Mega Man Battle Network 2 / YMMV

Anti-Climax Boss:
- FreezeMan, the supreme commander of Gospel, is an Aqua Navi (weak to Elec attacks) standing on ice panels (doubles damage from Elec attacks on top of the Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors multiplier), so two ToadMan or ThunderMan chips should be enough to take him down. He's also a Stationary Boss so aiming is less of an issue. What's more, since Elec attacks cause enemies to be paralyzed rather than flinch, you can immediately hit him again.
- The third boss of the Bonus Dungeon is PlanetMan.EXE, who is a Stationary Boss that sits in the center of his area, perfectly in the range of a wide variety of attacks which you've collected to get this far. That's because the true final challenge of the WWW area is the real Bass, who catches you as you try to leave the place.
Ass Pull: Lan surviving excess and even incapacitating amounts of reality-distorting magnetic radiation, even after his radiation suit failed; the script even goes so far as to say it goes thousands of times past the lethal dosage. The game effectively shrugs it off in the ending like nothing actually happened to any major degree at all. It basically became the go-to example among fans for Lan being able to survive anything this series throws at him.
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In the final chapter, you can find several hidden NPCs who will give you some useful items. The one in the Mother Computer Room who gives you a PowerUp? A Prog who seems to have somehow escaped from the Cyberworld and went into hiding in the real world. This is never addressed afterwards.
Breather Boss: CutMan comes between QuickMan, who's a Wake-Up Call Boss, and ShadowMan, who can present a tricky fight. CutMan does have his gimmicks that obstruct your movement, but his attacks are very short-ranged and easily dodged.
Cheese Strategy: About halfway through the game, the player should be able to acquire the components of the Gater Program Advance,^note an attack that freezes time and summons GateMan to fill the screen with projectiles that track all enemies and deal a total of 900 damage. This trivializes every virus encounter and makes S-ranking even the post-game bosses a nonissue. Since using the P.A. requires pretty much no skill from the player, many fans believe it saps away all the fun from the game and discourages creative folder building. As a result, activating Gater in PVP is frowned upon, and avoiding it altogether is a very popular Self-Imposed Challenge.
Complacent Gaming Syndrome: The G code is overall considered the best one, since it has access to two powerful and easy to obtain Program Advances.^note One popular Self-Imposed Challenge is to avoid using the G code at all during a playthrough, and there exists a mod that removes the G code from the entire game (and humorously, also removes the letter G from all in-game text as well).
Even Better Sequel: While the first game was widely praised, it was still very barebones and not fleshed out to its full potential. Battle Network 2 injects a ton of new gameplay elements, refines the world design, and has a very meaty post-game into the series, a trend that would continue with subsequent games.
Goddamned Boss: This game has a fair number of bosses that are difficult to hit and/or remain in the back column which makes them more aggravating to fight.
- ToadMan.EXE sits on one of his lily pads that slide back and forth about his top and bottom rows, and will dart to the other lily pad the moment you line up with him for a frontal attack. He also has a homing paralyzing electric attack and his lily pads will periodically fire tadpoles that punish you when you try to attack him head-on or while you're trying to dodge his other attacks. It's not wise to challenge him at first opportunity.
- SnakeMan.EXE is immobile for most parts but hides in his pot in the back column while not attacking if you line up with him. The row in front of him is also a trio of empty spaces from which he summons his snakes which can block some of your attacks, and those cannot be stolen with an AreaGrab.
- KnightMan.EXE doesn't move much, but he has Stone Body while idle, making all your attacks, excluding Armor Piercing Attacks, do Scratch Damage to him. He also slowly advances forward, causing falling rocks and cracking your panels each time.
- MagnetMan.EXE starts the battle with a magnet line in the middle of the battlefield that pulls you towards it if you stand above or below it, which makes it trickier to dodge his semi-homing magnet projectiles. You can't fix it with a field-modifying chip, either, as he will always respond to that by setting another line of magnet panels.
Good Bad Bugs: The game's most powerful chips are balanced by their extreme rarity, with the player being unable to secure more than one copy of them per save file without trading. However, if the player collects said chips, then beats the final boss without saving in between, the chips will be duplicated, with one copy going into Lan's pack, and the other showing up in the location where the chip had originally been obtained.
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- The aesthetic of the Undernet in this game makes it look like an Xbox console.
- The Excuse Plot of the WWW area is that strong navis were being recruited for the WWW. This is somewhat similar to the Cicada 3301. Further bearing the similarities is that the Protecto viruses are essentially a Puzzle Boss.
- PlanetMan is the first use of Cosmic Motifs in the Battle Network series, which would become much more prominent with the dark chip duology and Star Force, years later. Of all the characters they could've brought back for the second trilogy, neglecting PlanetMan seems like a wasted opportunity.
