I wish I was more in love with Megaman.

I'm partial to platformers, but typically that's been stuck within the third dimension. The Wii and 3DS virtual console cracked me open to Megaman 1, 2 and 3, but as is common with most NES games coming into contact with my particular tastes, they've never exactly wowed me. Those NES classics are good games, and I respect their legacy as games, but I never found them to be my cup of tea.

SNES titles have a better chance of winning my interest. I had beaten Megaman X and walked away with a clear understanding of the brilliance held within the game's design, but once again, I never found myself driven to dive deeper into the franchise. The gameplay was fun, but not exactly something I find myself wanting to come back to time and time again.

I'd like to say Megaman Battle Network has changed that perspective, but I can't in good faith stake a flag in that claim. Megaman Battle Network is a fantastic concept, but is bogged down by heaps of padding and hell-ish level design that drags the rest of the game down with it.

A combination card game and RPG, you battle opponents upon a 3x3 cyber grid, building a deck and optimizing your build. You move about this battlefield in instant, snappy movements, having the player make quick paced decisions as to what cards to throw out, dodging incoming enemy attacks, and charging your mega blaster to deal additional damage. Certain cards have synergy with one another, enemies have elemental strengths and weaknesses, some cards are short and long ranged, but all come together to create an engaging complexity. There's a tightness to this design that sets up an incredible foundation for a series, while also being one of the most unique RPGs I've played in just how essential on-the-fly strategy is implemented.

You put this framework within an alternate universe where Megaman and the gang are merely navigation programs built for users, and out pops this wonderful, Saturday morning kids cartoon world that's built to maximize kid retention. It's a cute, charming world that I could easily see myself liking as a kid, with cute, relatable little characters.

... But I know myself all too well. This would be one of those titles where I wouldn't be able to complete the thing until I was older. If I managed to be as lost as I was when I first tried playing MMBN1 on the Wii U virtual console years ago, I'd have been more lost in this game than anything in my entire life up until that point.

One of the big reasons why I dropped the game during that Wii U era run was due in part to the level design being an esoteric, confusing labyrinth. Levels were constructed as mazes without a functional map in sight. This was meant to emulate the chaotic landscape of the information superhighway, with many paths linking and interconnecting to separate real life locations outside the digital world. As a result though, navigation becomes an absolute nightmare to figure out where you've been, where to go, and how to get there.

As if that were bad enough, added on to this minotaur's maze were quests designed to extract as much of your playtime as possible. Main story quests require you to move back and forth between areas to progress the story, dragging on plot points way more than necessary. Sometimes in order to reach these new plot points, the game decides to be vague with where you need to go next, expecting the player to play interpretor. Combine all this with no real quick travel system to circumnavigate this headache causes yours truly to, well, have a fucking headache.

I could maybe stomach this padding in isolation, but somehow even more layers are added to this comedic groin kick of a game. Battles occur randomly as you're moving about the superhighway, which means much like a barrage of pop-up viruses, I'm having to swat away these annoying things until they're gone. Once I'm done, I've become so distracted from the fly swatting that I end up forgetting what I was even doing beforehand. Often, I'd lose which way I was meant to be heading, causing me to backtrack from being unable to discern which direction I was intially heading towards.

Sometimes if I'm making my way towards an objective, I might end up getting sidelined by one of the most obnoxious enemies to ever grace my screen, of whom wipe me from memory. 7 times out of 10, sure enough, I'd have forgotten to manually save after every battle to prevent me being sent back 20-60 minutes. Modern day autosaves have softened me, yes, but this is just an added layer frustration among the more objective design problems held within MMBN1. There's better ways to direct the player that just weren't done here, and these tiny elements pile up into a frustrating existence.

... But man, it's still difficult not to like MMBN1. Despite the flaws of MMBN1, I see heaps of potential. There's something to this game that just grapples me enough to start coming up with excuses for the lackluster elements. Maybe the constant deaths due to shitty, annoying enemies is all in part of the charm coming from Megaman's roots as being a tough as nails series. Yeah, the level design might instill a cardinal desire to chew cement, but the core gameplay loop is just so fun! How can the game be that bad if I'm having fun simply grinding? And you know, maybe Ms. Madd does attempt to kill a middle schooler by doing a Speed and driving a bus into oncoming traffic, but you know, maybe she's really a good person under all that! How can someone that hot be evil?

Masochism or not, I still appreciate MMBN1. There's something here that needs some work, but I think I'm here for it every step of the way. I can fix her.