Megaman Battle Network Transmission
Format: GameCube
Developed by: Arika
Published by: Capcom
Based on: Pop eating itself
Genre: Action Platformer
Media: Wee DVD-Rom
Date: 6 March 2003 (Japan - Rockman.EXE Transmission)
Ultimate Megaman? No, but nice try.
"Plus c'est change, plus c'est meme chôse - the more that things change, the more they stay the same."
These words were once intoned by Rush lead singer Geddy Lee. [1] To prove the point, the band went on to record a dozen more albums, all of which sounded different than their previous records, and yet, exactly the same. For those who are too cool or snooty to deign to listen to Rush, there's always Megaman Battle Network Transmission, which demonstrates the same principle with gut-wrenching inevitability.
Technically, Transmission is the first Megaman title to appear on the current generation of console hardware. This becomes obvious when you look at the high-resolution graphics - no Megaman title has ever looked this clean before. But that's about as far as the changes go; at its heart, Transmission is basically just an old-fashioned Megaman game with a lot of throbbing polygons in the background. The console in use may be an Indigo or Spice Orange DVD-ROM system instead of an '80s grey cart-based front-loader, but you've played this game (or something like it) before.
Considering its pedigree, that's hardly a surprise. Transmission was designed by Arika, the company responsible for the Street Fighter EX series. Their approach to translating the most successful 2D fighting series of all time into 3D was to offer gamers the exact same game, but with ugly polygonal models and off-kilter physics. Apparently this is a company-wide policy, because that's precisely what they've done with Megaman.
The first thing gamers will notice in playing Transmission is that outside of the few limited cinemas, the game is ass ugly. Sure, it has high-res character models and detailed, abstract backgrounds, but tragically, they all tend to suck. The sleek artwork of the GameBoy Advance Battle Network titles is completely absent here - in its place is the single worst abuse of cel-shading to be found in the industry. Klonoa 2 pioneered cel-shading for this genre and was far more convincing than this... three years ago. The technology has only gotten better since then. Someone might want to brief Arika on the current state of affairs.
Wind Waker?, Breath of Fire V, Dark Cloud 2 and Sly Cooper all use the gimmicky cel-shading technique to good effect; their developers understood that to make the look work, the entire game needs to be built to incorporate a single visual style consistently throughout the whole of the experience. Not so with Arika; what they've given us in Transmission is a managerie of poorly-designed cel-shaded 3D models drifting unconvincingly through a side-scrolling version of Rez. Everything looks fine (if a bit oversaturated with color) in still screens, but what you can't see in screenshots is that Megaman in motion is incredibly pudgy [2] and moves awkwardly, the enemies look blocky and display little in the way of actual animation, and most weapons are unimpressive to behold. There's a serious visual disconnect in effect, making this one of the least visually appealing Megaman games ever. Remember, kids, "style" and "consistency" are far more important than "detail."
Luckily for the blind rats at Arika, a game can still be fun even if it looks like it was programmed as a sophomore comp sci assignment. Fortunately, Transmission manages to rise above its dismal appearance and offers gameplay that's surprisingly true to the series' origins - the play feels a lot like the old NES Megaman games, updated to take advantage of the more varied and free-form concepts of the Battle Network games. It's an odd but effective pairing. For the most part.
Transmission's purpose in life is this: to recreate the gameplay of a classic Megaman platformer within the context of the Battle Network series. Gone are Dr. Light and Roll and Bass and Dr. Wily; in their place, Dr. Hikari, Roll.EXE, Bass.EXE and... Dr. Wily. Besides the very slightly different story and premise [3], the biggest difference between Transmission and the original Megaman games is that the power-up and secondary weapon systems are far more intricate and flexible than the old-fashioned "kill some robot and take his weapon, which you will then proceed to use so infrequently as to make no difference." Rather, Transmission offers more than 130 different weapons and skills to acquire, any five of which can be equipped at a time. The game's even kind enough to start you out with 20 unique power-up chips. Which is a good thing, because Megaman's Buster cannon is so pathetically underpowered at the beginning that gamers will frequently find themselves questioning their manhood. "Am I really so pathetic that I can only fire one woefully underpowered bullet per second, thereby requiring no less than five seconds to kill even the weakest enemy?" they will ask. The good news is that no, it's not you, it's Transmission. The bad news is that using secondary weapons - the only way you will make headway in the game - is a needlessly complex and stupidly limited endeavor.
