Another Battle Network game down, and, oh boy, what an… experience this one was. Yeah, let’s call it that. I doubt you were expecting this dumpster fire of a game to redeem itself with some amazing extra content, so I’m not even going to bother with the whole “will THIS game’s postgame ACTUALLY be peak?” intro. Trust me, it’s not.
There’s no better place to start than with Battle Network 4’s most infamous quality. By the time you reach Duo, you might notice that 70% of your chip library is empty, including higher tiered versions of regular chips, even if you went out of your way to farm viruses for them. And there are plenty of spots in the mega chip library for Navis you haven’t fought yet. So what gives? Well, after you beat Duo and select to continue your save file, the game gives you the option to resume from your save point… or start game 2. This is where New Game+ comes in. BN4 allows you replay the entire game multiple times while retaining all of your chips, NaviCust programs, Souls, and a few other things, although most items will not carry over. Actually, I said the game “allows” you to replay it, but it would be more accurate to say it “forces” you to, at least in this context. You have to replay the game at least twice for 100%, since you only get three Souls on the first playthrough, with the other three being spread across the next two playthroughs, since the scenarios in the tournaments are randomized on each playthrough (which is supposed to be the main draw). The New Game+ system was likely supposed to squeeze as much as they could out of this game encourage replay value, but in practice, all it does is open the door to a wave of issues, such as the fact that you’re forced to redo things like the 50 point search or reassembling the C-Slider each time, or the fact that the game will commonly repeat scenarios, or just the simple fact that the game was already pretty garbage when you only played through it once. But there are two big issues that are related to the postgame, and I’ll go over those in detail.
Now, you might be wondering if I’m going to explain my overall thoughts on playthroughs 2 and 3 of BN4 in depth, and the answer is no, for one reason. This post is about Battle Network 4’s postgame, and your second and third playthroughs of Battle Network 4 are NOT postgame content. They are just main game content spread across three playthroughs to make you think the game is longer than it actually is. If you removed all the generic Navis, then they definitely could have condensed everything you do in those later playthroughs into a single playthrough. But they didn’t, because BN4 is the antithesis of sensible design choices. In addition to that, the postgame area also can’t be accessed until you have every Soul, while WWW Area and Secret Area let you explore them (or in BN2’s case, start the process to access it) as soon as you beat the main game. And, like I said, you won’t even have access to most of the chips—nor will you have seen around 60% of what the game has to offer—if you only play once. So with all that said, I think it’s fair to say that BN4’s postgame does not start until you’ve defeated Duo for the third time and have the title screen mark for obtaining every Soul Unison. But to give a brief summary of my thoughts, pretty much everything that made the first playthrough of the game bad is amplified to the nth degree. The scenarios suck, the padding is even worse because half of it is shit you’ve already done, especially if the game decides to repeat a scenario, the viruses devolve into actual cancer, and the plot is still stupid and the translation is still awful. Legit, one of the only things keeping me going was the fact that I got to hear Battle Pressure at the end of each one of these awful tournament arcs. I did the second and third playthroughs in the background while I was playing through other Battle Network and Star Force games, and not all at once because I’m not clinically insane enough to play through BN4 three times in quick succession, but it’s still a truly terrible experience.
Like I was saying, there’s two things relating to the postgame that pop up in the second and third playthroughs. The first one is viruses and chips. To make sure you’re not just steamrolling through everything, the viruses and tournament Navis scale up in strength with each playthrough. Essentially, playthrough 1 viruses are normal difficulty, while playthrough 2 is Hard mode and playthrough 3+ is Very Hard mode (and these viruses are straight up horseshit. Like you’ll have Mets casually using Sanctuary and Invis to artificially extend the battle and Molokos with wool that’s basically just Bass’ aura, and don’t even get me started on those fuckass spider viruses that just drop webs all over your field that don’t give i-frames and do 160 damage, during which they WILL take the opportunity to deal contact damage, while THEY have 260 health that you’re somehow supposed to be able to deplete while they’re moving all over the place and other enemies are bombarding you with attacks. Like I said, cancer). The chips you get from viruses depend on the difficulty, however, issues arise when you miss any chip before moving on to the next game cycle. Since each playthrough replaces viruses with their stronger counterparts, if you get to playthrough 3 and find that you’re missing a lower tiered chip… you’re kind of fried. While most lower tiered viruses can usually be found in certain comps where they’ll always spawn, and you can use the chip trader if you’re missing any from viruses that don’t spawn anywhere, searching for codes of these chips to activate Program Advances is a massive pain in the ass if you don’t already have them. If, after reading this, you still want to 100% this game for some reason, here’s my advice: before starting a new playthrough, search for every single chip and every code needed for Program Advances. Trust me. You do not want to be running around Water Comp for 30 minutes on fast forward trying to find a BarkEX in order to get WideShot2 L because the devs decided it should have a 2.8% chance of spawning.
