Hours played: ~ 3-4 hours
I’m going to start off this review with a disclaimer which is that I absolutely adored the Mega Man Battle Network (MMBN) series on the GBA. This, of course, is going to have much bearing on my review of the new StarForce (SF) games, because they are the spiritual successors to the Battle Network games.
The games essentially operate in the exact same way as the MMBN. You control a human who has a virtual counterpart (Mega Man-style) and you fight viruses in computers while collecting battle chips. There are many spins on the classic formula, though, that both enhance and hinder the gameplay as a whole.
One essential difference that SF has from the MMBN games is that the battles are now in a pleasant 3D, and your movement within this plane is essentially limited to three “squares” as opposed to the 9 in MMBN. I honestly thought that this would be a bigger hindrance than it ended up being. There’s a nice new lock-on feature that can be used at any time with most battle chips that allows you to jump right in front of the enemy and attack as opposed to doing so from far away. This move brings all new usefulness to the sword-based battle chips in the game. Also, now when you perform a counter-attack, instead of dealing double damage on the next battle chip blow, you are instead afforded an extra random chip from your folder to battle with that turn.
The in-battle chip system also functions differently. Instead of having chips with letters allowing for match-ups, the battle chips are arranged into three columns of two. You can always pick the chips in the same column with each other, or you could opt to pick identical chips that show up instead. The chips also appear in one of two colours, silver and yellow. The yellow ones are bound to column rules, but the silver ones can be used in conjunction with any other chip set.
There are only two annoying “changes” in the game that I have observed thus far. One is that instead of just “jacking in” to objects, you now have to discover that they can be “pulsed into”, and then find a central hub to pulse into (to change into Mega Man) to then run around in the overlayed “EM world” (electro magnetic world) (not the internet, but it’s successor) until you can once again find the object, and then you have to use the touch screen (randomly) to pulse into the object. This entire scenario is a decent and superfluous step backward for these Mega Man RPG games. My second qualm with the game is that the main world still has what can easily be classified as GBA graphics. The DS can do much better. They should have AT THE VERY LEAST added some extra animations to the characters to make them seem more lively, but I would be contented only if they used nice 3D graphics for the outer world as was very briefly shown in a clip montage when the DS was first shown at E3.