Gotta be honest, this is my least favorite battle network game. The story only gets good when you get to the hospital, but before that you gotta go trough a tournament arc that feels like filler (specially knowing the next game would be THE tournament game), and my god THE DUNGEONS ARE THE WORST. All with mindnuming puzzles of just going from one place to deactivate a lock to go to another (a problem Battle network 1's dungeons also had), and it might have the worst dungeon in all of BN: The hospital comp. Crazy how the best story beat is composed by the worst gameplay beat. To advance on that one you must grind up and sacrifice fire chips, so please don't use avoid random encounter cheats on this game or else you won't have enough fire chips to beat that dungeon, I did. Even then a dungeon that forces you to mindlessly grind is like the game asking you to play the worst part of a normal jrpg.

I'm surprised I wound up feeling this way, but I actually think this is a bit of a downgrade from the last game. Battle Network 2 just feels like the better paced game, has a larger scope, a frankly more consistently interesting story, and while Battle Network 3 has plenty of great boss fights, King Man, Metal Man and Bowl Man immediately come to mind, imo it has the least interesting final boss fight up to this point, and Bubble Man, which I find to be personally, my least favorite fight in any of the 3 games I've played to this point. It also has a general downgrade in level design across the board I think, but I can at least say, the latter half of the story is some genuinely good stuff, if nothing else, this game does deliver quite a bit of character interaction that I really really enjoy! But I also can't firmly believe that this game's story is wholly the best because there are several ways in which I think this game stumbles into pitfalls the prior game just didn't, especially when it comes to, for lack of better term, the stakes of the situation, I feel the final parts of Battle Network 2 more efficiently communicate the imminent danger in what is happening to the world than Battle Network 3 does, and 3 definitely should feel more important! I admit some of my feelings may come from playing this so soon after Battle Network 2, so knowing how generally panned Battle Network 4 is, I think I'll give it a good bit before I play that game just to give it the fairest shake it can get.