YMMV / Mega Man Battle Network 1

• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • After the entire game sets up ProtoMan as a major badass and worthy rival to MegaMan, he ends up being surprisingly easy. He's quite predictable due to heavily telegraphing his moves, and hitting him with a chip will reset his attack pattern.
  • Despite being hyped up as Wily's ultimate weapon, the Life Virus proves to be a wimp of a Final Boss. It has an unimpressive set of attacks that are easily dodged, it's huge and never moves so you don't have to aim, and its health is low enough that it's possible to kill in a single turn, even with just the temporarily beefed-up MegaBuster.
• Breather Boss: That fact that NumberMan never moves ensures that almost all of your attacks will hit him.
• Condemned by History: The first Battle Network got fairly strong reviews when it came out and makes for a solid foundation for the rest of the series, but there is little reason to go back to it. Each sequel refines and improves on the gameplay to the point that they all make the original game look downright archaic. The DS remake, Operate Shooting Star, was met with poor sales and never got an international release. The general sentiment is that the first Battle Network is one of the weakest mainline entries, rivaled only by Battle Network 4's Fake Longevity and "Blind Idiot" Translation.
• Game-Breaker: Has its own section on the series' page.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • The Cutscene Pause glitch allows you to skip cutscenes by exploiting the brief window in which you can bring up the pause menu. This can actually be used to skip the final boss of the game.
  • A Reddit user wound up accidentally performing a credits warp in the final dungeon of the game. As it turns out, the fires you need to put out in this segment just so happen to share memory space with cutscene triggers of all things, and one specific fire enables the flag that triggers the credits scene. By putting out this specific fire, then jacking out and leaving the school, the credits will play and you'll have skipped the entire rest of the game.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Wily's "So super... Such programs!" line in the English version is formatted exactly like the Doge meme, which wouldn't emerge until nearly a decade after the game's release.
  • One of the optional bosses Skullman.EXE is a tall slender skeleton with a black, white, red and orange colour scheme with a unique laugh. Several decades, Undertale would introduce a character with a similar appearance and unique laughter called Papyrus.
• It's the Same, So It Sucks: Compared to the fifth game, the DS port in Operate Shooting Star is rather plain by comparison; the graphics and music nearly exactly the same, and, outside of the crossover scenario with Star Force, very little additions are made to take advantage of the DS. While still considered a Polished Port, it is also recognized as disappointingly safe.
• Pandering to the Base: The ClockMan scenario in the Operate Shooting Star remake features striking romantic undertones between the Megas and their significant others that clash jarringly with the complete lack of overt romance between the characters in the other parts of the series. This element seemingly only exists to pander to shippers of the MegaMan.EXE x Roll and Geo Stelar x Harp Note pairings.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The only way to flee fights is with Escape chips, which take up slots in your limited folder space and are subject to RNG to even see. Area traversal can thus get tedious super quickly since the series runs on a standard Random Encounters system. Later games and the Operate Shooting Star port would rectify this by adding a dedicated flee button.
• So Okay, It's Average: The first game isn't really anything special, having very questionable balancing that isn't especially fun, some mechanics that needed some more tuning to actually be more enjoyable, forgettable writing, and an infamously bizarre overworld decision that makes every place look identical. While it's looked back on as important for helping the devs figure out what they wanted to do with the second and third game, the only game it's overwhelmingly considered better than by fans is the fourth.
