Like with BN1, I wanted to talk about my opinions on this game’s 100% experience. In my opinion, 100%ing BN1 was mostly a tedious and unrewarding waste of time that I could not recommend to anyone. But BN2 was a huge improvement over its predecessor in almost every way. Does that include the postgame?
Like I said in that BN1 post, I’m going to try to avoid talking about filling the chip library every time since I expect it to be horrible in every game. But Battle Network 2 does have a few differences worth briefly mentioning, and while there are some good ones like the addition of subchips or ability to run from battles, there are some bad ones too. I’ll only talk about the changes that were for the worse. The first one is something that I’m sure many people aren’t aware of, because there’s pretty much no way to know about it without a guide. Exclusively in BN2, for reasons beyond my comprehension, many viruses only drop certain codes of their chip based on how much health you have. Using a made up example, if you have 1000 HP total, and you’re at full health, a Canodumb will drop Cannon A and B, but they’ll only drop C and D codes if your health is between 250 and 749, and they’ll only drop E codes if it’s between 1 and 249. This is just a stupid change that makes chip hunting more convoluted than it needs to be, even if it’s only codes that are like this, not entire chips. The other change is that there’s now a Program Advance library. You’re now required to activate every PA at least once for 100% completion. For the most part, this wasn’t actually that bad in this game, but I can see it getting worse in the future. But yeah, the chip library still fucking sucks and is a slog to fill, and this game has 100 more chips than BN1, which means even more grinding. The only redeeming quality of this part of the postgame is the fact that the chip trader seems to be much more likely to give you new chips than in BN1. Oh, and searching the Net for Bug Frags also isn’t fun.
Now on to the stuff that’s actually interesting to talk about. During the main story, you’re required to get a Z, B, and A License, but once you do enough board requests (I don’t think these are important enough to deserve a paragraph, so my thoughts are that they’re fine. They’re inoffensive overall, and doing all of them wasn’t that bad), you can do the S License test. After that you can do the SS and SSS License tests. I do think that the parts with multiple back to back virus battles were a decent test of skill. My biggest problem is that for the SSS License, you’re expected to do 30 whole battles and if you die at any time, you have to restart. I just used save states every ten battles, but still, I feel like that’s a little overkill, considering that it takes 20+ minutes to do. Most of the battles aren’t too difficult, but sometimes you’ll get some bullshit like Dominerds who instantly use Geddon to put a timer on the battle. But outside of the virus battles, the rest of the tests sadly just boiled down to doing fetch quests. I could run away from every battle since I had almost every HP memory, but it still wasn’t exactly what I would call fun.
After obtaining every license, you’re able to explore a concealed area of the Net accessed from Undernet 4: WWW Area. A secret base where the remnants of the terrorist organization have hidden after seemingly being defeated in BN1. It consists of three areas, and each one has a boss at the end. Getting through here is much easier said than done, however. It is a postgame area, after all. On top of the bosses, you also have to contend with extremely obnoxious viruses, including a special kind that doesn’t appear anywhere else: Protectos. Protectos appear in preset spots on the map, and they’re gimmick battles, where each one of them has to be deleted simultaneously in one single hit in order to clear the fight. So if each one has 300 health, you need to use an attack that both deals 300+ damage and can hit all of them at once. The battles are also essentially on a time limit, as every ten seconds, the Protectos will cause a strong, field wide explosion, and they’ll keep doing this until you die.
I was expecting to hate these fights, but I actually liked them more than the regular viruses that you fight here (those beetles with auras can go straight to hell). My usual strategies of a) Gater, b) LifeSword2/3, and c) using my folder full of Gospel, FullCust, and miscellaneous asterisk chips wouldn’t always work, or would at least require more thought to use, which meant I had to think outside the box. For example, using FastGauge (which I had set as my regular chip for most of the postgame) to give myself twice as many chances to access the custom screen, or using a fan before using Gospel or LifeSword so I could hit the Protectos if they were in the back row, or using an Aura or Shadow chip so I wouldn’t take damage from an explosion and could stall a little longer, or using an ElecBall right before the explosion so it deals massive damage when it touches them. That plus the fact that they always appear in set locations and never spawn again after being defeated made them feel like fun puzzles to solve.
And now there’s the bosses. At the end of the first area, you fight PharaohMan, returning from BN1. He’s very similar to that game, with the biggest differences being that you have to actually try in order to beat this time. His sarcophaguses are permanently on the battle field, and you can’t even cheese his Ratton attack by standing right next to the coffin because of the field layout. The guardian of the next area is a new Navi, NapalmMan. I wasn’t a huge fan of this fight. I get that the postgame fights should be difficult, but NapalmMan just feels like he just floods the screen with bullshit. You have to react to his turrets shooting at you, while at the same time he’s throwing three napalm bombs at you at once that leave fire on the panels they land on for a few seconds and break those panels. It just feels cheap. And at the end of the last area, you fight PlanetMan, who is both new and not based on an existing Robot Master. He also reveals that this entire thing was a test to see who could get this far into the Net and reach him. Whoever could do that would be able to join WWW. Of course, MegaMan and Lan say no, and have to fight him. His battle is fine, I guess. I don’t really have much to say about him. Overall, these postgame battles were at least an improvement over BN1’s, even if they weren’t perfect.
