with clean isometric visuals, colorful and expressive visuals, impactful battle effects, and some sick backgrounds in the internet. Granted, I can't give BN3 too much credit since a lot of its assets are taken from the first game, but I can still say that it generally looks pretty great. The soundtrack, as you'd expect from a Mega Man game, is also fantastic. The Battle Network series as a whole has such a classic GBA techno sound to it and 3 has what is probably the strong soundtrack of them all, boasting a ton of the best tracks in the franchise such as Final Transmission, Navi Customizer, Shooting Enemy, and Great Battlers.
Overall, Battle Network 3 is just the complete Battle Network package. It's a stellar GBA RPG with a streamlined overworld that's fun to explore, one of the genre's most innovative battle systems refined to near perfection, oodles of side content, a banging soundtrack, and an emotionally resonant character-driven story that ends this initial trilogy on a high note. I'm still excited to try out the next three games and I hear 6 in particular is also very good, but I really doubt anything will be able to top the sheer impact that Battle Network 3 left on me.
Update: I have now played 4-6. Battle Network 4 makes some nice improvements, but the structure sucks. Battle Network 5 is a lot better but I'm not huge on the liberation missions. Battle Network 6 is as great as everyone says though and does come very close to topping 3, but the weaker set-up means it doesn't feel quite as impactful.
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