Mega Man Battle Network 5 – MMHP

Story

The SciLab Officials devise a counter strategy—they’ll form a team of highly competent Navis and Operators to go in and liberate the captured areas. Lan, having victories against Wily, the WWW, Gospel, and Nebula under his belt, is invited to join this special team. He accepts because it will put him one step closer to winning back his friends’ PETs and saving his dad…

It’s an impressive worldwide operation: the entire Net has been taken over by agents of Nebula. Meanwhile, and all part of his grand scheme, Dr. Regal, leader of Nebula, has kidnapped Lan’s father, Dr. Hikari. But, by freak chance, he misses the opportunity to steal the one thing that may have ensured his victory: Lan’s PET

As might be expected, this game expands upon Battle Network 4 . Most of the features here come from previous games, so I’m not going to expound on them here. As always, check the strategies page for overall game play information.

Liberation Missions

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which, in turn, almost never happens. For normal viruses this isn’t as bad, but prepare yourself for some very frustrating boss battles.

The most significant change in this game is the liberation mission system. These are modeled after turn-based strategy games. This is an interesting idea, though having to defeat everything in three turns makes you ridiculously dependant on getting a good draw of chipswhich, in turn, almost never happens. For normal viruses this isn’t as bad, but prepare yourself for some very frustrating boss battles.

Like turn-based strategy games, you have multiple “units” (Navis), and the game operates in rounds, or “phases”—first all of your Navis get to move, then all of the enemies get a turn, back and forth. Unlike most other games of this type, however, you are not limited in the distance you can walk during your turn, except that you can’t cross Dark Panels. You can move around as much as you like during your phase; your character’s turn ends only when he attacks something.

Liberate Dark Panels to cross them. You don’t have to liberate them all, but you do have to liberate all of the Dark Holes. Defeating the boss wins the mission, but before you can fight the boss, you must clear all the Dark Holes on the map. In order to get the best prize, you need to clear the mission in as few phases as possible; to facilitate this, skip as many Dark Panels as you can, and focus on going directly to the Dark Holes and then the boss. Usually you’ll want to skip items as well unless you bump into them along the way, because they generally aren’t significant enough to be worth the effort.

When you attack something during your phase, you actually have to fight the virus battle like normal—no sitting back and watching in this game. On the other hand, when the enemies attack you during their phase (which they can do if they are close enough to you; most enemies can only walk on Dark Panels though, which limits how close they can get to you), they simply do damage to you without opening a battle.

The layout of the battle field depends on the number of Dark Panels surrounding your character when the fight starts. The more Dark Panels there are in the eight tiles around your Navi, the more at a disadvantage you will be. On the other hand, if you liberate an isolated Dark Panel, you will have the advantage and the enemies will be at a disadvantage.

Pincher attacks have enemies on both sides of you (use and to turn around). This is an interesting twist and can actually sometimes work in your favor, since enemies have only two columns on each side, making it easier to use attacks with limited range (like swords). You do, however, have to watch out for attacks coming from both sides. Also, some enemies can cross sides.

If you liberate a panel in one turn (defeat everything before your Custom Screen opens again), you get a “1 turn liberation” which will liberate all of the panels on the eight tiles around your Navi’s position, even ones he did not target with his liberation attack. This can be a good way to quickly clear out panels, but—being heavily reliant on getting a good random draw of chips—it is tough to plan to do on purpose.

You can replay liberation missions by talking to gold-colored Mr.Progs that you find in the areas where the missions took place. Use this to obtain chips that you missed on your first pass through, and just to make money as well. (You can purposefully take longer than the required number of phases to earn some Zenny, not to mention the Zenny you find when you liberate certain tiles.)

DarkChips

The DarkChip system is altered a bit in this game from the previous one in that DarkChips are now ordinary chips that you can find and place into your Folder and use like normal in battle. Later in the game, you can also use them to activate Soul Unisons to end up with a ChaosSoul. (The manual tells you this, so I’m not really spoiling much.) Using DarkChips still subtracts 1 HP from your maximum health per battle where you use them, except for using Chaos Unisons.

Note that only MegaMan can use DarkChips.

Double Team DS

The DS version of the game is basically both versions packaged together. When you start a new game, you select one version or the other, and you play through the entire game as that version. The only crossover that exists between them is that once you finish one game, you can then gain Transport Chips, or TP Chips, to enable you to, during liberation missions, swap out characters in your team with their respective matches from the other version of the game. For example, MagnetMan and KnightMan both serve the same function and so you can swap the two. Given the way the story was done in this game, you’ll never notice the difference in the plot when you exchange characters.

Other notes:

• All of the music has been re-sequenced.
• There are a bunch of voice samples added to various aspects of the game. Too bad both Lan and MegaMan sound like they are at least 25 years old

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• They added additional face portraits for some characters to display different expressions. (Lan’s evil grin is hilarious—particularly since it’s not supposed to look evil, yet somehow it does.)
• Most of the interfaces have been altered to take the top and bottom screens into account, but not very thoroughly. Usually you do most of your actions in one screen while the other one is frozen in standby mode.
• They fixed the dialogue in a number of places, correcting typos and cleaning up some instances of awkward grammar. They didn’t catch all of the errors, but they did correct a lot of them.
• You can access some of your subscreen during liberation missions, allowing you to reorganize your chip folder and save the game using any character instead of specific ones (you can still only save once per phase, however).
• When you jack in or out, MegaMan animates in the lower screen (this is pretty cool). Also, the jack-in sequence animation has changed.
• Many of the homepages and some servers throughout the game are totally revamped here.
• There’s a pretty cool semi-animation sequence displayed when you turn the game on, before the title screen.
• There are two save slots instead of just one (you need two in order to play through both versions of the game). Saving takes forever.
• You can bring Navi teammates with you as you wander the Internet during non-critical sections of the plot, and swap between them during battle. (This is called the “Party Battle System”). In addition to being able to switch to them, your teammate(s) can pop in to perform an attack automatically or do other things, and you can pull off a double-attack by switching characters while in Full Synchro status (at the sacrifice of the Full Synchro).
• During liberation missions, you can team up with other Navis in a similar manner as the Party Battle System, by having all of the Navis involved standing on the same tile as you when you liberate a panel. This, however, is not at all worth it, because it uses up the turn of every single character involved in the battle.
• You can unlock certain things by having various GBA games inserted into the system while you play the DS version. Among other things, you can copy over your chip folder from a GBA version of Battle Network 5 or even use a completed save file from that game to unlock TP Chips right from the start of the game. (Remember you need to use the completed save file of the opposite version of the game that you are currently playing.)
• Overall, the best new feature is the map! It acts as a mini-map and it shows icons for various features like MegaMan’s current position, homepages, Net Dealers, skull doors, and such. No more getting lost in an endless tangle of maze-like paths! (In some cases you have to find map items before your map is filled in. Also, plain rectangular servers have no maps.)
• There are other miscellaneous changes that I haven’t mentioned here.