To date, the only one of these I've played, though I'd gone through LPs of the full series beforehand. One of my friend groups had a "game club", where we ran through a bunch of different games over a couple weeks or so, then discussed our findings together. We were only gonna play one of the games, and 3 seemed to be the best, so that's what we ran through.

For the record, if I was to rate the games based on the impressions I got from the LPs, I'd probably go 3 > 6 >>> 2 > 5 >>> 1 >>>> 4. But like I said, this is the only one I've played, so take those ratings with a grain of salt.

Since my firsthand experience with the series is through a casual playthrough of 3 (I didn't even mess much with the post game!), I can't comment much on the game within its continuum. I feel the need to mention that, since despite its Saturday Morning cartoon vibe, Battle Network is an extremely complex series from a mechanical standpoint. I sorta feel like I'd need to run through a bunch of 'em before I got confident enough to comment on stuff like the chip balance (I know Gater breaks the game, somehow?), or how much NaviCust changes the formula (though it's fun to mess with), or how much of a bummer it'll be to trade Style Change for Double Soul next time, or anything like that.

So I'll mostly just look at this game as its own thing. It's a good time! I may not get this game's high-end skill level, but I really respect combat as its own thing. Fast and quite strategic, this may be one of the most-involved Deck Builders I've played, particularly relative to how simple the systems involved are. There's a ton of different types of ways you can kit out MegaMan.EXE, lending to a lot of different playstyles. You probably want to play around Program Advances like LifeSword and Gater, but there's no reason you have to. The impression I get is that all the high-end game-breaking stuff is mostly there for the competitive scene (like Pokémon!), which means you can go nuts with whatever you want. So if you really just wanna turtle up with Guard and take potshots on the enemy, I mean that's agony, but you can. More power to you.

I also like our leads here! Lan's a good kid, such a fun go-getter of a hero. I love his dynamic with MegaMan.EXE, where Lan really does feel like his younger brother despite everything. The rest of Lan's friend group are simple but cute enough friends (though, I always have to remind myself that MegaMan.EXE and Roll.EXE are not related in this continuity; Roll.EXE's crush always throws me). Dr. Wily is of course great fun as always, particularly as a Saturday Morning cartoon villain surrounded by Saturday Morning flunkies. This is probably Bass.EXE at his most interesting, since the bonus boss finally gets a chance at plot relevance, and we get this genuinely interesting story about his identity as a ghost in the machine.

...but mostly, if you're playing this game casually, you're here for the scenario writing silliness. How can you not love a game where one of the big set pieces is a zoo with animals chasing after people? Or a random bearded hero saving a suburban mother from her dishwasher? Or "MegaMan! Attack!" Has to be up there with the airplane rap battle from BN2 as one of the funniest moments in the series.

Battle Network is a series that could only have existed at its time. I didn't grow up with it or anything, but I grew up in the era it came out, so I'm VERY familiar with the type of media it's commenting on and would consider its contemporary. In particular, I think the way Battle Network reveres the internet is very much a product of the early 00s, when the internet was just starting to become a component of children's day-to-day life. Like you look at kids' shows today, and the internet is just a thing that exists, getting commented upon like an every day facet of life without any need to over-examine it. But at this time, the internet was ~novel~ and represented ~unfettered potential~. This is a time when the internet is still so foreign that it's represented through abstract terms; like, sure, maybe everyone has a little computer program dude that goes exploring the information superhighway to retrieve data and hang out. And maybe you can contain a soul in a .BAT file, who knows?

I'm not gonna sit here and say whether or not Battle Network predicted the future (though, it got the Internet of Things spot-on). But I think Battle Network represented an era where it was okay to be optimistic about the internet, not cynical. And that's lovely.