Mega Man Battle Network

The Good
The gameplay style crosses Adventure with RPG elements, which is fine. The weapon variety is super that you feel like you can make use of multiple weapons straight from a classic Mega Man game. Even the Netnavis and viruses do have some resemblance to the Robot Masters and common Robots respectively. It's satisfying to level your character up and utilise newer and better chips, though many of them become redundant with no further use.

The Bad
Somehow the isometric angle doesn't fully work in this game, because it leaves a lot of scenery and stuff hidden. If only it had the rotation and 3D style that you got in "Mega Man Legends", then you'd feel encouraged to explore. The constant random battles get pretty annoying. Would have preferred enemies you can choose to battle or avoid. The music is overly repetitive with absolutely no variety and the tunes sound pretty 8-bit and PC Speaker. Mega Man Zero was capable of music tracks that are heaps better, so it appears Capcom didn't invest much on the audio in this case.

And the storyline it's way out of hand. Technology is pretty bad if you rely on programming to do everything for you, which also leads to ovens that catch fire caused by a virus. They leave a lot of plot gaps such as the origin of the Wood Program, which World Wide Web (WWW) somehow acquire. And then they suddenly thrust crossing DNA with binary code to resurrect a dead boy. And those names couldn't get any more unoriginal. Why would you name your child Local Area Network (LAN) and his brother Hub?

The Bottom Line
This alternate universe or timeline in which Mega Man goes from a Robot to a Software Man (Different from a Cyber Elf) is intriguing and means new possibilities. However the way Capcom went about it was pretty wrong. One should not send boys to do a man's job. What you're looking at is a game that is half-baked and half-burnt. This somehow feels like a Pokemon anime ripoff. This could've been tonnes better with more work and get a similar feel to the Mega Man Robot universe, but this title seems more like a bad reflection of it. You may get some joy to play this if you're looking for something completely (or nearly) different.