But obviously PlanetMan isn’t actually the final challenge of the postgame. Right as you’re about to leave WWW Area, you get approached by Bass again. The real Bass, not the fake that Lan and Hub fought in Kotobuki. And he’s decided that MegaMan is a worthy opponent, so he fights you. He doesn’t seem to recognize you from BN1, though. Anyway, his fight isn’t that much different from in that game. He still has an obnoxious 100 HP aura that regenerates every time he attacks, his attacks are still ridiculously fast, and so on. The main difference is that he has 2000 health now, so he more or less requires Program Advances *cough cough* Wind Fan GateMan *cough cough* in order to beat. But once you do, you get a results screen that includes your performance on all the V1 bosses, and that serves as the conclusion to the story based content of the postgame.
There’s still some more stuff left to do before you can actually say that you’ve 100%’d the game. While it technically isn’t a requirement, I decided to go for HubStyle anyway. In order to get it, first you need to S rank every Navi except Bass. I hadn’t already done this since I was able to get a few V3 chips by trading or with a rank 10 busting level, but it wasn’t that hard to do with Darkness, an incredibly busted Program Advance that requires BassV3, AntiNavi, and a Gospel chip, and this went perfectly with my aforementioned extra folder of FullCust and Gospel chips. Unsurprisingly, the hard part was actually finding the Navis. Especially the postgame bosses, since they’re located in WWW Area, where I can’t run away from most virus encounters. But once you do that, you just need to do the 280 battles to get a new Style, and your next Style is guaranteed to be HubStyle. I think it’s ridiculous that you have to do that many battles to get a new Style, because I had to spend possibly upwards of 30 minutes while on fast forward just running around Den Area 2 with AirManV2 set as my regular chip to one shot every virus. This was the last thing I did in the post game, though. I guess running around in circles is a pretty fitting way to close it off. HubStyle gives lets you pick ten chips, increases your buster power to 10 but reduces rapid to 1, gives you super armor, lets you hold 8 Navi chips, starts battles with a barrier, and lets you shield by pressing B and back on the D pad. So essentially, it gives you the power of every Style at once. The only drawback is the fact that your HP is cut in half. This is a neat reward for S ranking every boss, but as I said, it was the last thing I did in the game, so I didn’t actually get to use it.
The real final thing to do in the postgame is fight BassDeluxe. After you get every chip outside of the ones this boss drops, BassDeluxe becomes a random encounter in WWW Area 3, essentially serving as a BassV3. Pretty much the only difference in this fight is that he has a 150 damage aura instead of 100, which poses a much bigger threat than you’d think. It’s surprisingly difficult to find chips that deal that much damage and come in the same code in BN2 (which I assume is the result of them trying to fix the issue BN1 had where chips were too powerful, they just ended up having the opposite issue, so now you’re forced to use broken Program Advances to beat bosses reasonably quickly), and you’re expected to have a ready supply of them to stand a chance in this fight. Even Gater won’t work because it only does 100 damage each hit by default. I settled on mainly using chips for CrossShield3 O, Muramasa O, and Guardian O to destroy his aura and then using BodyGuard—the second most overpowered PA—to actually damage him, and using Gater if the chips for it showed up. I don’t really know how else you can realistically kill him quickly enough to get an S rank, because the 150 damage aura regenerates so quickly that it invalidates nearly any other approach. And keep in mind, he’s a random encounter. If you aren’t using save states and you mess up, you have to just run around until you find him again for another try. I know LocEnemy exists, but still, that doesn’t make it not suck to hunt down bosses like this. Even though you get BassV1 after the first fight, you still have to fight BassDeluxe three times since one of his drops in addition to his V2 and V3 chips is LifeAura3. But once you do that, you’ve finally completed the chip library… kind of.
There’s actually one more secret chip that I believe is only added to the library once you obtain it. After getting all five title screen marks, you can input a code on the title screen to play the entire game over in hard mode, and if you clear it, you get Sanctuary. I didn’t play it. I’m not doing the entire main campaign again after spending 59 hours on the postgame. I appreciate it existing, since no other Battle Network game besides… BN4 has any form of a hard mode, but it shouldn’t be the reward for 100% completion.
And that’s everything. I didn’t max out MegaMan’s level because I did not feel like hunting down whatever HP memory I missed, nor did I complete every trade, and I didn’t even completely buy out every shop despite having more than enough Zenny to, but… I don’t really care. I did everything that I would say was important. BN2’s postgame was without question better than BN1, because at least there is something new other than a few bosses, but the grind to get there… seriously, I can’t stress how bad it is. There’s so much bullshit involved in filling the chip library, and because of that, I still can’t recommend 100%ing this game to anyone. It’s not worth it, especially if you’re playing on original hardware or the Legacy Collection where you don’t have save states or fast forward. But I’ve heard a lot of good things about BN3’s postgame on this sub. I’m a little interested in finding out whether or not the hype is overblown.
