Mega Man Battle Network 5: Double Team (DS)

While it may be true that Mega Man Battle Network 5: Double Team is merely just an enhanced version of a GBA game that was released a few months earlier, it's also impossible to deny that all of the added map, touch-screen, and Wi-Fi features make the DS game easier to play, and ultimately more enjoyable. If you haven't yet given Capcom's Mega Man-themed role-playing-game franchise a try, now might be the time to finally cut your teeth. And, if you're a longtime fan, you'll appreciate all of the improvements, not to mention the ability to unlock bonuses and transfer chip folders by inserting previous Mega Man Battle Network games into the system's GBA slot.

Battle Network 5 on the DS packages together the two versions of the GBA game, but also includes a number of beneficial DS-specific upgrades.

For the uninitiated, the Mega Man Battle Network series combines traditional role-playing with action-oriented combat. The central idea is that the real world and cyberspace exist as two separate universes. A young boy named Lan wanders around and interacts with people and places in the real world, while his souped-up cell phone, a Navi named Mega Man, explores cyber dungeons in the virtual world and partakes of random battles against evil Navis (called viruses). Often, the things you do in cyberspace will unlock doors or activate machines in the real world, and vice versa. Combat isn't turn-based, like it usually is in role-playing games. Instead, battles happen in real time on a 6-by-3 grid that's split evenly into player and enemy areas. Naturally, you want to deplete their health meters before they obliterate yours.

The unique thing about combat in the Mega Man Battle Network games is that Mega Man's attacks are randomly decided by drawing tiny cards known as battle chips. Five chips are selected at the beginning of each battle, and when they're used, others are drawn to take their places. Some chips are better against certain types of enemies, and some can dole out damage to a whole swath of grid squares. Multiple attacks can be chained together by using chips with the same name or letter designation, and some chips can be combined to create stronger attacks. You can only bring 30 chips into battle with you, so that's where most of the game's strategy comes from: collecting, organizing, and storing useful battle chips in your active folder. In all, there are nearly 300 unique chips to find and collect.

Similar to how Ruby and Sapphire introduced multiple Pokemon battles to Nintendo's Pokemon franchise, Mega Man Battle Network 5 introduces the ability to alternate between and control multiple Navis (in addition to Mega Man) in cyberspace battles and during so-called "liberation" missions. The main difference between the two situations is that you can only bring two other Navis besides Mega Man into cyberspace, whereas in liberation missions you can control as many as six. Liberation missions are basically just turn-based variations of cyberspace levels. Each level is filled with dark panels that block your way to the boss. By using the Navis on your team, your goal is to liberate dark panels until you clear a path. Each dark panel contains a group of viruses--so battles aren't random--but you can only liberate one panel per turn with each Navi. Once all your Navis have been used, your turn ends, and the boss gets its chance to heal its minions or conjure new viruses to stand in your way.

Mega Man Battle Network 5 improves upon Mega Man Battle Network 4 in a myriad of other ways, too. Many of the dungeons in cyberspace now include puzzles and side games, instead of just leading the player toward the exit with a constant flurry of random battles. Battle arenas have a wider variety of terrain, such as rocks and leafy vegetation, and some arenas are split so that enemies are on the left and right sides of the screen while Mega Man is in the middle. Most importantly, dark chips have been made easier to find and use. Dark chips are powerful attack chips that can cause Mega Man to lose HP or turn evil if he uses them too frequently. There are twice as many dark chips now, and they can be collected and put into folders just like regular chips. Previously, the CPU would occasionally just insert a random dark chip into the deck during a battle. It's also possible now to combine a dark chip with a soul Navi chip in order to activate a soul unison attack, which doesn't reflect negatively on Mega Man's HP or personality. Taken together, these changes give players more leeway to collect and use dark chips.

Although mainly a role-playing game, Mega Man's combat takes place in real time on a 6-by-3 grid.

Like most RPGs, Mega Man Battle Network 5 is primarily a dungeon crawler. You'll spend most of your time in the game traveling through cyberspace areas in search of the enemies you need to defeat and items you need to collect in order to advance the story along. The inclusion of multiple Navi battles, liberation missions, and more side games makes that journey livelier than it was in previous games. But the core gameplay still involves a lot of back-and-forth travel and frequent, randomly occurring battles. Like in similarly designed RPGs, the roughly 30-hour trek through the game does feel tedious at times. And, like in any other similarly designed RPG, the story and characters make up for the game's repetitive hands-on aspects. On the one side, you have a group called Nebula trying to take over the world by cornering the market on dark chips. On the other side, you have Lan and his friends trying to stop them. In the middle, you have familiar characters like Mega Man, Protoman, Guts Man, and so forth. If you enjoy the Mega Man universe, you should have enough steam to slog through the game from beginning to end without burning out on cyberspace dungeons.

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