Mega Man Battle Network 4

[Mr. Sean Nelson]

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:

(click to show/hide)

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.

[Max]

They threw in Duo and he had nothing to do with the story.

It was bullshit, I agree with you.

[Smunch]

Worst one I've played (2-6 is my set of played ones).  Duo fight was fun and challenging, but Devil is right. I was also sad that I didn't get to fight a lot of the Navis, but didn't dare play through again for the CHANCE to battle them.

Thumbs down.

[KillerChair]

I did enjoy the game. I liked the hard mode things it had.
Though i agree on the "actual" opponent lacking.

[Mr. Sean Nelson]

I may sound more harsh than is warranted.
It is simply that 2 and 3 just blew me away with how fun they were.
After a long semester, I was finally able to pick the fourth game up.
But it was really disappointing. The music and battle system still had many other video games beat, but they just were not as good.
I really hope that 5 and 6 are better.

Although, interestingly enough, Mega Man 4 was my least favorite as well.
Coincidence?

[Emmanuelf06]

It was my favorite with exe 4,5 (battlechip mode powaaaaa)
I like exe 6 too, the link navi mode was awesome.

Exe 5 was cool but i didnt like the "missions" xD

Exe 4 have great musics (boss battle theme or tournament battle theme), good soul unisons (not too powerfull but tactics), a funny story (but hard without tips!!!!) and a hard mode very interesting.

I didnt like exe1-3 because it's just....megaman and BAD transformations, and we can have just one Style Mode (wood, heat...), we can change the style but it's boring, just one is possible to use.

Exe 4 was awesome with GutsSoul (+30 vulcans and normal chips), FireSoul, Aquasoul, Metalsoul, the most tactics EXE for me.

Exe 6 was cool but too easy and the battlechips were agressive, not very tactics....

Exe 4,5 win for me, i played this game a lot...  

I hope you understand me xD

[scrotoman.exe]

Yeah, I disliked 4 for most of the reasons the OP mentioned. I thought 3 was the worst because IIRC, there were even more step-n-fetch missions than 4 had, even if its plot wasnt as bad. I stack it, best to worst, 2,6,1,5,4,3. IMO.

[Pieman]

Battle Network 4.... it's not the souls that's the issues. Not the story. The fact they basically force you to play through the whole thing 3+ times is rather annoying as hell. Other than that it's ok.

1 is meh but it's the first so yeah. 2 was pretty good, introducing styles. 3 was awesome plenty of challenging navis and the first appearance of navi customizer so great. 4,5 was fun considering you could pick from not just Megaman but a whole area of navis! 5 aside of the missions improved what went wrong with 4. And 6 is close to 3 on being awesome.

4 did introduce one of my favorite navis, Searchman.EXE so that's at least some light point.

[Korby]

My personal favorite game is 6 Gregar.

Anyway, I never liked BN4. It was just...bleh for me.

[KillerChair]

My personal favorite game is 6 Gregar.

High five!

[Korby]

(click to show/hide)

High five!

[Mr. Sean Nelson]

It was my favorite with exe 4,5 (battlechip mode powaaaaa)
I like exe 6 too, the link navi mode was awesome.

Exe 5 was cool but i didnt like the "missions" xD

Exe 4 have great musics (boss battle theme or tournament battle theme), good soul unisons (not too powerfull but tactics), a funny story (but hard without tips!!!!) and a hard mode very interesting.

I didnt like exe1-3 because it's just....megaman and BAD transformations, and we can have just one Style Mode (wood, heat...), we can change the style but it's boring, just one is possible to use.

Exe 4 was awesome with GutsSoul (+30 vulcans and normal chips), FireSoul, Aquasoul, Metalsoul, the most tactics EXE for me.

Exe 6 was cool but too easy and the battlechips were agressive, not very tactics....

Exe 4,5 win for me, i played this game a lot...  

I hope you understand me xD

Interesting. The only souls that I earned were Aqua, wood, and proto.
I thought that all of these were pretty lame.
Maybe if I had received Guts, fire, or metal, I would have had a higher opinion of the soul unisons.
But that was a great deal of the problem, you couldn't pick who you battled.
I never even got to fight Guts Man. That is a mainstay of the series!

I was surprised at how many people are saying that they disliked mmbn 3.
I thought that 2 was better, but I still really enjoyed 3. I will give you the fact that style modes were annoying. If you could simply pick your own style, it would have been much better. I lucked out when I played and got ElecGuts Style. That was absolutely incredible!  

[KillerChair]

I have mmbn3 blue oficially ^^
Great game... nothing to dislike about it.

By the way... have you even tried the hard mode of mmbn4?
You get extra souls and such if you do so.

[Mr. Sean Nelson]

I would if I didn't dislike the game for a plethora of reasons.  
Interesting information though.
So you retain soul unisons between games then?

[PressStart]

I feel like they really dropped the ball with Battle Network 4. The series was at the height of its popularity around that time, and what do they do? They make a bland rpg that is literally patched together. They make all of these new bosses, but rather than make a coherent, lengthy set of events for it all to go down in, they have this basic tournament setup which only uses SOME of the robots each time.

Souls were an awesome addition. It made the game even more 'Mega Man' like than before, getting to switch to a boss' type (and essentially, playing as the bosses, an idea so popular that they went ahead with it in BN 4.5 and 5). But then they mess it up by splitting the games available bosses and souls into two games. Battle Network is not Pokemon; it got pretty popular but nowhere near as big as Pokemon. Splitting the content makes the individual games have less content, and when you have not-so-many people buying the games, you hardly have trades and people finding the complete set of content. Thus, you have people playing half a game and discovering that it is mediocre compared to the previous ones.

What's sad to me is how fun the Battle Network games are, the style of play having a grid with real-time action dodging but the rpg elements of set attacks and what-not. A real, online version that had balanced chips would be fantastic. The closest there has ever been is Starforce, and unfortunately the online play there tended to be laggy and filled with unbalanced fights.