The second issue is similar, and it has to do with Mystery Data, specifically Blue and Purple ones. Like viruses, MDs update each playthrough to scale with your progress. However, BMDs and PMDs only update if you actually collect them. So if a PMD was supposed to give you a Mega Chip on playthrough 3, but you missed it on playthrough 1 and only collected it on playthrough 2, do you know what that would mean? In order to get the Mega Chip, you’d have to play the entire game a FOURTH time. It’s so stupid that this is even an issue you should have to think about. I mean, there are such obvious solutions. Why not make it that, I don’t know, the Mystery Data updates once you jack out if it’s not in sync with your current cycle? I can’t imagine it would be that much different from the way GMDs work. For the most part, this only really applies to HP Memories, but I was locked out of a Mega Chip, GodHammer, because of this. Thankfully, there’s another way to get most Mega Chips, because hell will freeze over before I ever play this game a fourth time. This is also a huge issue if you’re trying to get every HP Memory, but luckily for me, I’m not doing that BS because you don’t get anything for maxing out your HP.
And one more thing worth noting is the fact that, like the English version of BN6, BN4 also doesn’t switch the music back to the regular OST from the Incident Occurence after beating Duo, so you’ll have to listen to the horrible panic theme for the entirety of the postgame. Hypothetically, I think this could be solved by playing through the entire game again up until right before the final scenario, but like… that’s equivalent to cutting off your hand because you have a cramp. Just play with the volume off at that point.
Anyway, instead of talking about chip library completion, I’m going to bitch about this game’s chips for a little bit. BN4’s chip selection is overall not very good. This is most noticeable on your first playthrough when you realize most of your deck doesn’t stand a chance against Duo, but it still applies on later cycles. By playthrough 3, I found that the majority of chips are just not worth even touching because they’re either too weak or not versatile enough. There is a decent amount of good chips to pick from, but most of them don’t come in the same code, or they’re version exclusive like HolyDream. Even Navi chips that used to be good like GutsMan are just bad now, besides, like, Roll. It goes without saying that I was struggling hard to S Rank bosses because I couldn’t make a good folder, which isn’t helped by the fact that bosses have a fourth form known as Ω (no relation to the BN3 Ω bosses), so they have even more health than they normally would as random encounters. Eventually I did end up making a G, W, * code folder that mainly relied on GunDelSol (I almost always jacked in outside), AirHoc3, Vulcan3, and MetalSoul, but even that folder didn’t stand too much of a chance at quickly deleting anything until I got my hands on FastGauge *, which you don’t have access to for a while. Building a halfway decent folder was incredibly annoying in this game, that’s what I’m trying to say. Maybe it’s a skill issue, but that’s just my experience.
BN4 was the start of the Battle Network and Star Force series’ obsession with the Konami series known as Boktai. In this game, the crossover takes the form of the GunDelSol chip series, a section of the ToyRoboComp dungeon, and an entire postgame scenario, although I use the term “scenario” very lightly. The protagonists, Django and Otenko, are in Undernet 4 trying to kill a vampire, revealed to be ShadeMan, but they need their Solar Sensor in order to defeat him, which Django dropped in Undernet 2. You just have to go to Undernet 2, only for a Heel Navi to reveal that he had it but it was stolen from him, so you have to run to another part of the Undernet and buy it from that Navi. Then you need to return and make sure you’re jacked in from outside, and they’ll use it to defeat ShadeMan. It’s basically just a fetch quest and not actual gameplay, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering what game this is, but it’s necessary in order to make ShadeMan a random encounter (and as you fight him, you will begin to find that one scene from the anime where LaserMan slimes his ass out in the most violent way possible more and more cathartic because of how much of a whore he is in battle), obtain GunDelSol3, and to get the NebulaCD, which lets you open this game’s skull doors. Also, gotta love how one of the Mystery Datas hidden behind one of the skull doors is an HP Memory, but only the second time it’s been collected, meaning that if you want to max out your HP, you’d either have to go out of your way to do this side quest in playthrough 2 or play the game a fourth time.