• That One Boss: SharkMan.EXE is an absolute pain in the ass for all the wrong reasons. The gist is that there are three shark fins on his side of the battlefield, only one of which is the real SharkMan. You can't tell which one is the real deal until you hit it with an attack, which causes him to pop out briefly and fire an AquaTower at you before the fins reshuffle and start the pattern over. The problem is that, unless SharkMan is in the front column, the fake fins constantly get in the way of your attacks. Even worse, you can end up with false negatives; when MegaMan moves in front of the fins, they dash towards him. If the fin that is the real SharkMan does this, he turns invulnerable during the attack, so if you happen to hit him right as he starts the dash, you'll probably think it's one of the fakes and thus waste time on the other two fins. And don't even think about trying to exploit his weakness to Elec chips, since nearly every Elec chip in the game is either too slow to hit him reliably without the fake fins absorbing the attack, or they can only hit him if he's in the front column. Even attacks that lock onto enemies aren't safe, since more often than not they can't distinguish the real SharkMan from the fakes! Simply winning the fight is tough enough on its own, but getting high enough ranks to nab his V2 and especially his V3 chip practically forces you to pack your folder with BigBombs and Navi chips that hit the entire enemy area at once, since otherwise the battle quickly devolves into a frustrating Luck-Based Mission that will have you tearing your hair out in short order.
• That One Level:
  • In the school network, you have to input passcodes to open gates and the answers are given to you (e.g. count the number of chairs in the classroom, that number is the passcode), however, some gates don't give you any clues meaning you have to guess and if you're wrong too many times, the passcode changes. Thankfully, it does tell you whether you're too high or low and if one digit is correct, you're told which digit to change.
  • The Waterworks Comp involves navigating through a pretty long stage of ice puzzles. It seems like you deleted what was causing the water to get held up but guess what? Now the water is purple and everyone's poisoned so you have to go through the previous segments again and traverse new parts of the dungeon to boot!
  • The Power Plant Comp is a big nightmare to many players. While veterans to the series won't mind the lack of After-Combat Recovery (the later games have it as a facet of the system as opposed to a one-time gimmick), there's the fact that you're on a limited battery life, have to solve frustratingly vague logic puzzles that force you to backtrack if you fail too many times, the random battle rate is through the roof and a large part of the level is an invisible maze. You can't jack out either, so it's possible to be trapped in a nigh-unwinnable situation. The stage also ends with three-round back-to-back-boss fights, with one of them being a Hopeless Boss Fight and the other pits you against ProtoMan. Thankfully, Operate Shooting Star irons out a few flaws of this dungeon by highlighting its invisible paths with flickering dots and giving you unlimited attempts at its battery logic puzzle.
  • A rare example in the physical world is Den Town, where the combination of the traffic light gimmick, similar looking areas and the lack of sub-area indicators makes navigating the town almost as confusing as the main Internet areas. Late in the game, it is mandatory to scour through it in search of a plot-relevant NPC, and there is no indication that the sub-area the NPC resides in existed if you play through the ColorMan scenario.
• That One Sidequest: Because of the chip drop rates combined with single virus encounters capping the busting rank at 9 at best, a few chips are a pain to get for library completion, and therefore encounter Bass:
  • Getting 30 Met Guard A chips in exchange for a Buster Guard chip. Met Guard A is normally obtained by getting Rank 6 against Mettaur 1 viruses, which means having to intentionally get a lower busting rank and risk geting Zenny most of the time.
  • Leaf Shield and Drop Down, which are obtained from the Popper 2 and 3 viruses respectively. Getting an S rank against them is impossible due to how they spawn and enter the field, which leaves a 3.125% chance at Rank 9 to get their chip drops.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Operate Shooting Star features a time-traveling villain and a cross over with the sequel series, Star Force...for one Filler scenario that basically amounts to playing tag. Otherwise it's just a port of the first Battle Network with a handful of new features.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Operate Shooting Star was hyped as a crossover between Battle Network and Star Force but in practice was essentially an Updated Re-release of Battle Network 1; the Star Force exclusive content was a short scenario spliced into the otherwise unchanged plot right after the Power Plant scenario, meaning you're still going through at least half the game before unlocking the ability to play as Geo — which is supposed to be the driving reason to pick up Operate Shooting Star in the first place.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Man, webrings, that takes you back, huh? This game's version of the internet is based on the relatively ancient webring model of the internet from The '90s, in which users navigated webpage to webpage by passing directly from one address to the next, and groups of friends would share their links with each other to facilitate this.

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