i have been doing WAY too much this first month of 2024. this makes my 11th game that i've finished in january, and i swear it's not that i'm just no lifeing this shit. this was a hard mode playthrough i set up about a year ago, and only just finished now. you could say the same about a lot of games i've finished this month (FE7, SSX 3, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel), but it's worth mentioning here because i spent a loooooot of time in this game.
it's funny whenever games have a hard mode and then just completely fail to balance mechanics around it. did you know that, in hard mode, because of how the Mole1 and Mole2 viruses work, it's impossible to get the chips they drop (PopUp and Meteor18) through normal means and instead have to roll for them at the chip trader? extremely fun oversight aside, hard mode doesn't feel like the major difficulty spike it should be. earlygame is definitely hell, and getting good bust ranks is a lot more difficult to accomplish until around midgame. but, hard mode, just like normal mode, still gets broken in half by gater. sure, the boss HP totals skyrocket when you multiply them by 1.5 (MagnetManV3 boasts an intimidating 2700 HP meanwhile PlanetManV3 has the highest total at 3300 HP), but the same basic strategies will work here just like they did in normal mode. Invis3 still makes you untouchable, Gater still deals a stupid amount of damage while being easy to make flow in your folder, and FullCust is still broken. this is by no means a complaint, it just feels odd that capcom would go through the effort of hiding this hard mode behind so many obstacles only for it to feel relatively unconsidered.
MMBN2 is still at its base a fantastic game and i still had a great time with it. if anything, the hard mode experience has left me thinking that the overall ease and simplicity of normal mode could at least be somewhat solved by using some of these HP totals. maybe keep the virus HP totals the same (to make random encounters + escaping be less tedious) but use the navi HP totals from hard mode? i could always just play the "remove the letter G from the game" mod, but something like this feels at least a little more sensible and organic. ah well, difficulty issues aside, it's still one of the best games on the GBA and a highlight of the series.
it's funny whenever games have a hard mode and then just completely fail to balance mechanics around it. did you know that, in hard mode, because of how the Mole1 and Mole2 viruses work, it's impossible to get the chips they drop (PopUp and Meteor18) through normal means and instead have to roll for them at the chip trader? extremely fun oversight aside, hard mode doesn't feel like the major difficulty spike it should be. earlygame is definitely hell, and getting good bust ranks is a lot more difficult to accomplish until around midgame. but, hard mode, just like normal mode, still gets broken in half by gater. sure, the boss HP totals skyrocket when you multiply them by 1.5 (MagnetManV3 boasts an intimidating 2700 HP meanwhile PlanetManV3 has the highest total at 3300 HP), but the same basic strategies will work here just like they did in normal mode. Invis3 still makes you untouchable, Gater still deals a stupid amount of damage while being easy to make flow in your folder, and FullCust is still broken. this is by no means a complaint, it just feels odd that capcom would go through the effort of hiding this hard mode behind so many obstacles only for it to feel relatively unconsidered.
MMBN2 is still at its base a fantastic game and i still had a great time with it. if anything, the hard mode experience has left me thinking that the overall ease and simplicity of normal mode could at least be somewhat solved by using some of these HP totals. maybe keep the virus HP totals the same (to make random encounters + escaping be less tedious) but use the navi HP totals from hard mode? i could always just play the "remove the letter G from the game" mod, but something like this feels at least a little more sensible and organic. ah well, difficulty issues aside, it's still one of the best games on the GBA and a highlight of the series.