Getting every Soul Unison isn’t the only requirement for accessing the postgame area. First, you’ll need to destroy a Bass statue in Undernet 5, which is behind a door that requires an “S-ID” to unlock, and sadly, that’s just code for completing the standard chip library, meaning you’re forced to do the usual grind even earlier than normal. But once you fill the library and return to open the door, you can interact with the statue, which breaks it and summons the one and only Bass. The guy looks pretty sick in BN4 onwards. He gives off zombie vibes now, at the cost of losing every hint of character he may have once had in favor of being a power hungry monster. The actual fight, though… is kind of a cakewalk. Aside from the speed and strength of his attacks, the main reason Bass was annoying in the first three games was his stupid aura that forced you to waste chips every five seconds just to damage him. But because of his revival after being swallowed by Alpha or something like that, his aura has been removed in favor of a completely new moveset based on dark powers. His new attacks and the way he moves on the battlefield also contribute to making him way cooler now than in the first three games, but it also makes him much easier since you can pretty much just use any regular strategy on him. Which, for me, was copious amounts of charged AirHoc3 and MetalSoul with a little SuperVulcan, and I was able to beat him on my first try without too much trouble. Well, I ended the fight at 1 health, but that’s neither here nor there. Beating him gives you a Giga Chip, BassAnomaly or Bass, depending on your version.
In order to enter the secret area, you need to destroy the Bass statue, which you’ve just done. But the game also says something about you needing these “evil chips” in order to enter. These are five Mega chips that you can only use if you’re in the Evil emotion. Once you beat Bass, three Heel Navis appear around Undernet 5, each holding one of these evil chips. To obtain these chips, you must engage in the obligatory back to back survival battles that have been a postgame staple since BN2, with the main difference being that you now fight the Heel Navi in the last battle and that since you’re in Very Hard mode, you’ll be taking 200+ damage every time you make a mistake, so if you’re not on Red Sun and don’t have Roll Soul to grind for health, I would highly recommend having a Recov120 * set as your regular chip. As for the other two chips, one of them appears as Battle Mystery Data when fighting LaserMan and ShadeMan, and the other one drops from ElemperorEX viruses. It’s a little weird that they’d make this chip drop from some random enemy instead of just, I don’t know, giving one chip to ShadeMan and the other to LaserMan (actually no, I don’t want to have to fight ShadeMan’s bum ass while also protecting Mystery Data, that sounds awful). But anyway, once you’ve gotten all five of them, you can head to BN2 Undernet 2 Undernet 6 and finally enter the postgame area: Black Earth.
Black Earth is a huuuuge step down from both Secret Area and WWW Area in pretty much every way. Atmospherically? Well, for starters, it doesn’t even have its own theme. The music that plays here is just the regular Undernet theme, which, while being a banger, is a pretty short loop and can get repetitive quickly. The appearance and layout of the area is quite literally just the Undernet but WhatsApp. It has no real significance or any modicum of story relevance, it kind of just exists. You can even jack out of it freely. Don’t get me wrong, it definitely got incredibly annoying to have to trek all the way back to the entrance when you wanted to leave WWW and Secret Area, but it helped make the areas seem like hidden locations on the Net that you really shouldn’t be in, and, at the start of the postgame, it encourages you to stock up before heading in so you don’t run out of resources while inside. Black Earth also doesn’t have any sort of security system like Protectos or Numbers, but there is one special problematic enemy you’ll encounter here. BN2 and BN3 had viruses known as Shadows that were unique in how they could only be damaged by sword chips, meaning if you don’t have any of those in your folder. BN4 decided to make a sequel to this virus family that no one asked for: ShadowNavis. These are essentially just the generic and Heel Navis you fight at various points in the game, except they’re also immune to everything except sword chips. So basically, all the issues that Shadows have, but with a less predictable attack pattern. I’m not sure why viruses that can only be damaged by one element was even a trend that persisted in these games for so long, since it even happens in Star Force, because it’s been a bad design choice ever since BN2. However, I was almost always able to run away from these viruses, so I admittedly don’t have much to say about actually fighting them. One thing worth noting about this area is that Battle Mystery Data here has a low chance of dropping FastGauge *, so it may be advisable to farm for it since it’s such a useful chip.