Nightmare Fuel: Gospel as an organization are easily among the darkest antagonists in the series. While WWW did cause terrorist acts, at the end of the day they were mostly hackers causing a ton of trouble and collateral damage out of one man's petty spite for the Net. Gospel on the other hand does genuine bombings, including attempting to destroy a dam and kill everyone nearby with the flooding, wipes out all of the NetNavis of Yumland in what is all but outright genocide, and are straight up referred to as a "NetMafia" that will attempt to kill anyone that gets in their way. And while other games nearly kill characters in some way or another, this one has folks burned, blown up, directly wounded and everything with all the violent intentions implied, even if no one actually dies. The fact that their leader is an abused, orphaned child who turned to the internet after becoming misanthropic, and it's heavily implied Wily reached out to him anonymously and inspired the foundation of Gospel adds even more Realism-Induced Horror regarding children being radicalized online. Later games toned this down significantly to fit their intended ratings better.
Scrappy Mechanic:
- It's possible to run into stronger versions of the Navis you've defeated as Random Encounters in certain areas of the Net. Having the ability to refight them is cool and all, but potentially being forced to battle a harder version of an already hard boss (like QuickMan) completely unprompted isn't. While not the first time the series has done this, the bosses' annoying gimmicks and mandatory Cyberworld traversal being a lot more frequent in this game makes this gameplay mechanic a lot more unbearable.
- Getting the secret chips requires battling another human player (or yourself with a second Gameboy Advance/Nintendo DS and a link cable. You must set a pattern and then break it, one example is to win battles with taking a hit and then taking a hit, but are never told which pattern to currently go for, as such your reward will usually be a random chip from the opposing player.
Sequel Difficulty Spike: Thanks to tweaks to the chips, removal of After-Combat Recovery, and enemy Navis having more strategies than "Sit there and be deleted" in addition to more health, this game is a step up in difficulty compared to the relatively easy first game.
Tear Jerker: ShadowMan outright kills the whole YumLand net population. When the YumSquare king gives his dying words, this haunting, sad tune begins playing - and it stays in that location for the rest of the game.
That One Attack: ShadowMan.EXE v3, at low health, will bust out Muramasa on you with very little warning. This attack does damage equal to the amount of health he's missing, and at his max of 1600 HP the attack can potentially deal over one thousand damage. Defeat him quickly if you don't want to experience this attack.
That One Boss:
- QuickMan.EXE is invincible at all times except when moving or attacking, moves like a spastic monkey on crack so that his vulnerability then doesn't even matter, and his attacks are irritating to dodge, because Quick Boomerangs are really, REALLY fast moving. It doesn't help that he's the second boss of the game, the first boss was a complete chump, and the next boss AFTER him isn't exactly threatening either, so he's not even really a Wake-Up Call Boss. Worse yet, it's entirely possible for the game to be Unintentionally Unwinnable here, as you can't leave his area (either to recover HP or improve your moveset) once you enter (but nothing stops you from saving...)
- ThunderMan.EXE remains in the back row and fields three thunder clouds that move back and forth on the rows. These can fire off paralyzing thunder balls, and attack MegaMan if their movement gets obstructed. This results in the player needing to do some fancy footwork to be able to land hits on ThunderMan while dodging the clouds. And due to plot circumstances, the first time you fight him, you have also lost all your chips with the exception of the ones in your folder, and you can't access the net to get new chips unless you beat him. In the Virtual Console rerelease, he has the potential to be even worse if the player has relied on the Gospel Breath chips (which can't hit anything in the back row) and hasn't upgraded the chip folder from time to time.
That One Level:
- Quick Man has a horribly annoying stage, because you can't jack out of the detonators once you jack in, meaning you can't restore your health. It is even possible to get into an Unintentionally Unwinnable situation because while you can't jack out, there's nothing stopping you from saving...
- Freeze Man's chapter forces you to repeatedly backtrack all across the Internet to get the right items to melt the right variants of ice.
Unintentional Period Piece: This game introduces several aspects of the net that were new when it appeared (and in the timeframe when it was set) but which now date it very clearly to the late 90's and early 2000s. In particular, the background to Yai's server is a Geocities page, complete with a view counter at "00000003". Likewise, the central forums for the entire setting are single-threaded lists of posts divided by topic - a layout that was popular at the time but which made increasingly less sense as more people joined in and which now exists more as a niche thing.
The Un-Twist: The identity of the Gospel spy who infiltrates the Official conference in Netopia is easy to pick out as the one, new unique sprite that players have not yet seen. Princess Pride, of course.
Values Dissonance: The depictions of the Netopian ghetto and a number of black Netopian NPCs (including the infamous Battle Rapping NPC during the airplane arc) come across as deeply racist outside of Japan, especially to Americans. While the stereotypes somehow evaded any noteworthy scrutiny upon Battle Network 2's original release, they almost certainly would not have upon the release of Legacy Collection, so Capcom saw fit to slap the entire collection with a Content Warning stating that the series' usage of stereotypes was left unaltered in the name of authenticity.
Values Resonance: Gospel being made up of people who feel slighted and were lashing out for revenge bears a lot of similarities to people becoming radicalised over the internet in The New '10s and The New '20s. Sean himself even more so. A lot of kids growing up with internet access can relate to acting out or spending long hours online because they were unhappy with real life around them and felt powerless otherwise. It makes it very easy to sympathize with him as a Tragic Villain.

YMMV / Mega Man Battle Network 2

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