Anyone who has ever played a Battle Network game will recognize the system at work - Megaman carries a folder of 20 different battle chips at all times, and once the "Custom" gauge at the top of the screen fills, he's given a choice of five random chips from the Chip Folder pool to be used in combat. These skills range from the obvious power upgrades (aka really big guns), elemental weapons (because computer viruses love getting back to nature), healing abilities and even the means by which to force another Navi [4] to come whip virus arse for you. All of these elements hail directly from the GameBoy Advance action-RPGs from which Transmission has been spun, and they all translate quite smoothly into the world of simple run-and-jump gameplay. In fact, the battle chips make this the first game since Megaman 2 where secondary weapons are actually more practical and versatile than the standard mega-peashooter.
In terms of game structure, things are a bit less constrictive than the standard selection of 8 linear levels with a boss at the end; the Battle Network Internet is as huge and interconnected here as it is in the GBA titles. This, along with the flexibility of the battle chips, is the best part of the game - an interesting mix of the formulaic 8-bit Megaman level structure and a more ambitious, Metroid-like sense of interconnection. While there's no Super Metroid-ish sense of total free exploration - you have to "plug in" to the Internet from different locations on the town map in order to reach isolated sections of the Net, which you then restore to the main network by defeating the boss of that area - but the huge, continuous game world offers occasional divergent paths and a sense of exploration unseen in any other Megaman game lacking Servbots. Capcom has imbued Transmission with a much more satisfying sense of freedom than ever seen in their previous platformers.
And that makes the overall lack of polish and originality all the more disappointing. As nice as it is to play a Megaman platformer that actually bothers to strike forth from the set-in-stone formula of Megaman 2 [5], the game's parts add up to a disappointing whole. This is due in large part to Arika's numb-wittedness as developer.
Glaring graphical incompetence aside, there's a much greater problem impacting gameplay in Transmission, and it centers wholly upon the Custom element adopted from the MMBN RPGs. In the original Battle Network games, the Custom meter rises rapidly, allowing you to access the Custom menu and acquire new battle chip data roughly every seven seconds. In Transmission, the meter crawls feebly across the screen, taking roughly a minute to recharge. This is a reasonable gameplay limitation on its own, but when combined with a second facet of the chip system, it results in what Warren Spector calls "sandwich gameplay" - that is, dull stretches of play where you're stuck doing nothing but waiting for some arbitrary timer to expire, so you might as well go make a sandwich or something.
The problem is that the chips you can access through the Custom menu are determined randomly by the computer from among the twenty items currently in your Chip Folder. Accessing the Custom menu brings up five new, random chips, in addition to any that weren't selected during previous Customizations, with a maximum of ten. In effect, this means players have to participate in a power-up lottery every minute or so of gameplay, hoping the chip they need for a given situation just happens to pop into the menu by chance. As a result, you can easily stand about for several minutes in front of a wide gap waiting for the Dash chip to appear, or beneath a high ledge hoping to get your Air Jump chip. You'll constantly find yourself killing time next to the portal to a boss encounter for interminable stretches, waiting for the painful combination of a sluggish Custom meter and random Chip offerings to provide you with sufficient firepower to stand a fighting chance. It's possible the developers intended gamers to go roaring into boss battles with whatever piddling armament they happen to have on-hand, but such a mindset would defy anything resembling common sense. Why have such a detailed character-building system if you're either supposed to ignore it or sit and wait for it to work? Imagine a Final Fantasy game where you have to wait for the game to randomly offer you the spells you need for an upcoming battle - as stupid as that sounds, it's exactly how Transmission works.
