To those of you who played Mega Man Battle Network 4: what did you think? Here are some of my own thoughts on the matter:
I found the whole game lacking when compared to the previous three.
The Nebula crime syndicate, the intended bad-guy stand-ins, seemingly had only two notable members: Shade Man and Laser Man. Both were pretty lame. They had a few generic "bad navi" members, which I found really annoying. I would say that almost all of the music was substandard. Furthermore, what was that soul thing all about? I was of the opinion that it was clunky and horrible, and it very rarely was good to use. The tournament style of this game was painful. Every time, and I mean EVERY TIME Lan had an opponent, the player was forced to complete some mission to be able to fight him/her. These missions were usually god awful. They almost always involved going into the same parts of the internet that you were forced to explore a bunch of times already, and explore them AGAIN. Hell, one of the missions was simply to find 50 points which were hidden everywhere! All of this was compounded with a complete lack of direction in almost everything one needs to accomplish. For instance, in Sharo one must gather four special fire chips to activate satellite dishes. One must simply know where all of these chips are, but they could be anywhere in the entire world. Problems like these were routine in this game. The characters were extremely two dimensional. Even with the main bad guy, he wanted to create a world made of evil because everyone has evil in them. That makes sense, sure. There were disasters all over the world, and I didn't even care. There were no interesting people in this game at all. Chaud was barely in the game, and he was boring and useless when he was. Bass was not involved with the story, which was obnoxious. There weren't even internet squares in this game, just navis strewn about haphazardly. They also commonly hid under bridges and the like. The battle system was fine. It was just like all the other games. Except that you could not have more chips available to you without customizing, which really sucked. HP memories were shared between the three difficulty levels, so you could not gather them all in one playthrough. Although, why someone would play this disappointment twice is beyond me. There are official netbattlers in this game, as usual. But they are there in name only. They do absolutely nothing, and you never see them. Finally, the theme of this game was darkness. Darkness attempts to consume Mega Man, and almost everyone else. This makes for dialogue with annoying melodrama rivaling even that of the Mega Man X series.
I wish I had better things to say about this game, but I don't. I tried to like it, I really tried. But there are simply no redeeming qualities about this game whatsoever. It was worse than 1-3 in every way imaginable.
Story: 5/10 Not good. The generic dark vs. light theme that games go to when they can't think of anything good. But somehow, this game makes it seem even lamer.
Music: 8/10 It was okay. Not nearly as good as previous games, but these usually have good music.
Gameplay: 8/10 It is hard to mess up the fast-paced action of the series. But the lack of chip space in battles, along with the crappy soul mixture thing really dragged it down.
Replay value: 1/10 If you are truly psychotic, you may want to collect everything from all three difficulties and do every little thing there is to do. However, you will not want to unless you are indeed psychotic. :(
(http://img1.smackjeeves.com/images/uploaded/comics/2/b/2b4995084962.png)