Mega Man Battle Chip Challenge

If any of you have played the Mega Man Battle Network games, you'll know for a fact that they are polished and well rounded RPG's in the Mega Man universe that take the franchise in a new and interesting direction. You'll know that it has an intuitive combat system, new areas to explore besides the side scrolling theme-based levels of the original Mega Man games and you'll also know that the music and sound effects also match this quirky adventure to a tee with Mega Man now being represented as a piece of AI that cleans the net of evil baddies on a near daily basis. Last, but not least, you'll know that everyone else is missing out by not buying and playing these games.

Unfortunately, what you may not know, after playing two of the Network games and expecting a lot from the next iteration, is that Mega Man Battle Chip Challenge doesn't exactly do justice to the previous two Network games. To further elaborate this point, you are still a young boy in school with aspirations of fame and heroism always held down by doing homework and keeping up with your studies. You still control an AI based NAVI called Mega Man which can, hopefully, lead you to fame one day. Finally, you still compete with an unspeakable evil over the net and do battle with a number of foes including some type of organization called the WWW.

In Chip Challenge, the amount of control given to the player has been stripped down greatly during combat. Players now compete with one another using various chips in a card battle like format where the game will select a number of chips for you at random and allow you to select two chips of your own accord. The two chips are important as they can mean the battle if you're not wise in your decision, but at the same time, it emphasizes that your typical chip collection needs to be well rounded as well as the chips selected can lead to huge wins and conversely, huge losses. The fact that the player controls very little of this structure is what hinders the game greatly from being on par with the other Network titles in the franchise. Unfortunately, there's no way to adjust this method of randomness in the options so players are stuck watching this veritable battle of numbers.

In most cases, battles can be won by simply selecting two powerful chips that pray on the all too a-typical weaknesses, both environmental and character specific, inherent to Mega Man enemies. Fire for wood, electricity for water, and so forth making it a veritable guessing game as to what element or chip harms the enemy in a powerful fashion allowing the player, in the fewest moves, to bring down their opponent. There is a bit of strategy involved in this as the wrong selections can totally eliminate you from battle, but the randomness factor really detracts from the overall strategy based action.

Even more daunting is that many of the games extras are not unlocked until you progress through the game making it almost a veritable chore just to get all new powerful chips. The other portion holding the player back are funds as they can only be collected after winning subsequent battles.

The graphics of Chip Challenge are about the only thing really on par with the Network games as each character animates well and the world designed by Capcom for these characters is always colorful and full of life. There's actually nothing visually to complain about here right from the enemy design to the machine like backgrounds in the net world.

The sound too is similar to the Network games, but it still doesn't match up with the overall feel of the game. Portions of the music feel quiet and subdued while others feel rushed and overbearing. The mix is decent, for sure, but it's no match compared to other games in the Mega Man franchise.

Finally, the game contains a multiplayer mode, similar to those in the Network Transmission games where players can trade items or even compete with one another across a link cable, but since the game is so daunting in the single player game, there's no reason to drag your friend into this random encounter.