Yet annoying as this may be, it pales in comparison to the real flaw in the game: overwhelming sense of ennui you'll feel while playing. Once the novelty of the garish visuals and expanded weapon selection wears off, and once you learn to deal with the hassles of random Customization, you'll start to notice that there's really not much new happening here. Entire chunks of the game are lifted wholesale from previous Megaman games - most egregiously in Iceman's stage, which is little more than a clunky rehash of the original stage from a 1987 NES game called "Megaman." Even the enemies are exactly the same here: twin-bodied Crazy Razies, those penguin airplane things and the obnoxious little horned guys who glide across the floor. Tired old genre conventions are trotted out once again.
It doesn't stop there, thought. The same old gimmicky traps and disappearing blocks requiring will-destroying memorization pop up frequently. Despite the successes and failures of thousands of games like this over the past two decades, Transmission seems have been developed by people completely oblivious to progress, and it plays as though a GameCube dev kit fell into the past, landing in Capcom's offices right about the time development on Megaman 6 began. If Brendan Fraser came out of his bomb shelter today after hiding away since 1988, this is exactly the sort of game he would expect to find.
All of which leads one to the natural question: after 20 years of 2D platformers, is this really the best we can hope for?
The answer is a resounding "Um, of course not, moron," as anyone who has played comparable but superior games of this type in recent years can tell you. Compared to Metal Slug 2nd Mission, Metroid Fusion, Symphony of the Night or Wario Land Advance, MMBN Transmission feels hopelessly antiquated. Things like instant-kill spikes, disappearing platforms and turbo death lasers have always been a part of the Megaman series, but they're no longer particularly interesting, and the game doesn't bother to add a single original hazard to the mix . Anything that seems new is simply lifted from the Battle Network games.
Worse still, Transmission makes these trite obstacles irredeemably cheap and annoying: due to the large size of the characters in relation to the screen, less of the environment is visible onscreen at once than in the old NES titles [6]. You'll frequently fail to notice fatal obstacles until it's too late as a result. Several times, I've dropped downward and landed on spikes which were impossible to see before taking the leap into the unknown. Even worse are the fatal energy beams in Quickman's stage, which often can't be seen until it's too late to react and you're down one life. Due to the open, exploratory nature of the stages, it's also impossible to know for certain when you can drop down into a gap between platforms without dying; games of this sort (Metroid, SotN) usually eschew bottomless pits entirely and thus avoid such problems, but since Arika was obviously incapable of concocting anything more clever to challenge gamers, you're stuck making blind guesses about where it's safe to jump. The result is that Transmission frequently degenerates into the worst kind of trial-and-error gameplay, the hallmark of developers who are more interested in gimmicks than playability. There's really no excuse whatsoever for such sloppy design, and this pervasive sense of staleness and carelessness detract from the overall gameplay. It also offers even more support to detractors who think Megaman has long since lapsed into irrelevance.
Ironically, Transmission follows closely on the heels of Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter, a game which manages to completely reinvent the stagnant, boring BoF series in exactly the same way that Megaman so desperately needs for itself. But Dragon Quarter works where Megaman in general (and Transmission in particular) fails, because it displays every sign of a game whose concept, design and structure were carefully tailored from the ground up to ignore preconceptions and conventions and work on its own terms, all the while kicking gamers' butts up between their shoulders. It's a beautiful-looking game with a clever combat system, an involving interface and enough over-the-top challenge to make even the most dedicated gamer puke his guts in despair. Transmission, on the other hand, is merely pukey-looking, and it falls on its face when it strays too far from rehashing 15-year-old content. The gameplay is far less challenging than that of Dragon Quarter, but it manages to be more frustrating anyway thanks to its numerous flaws. In the end, Transmission largely appears to be a rush job intended to capitalize on the popularity of the anime based on the Battle Network series. The unpolished graphics, the lack of unique artwork for most character dialogue portraits [7], the sloppily-integrated Custom meter are all indications of a project for which sales goals and deadlines made the ultimate production decisions.
