Games

am i in for a good time

it will greatly depend of how much tolerance you have. games are great and combat keeps getting better with each entry. exploration can be rough and sometimes frustrating but scenarios are interesting enough to make it tolerable. story is interesting enough even if it is very anime

postgame is really great if you like challenges but it is an incredible pain to reach there because usually you will have to complete every single thing you can do in game, which range from having to hunt many enemies in random battles and beat them with a good rank, to repeat the complete game again multiple times (4th one is a big pain)

i would totally recommend playing all the games but not sure if i would recommend playing the postgame for all of them. they all have their own charm but postgame tends to be very time consuming

Fun games iirc. I cant remember which one I got really into, maybe 3rd installment or something, but I liked the combat mechanics + "deck building" (battle chips, whatever) UX a lot. At some point you can kinda evolve Megaman into an elemental type, all of which function differently with unique inherent mechanics. I loved that shit. Only thing is you have to be very deliberate to get the element/kit you want down the line. I wish you could just choose it. But the idea is its supposed to be a reflection of your inherent style/strats, which is cool in concept.

Idk, I liked them some of the dialogue is funny and randomly out of pocket too

I've played the sequel series Mega Man Star Force instead, but am familiar with common discourse about Battle Network. The short answer is that you'll love it the more you play.

The netbattling is consistently solid, but the first game is a bit bare-bones on that front. It almost always improves with each new entry. Starting in MMBN2 there are transformations that become more interesting with each sequel. Some overworld sections can be annoying or padded out, particularly in 2. The story is cheesy for the most part, but it has impactful moments too. Heads-up, BN2's story is, uh, much more off the rails than the rest and weird and insensitive at times. Also don't try to 100-percent BN4, not worth it. BN3 is most often considered to have the best story.

Also, please check out the Star Force series some day! It has some of the best writing in the franchise and it was woefully underappreciated back in the day because of its altered battle system.

Red Sun/Blue Moon (4) are probably my favorite. 2 was my first, but I never finished it because a cup full of sprite spilled on the cart and ruined it. I remember it and 3 being difficult, but I was practically an embryo so who knows. 5 and 6 are interesting spins on the mechanics, and I don’t think I played any after that.

Hell yes. The first game is infamous for all the internet areas being particularly labrynthian and looking all the fucking same. Also some pretty heinous translation errors. That all improves as the series goes on, but don't feel bad using maps in the earlier games during the "run all over the place in the net" backtracking sections.

Also, save every map transistion out on the open net. The games don't make it explicit, more as rumors, but boss rematches are hidden with invisible triggers out on the net. Usally they're down dead ends but not always. So you can occasionally end up in a surprise stronger version of a boss fight just trying to get from place to place. That can suck if you aren't ready and haven't saved in a long time. But those are also how you get the high powered boss chips, so they're worth it once you're ready.

Be aware that each game has hidden content that you aren't expected to figure out on your own just through the game itself. These are very much products of their time, and lean into the sort of old internet forum stuff with rumors and theories and helping each other out using those external info sources. When you get to the navi cust games where you arrange tetris like blocks to enable skills, there are codes to shrink almost every block that you'll only ever find now by looking them up. Post game stuff effectively requires using guides at this point in time since there aren't the digital equivalent of playground rumors about these games out on forums anymore.

The later games will start splitting content across versions like Pokemon, but with actual story changes as well. Mostly different bosses in the run through the main plot, but there are some weird choices like majot plot critical scenes locked to one version or another.

When you get to those ones I'd reccomend looking for fan patches/romhacks that try to make things more cohesive, and look up the "canon" game of the versions if you don't want odd plot holes like characters refering to previous events you didn't play, or an entire fucking main villian just coming back like "Somehow, Palpatine returned." because the scene explaining it is version specific.

Lastly, chip codes are more important than the game makes clear. If you want to break the battle system over your knee and make it cry, look up program advances and build your deck for them.