Replayed for the first time in over 15 years thanks to the Legacy Collection and I gotta say, this game has aged not the best. It's not awful, but it has a LOT of rough edges and suffers majorly from "First game syndrome" and due to the ridiculously high random encounter rate (Boy oh boy I love walking 5 steps and getting into a battle and rinsing and repeating that cycle for 13 hours) I think it would damn near be unplayable without the Legacy Collection's Buster Max Mode. The fact 90% of the dungeon design is labyrinthine as fuck and using a guide is practically mandatory was a big hindrance in my enjoyment as well.

The narrative is nothing to write home about being a typical Saturday morning cartoon "monster of the week" (Almost all the boss fights are very bare-bones with 1 or 2 moves as well which don't make for very exciting fights) episodic formula with a massive world ending threat in the background and both the plot and characters are very bare-bones until the very end when a major twist is revealed, but even so it's still entertaining at the very least. Still the creative, fast paced and addictive card based grid combat almost singlehandedly carries the game and even in its most primitive form it is still highly enjoyable and without a doubt is the reason the Battle Network series became as big a hit as it did because everything else about this game is merely ok at best.