And that's the most frustrating failure of all, because with more time, thought and imagination (and significantly less consideration given to cross-marketing), Transmission could be a total masterpiece, a beautiful piece of art that serves for Megaman fans in the same way that Symphony of the Night satisfied the Castlevania faithful. As it is, though, the game vigorously milks nostalgia and gameplay from two established franchises, and it still comes off as only slightly above average.
Megaman fans who have found the past few Megaman platformers to be lacking will find a lot to like about Transmission - it's the best traditionally-styled chapter of the series to come along since Megaman X4, and it's fairly addictive for those who cut their teeth on this sort of game. (At the very least, it's undeniably a much more enjoyable adventure than Megaman X6.) But nobody else should even bother. Perhaps if the Megaman series had evolved to this point over the course of 15 years and half a dozen games, Transmission would be a must-own title. But as the 30-somethingth side-scrolling run-and-jump Megaman game to be lobbed our way, it's more or less a rote exercise at this point, graphical upgrade (of sorts) notwithstanding. No amount of high-res backgrounds or crappy cel-shading can compensate for the fact that there's honestly nothing here that hasn't been done to death already. It's precisely because of the countless sub-par chapters Capcom has cranked out every few months for the past 10 years that no one outside of the series' already established fanbase will want to bother with this game. And rightly so.
Transmission is a solid product, and it offers a respectable amount of fun for those who still care about this kind of game. As a one-off, it's a great synopsis of a long-running series, demonstrating both its good and its bad characteristics. But one should question whether such a thing was really necessary; Megaman games aren't exactly a rarity, so unlike, say, Metroid Prime, this comes off less as a reinvention of a beloved classic seasoned with maturity and contemporary sensibilities, and more like "yet another freaking Megaman sequel." It's a pleasant, mundane sort of game that longs to be something great and inspiring - and it might have been, but for Capcom's shameful whoredom.
[1] OK, not really "intoned." But "shrieked" sounds so darned negative. [Return]
[2] As a side note, the entire meat of the game takes place in cyberspace; Lan's role has been reduced from "co-star" to "peripheral guy who gets email in order to advance the plot." For the duration of the game, he sits in his bedroom and talks to his computer, which could go a long way to account for why everyone's packing extra pounds. It doesn't explain why delicate, feminine Roll now has the build of an Olympic wrestler, though. [Return]
[3] Megaman is a virus-busting program on the Internet rather than a robot, and also serves as a sort of digitized soul for the deceased twin brother of the main character. Best not to think too hard about that last bit, actually. [Return]
[4] Not to be mistaken for the irritating Navi from Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Net Navis are programs like Megaman, who prowl the Internet and blow random viruses into component data. A more violent version of the soulless, vacant Navi from Serial Experiments Lain, actually. But with racing stripes on their pants. [Return]
[5] Capcom, having never heard of the Law of Dimishing Returns, has been operating under the principle that something which was awesome once could only be 30 times as awesome if they did the exact same thing 30 more times. This is also the thinking behind the exciting sequel to our 1991 war with Iraq, Desert Storm II: DESERT XTREME. [Return]
[6] This is now officially known as Rockman & Forte Syndrome. [Return]
[7] All returning characters are depicted with pre-existing character artwork. Except, oddly, Yai, who is graced with new artwork; apparently Capcom is retroactively working to make her less hideous. It's too late for me, though. Not after the opening mission of Battle Network 2 involved rescuing her naked, unconscious body from her bath. Those scars run deep. [Return]
[8] That condition being "If there's a sequel, it had damned well better fix every single problem in this game and spend a lot less time rehashing its 16-year-old predecessor." Otherwise, I retroactively redact this entire article.