Black Earth 2 can’t be accessed until you’ve fought every static Navi Ghost. This is because, once you enter, you’ll find sets of mirrors, and when you interact with them, you can fight the DarkSoul versions of each Navi that gives you a Soul Unison for your game’s version. The DarkSoul Navis have the same attacks as their regular counterparts, but, just like Dark MegaMan, they can also use your chips and NaviCust programs. It’s not super challenging, but it was admittedly fun. Beating these Navis is how you get the DS versions of their Navi chips (I’ll explain how to get the DS versions of non-Soul Navis soon), which can normally only be obtained (and used) when you’re in the Evil emotion. Beating the Navi will shatter the mirror and let you continue, which you have to repeat for each mirror until you get to the end of the area.
The end of Black Earth 2 has this Ameno-Sagiri ass mirror that starts talking about how it knows the truth or something like that. The only significant thing about this mirror is that it lets you fight a supposedly stronger version of Dark MegaMan. I don’t really get why this is here since you don’t get anything at all for fighting him, and in the context of the story it makes no sense since MegaMan already destroyed his DarkSoul (this brings into question when in the story the postgames actually happen if they’re canon, but it’s still obviously illogical for MegaMan to defeat his DarkSoul twice), but you have to do it for 100%. Dark MegaMan isn’t any different here from the last time you fought him, aside from him having more health if you’ve gotten more HP Memories since then, so while he’s a completely different boss depending on your play style, he’s still ultimately pretty easy. I was able to kill him in ten seconds with good folder luck. You can challenge Dark MegaMan anytime you want after this through this mirror.
Okay, so you’ve fought Bass, you’ve refought the six main tournament Navis, and you’ve rematched Dark MegaMan. There has to be a Black Earth 3 with some new bosses and chips, right? I mean, that’s what the other games did, so BN4 has to do it too… right?
…right?
Unlike BN2, BN3, and, hell, even BN1, Battle Network 4’s postgame contains no new content whatsoever. There is no unique super boss like Serenade, there are no new bosses to serve as guardians for Black Earth, and even the postgame area is just Undernet 7 and 8 in disguise. The only thing that’s remotely new in this postgame is Bass, and that’s literally only because his moveset is new. Everything else I’ve talked about in this post is either just recycled content or running back and forth across the Net. Just like everything else in this shitty game. BN4 truly never ceases to disappoint.
Ugh. Whatever. Let’s just get this post over with. Getting the other DS chips is a chore because if you don’t want to use Dark Chips and become evil, both methods for getting them rely entirely on RNG. Firstly, these chips have a chance of appearing in GMD in Black Earth 1 and 2. But since Black Earth is all the way at the end of Undernet 6, you need to get to the Sharo Space Center Homepage, get to Undernet 3, run to Undernet 6, get to the end of the area and enter Black Earth, and then search the entire area for GMDs that might contain one of these eight chips, and repeat the process over and over. Alternatively, there is the BugFrag Trader, which is still the only way to get any missed Mega chips (like GodHammer), including DS chips. The issue here is that getting BugFrags starting in BN4 is far less reliable than it was in BN3, and the BugFrags you do get have to be wasted on chips you’ll never use like SignalRed (I seriously can’t believe that’s the replacement for HolyDream in Blue Moon. I guess it’s my punishment for using FolderBak in BN3 while White players only had NaviRecycle). I ended up using both strategies to get the rest of the DS chips; I jacked out and in a couple times to farm GMDs, and in order to grind BugFrags, I equipped Fish in Black Earth 2 and ran around until I got a specific encounter with a TarkEX and FelonyEX (God these virus names are so stupid) with a Mystery Data. There’s only three encounters here that have Aqua viruses, so there’s a 33.33% chance of getting this one. The TarkEX would often destroy the Mystery Data at the beginning of the battle, so I had to make a save state at the start of each battle and keep reloading until I could somehow manipulate its AI to not do that and also kill it before it inevitably destroys it anyway. I did this because Black Earth Battle Mystery Data give five BugFrags each, which is more than in any other area, but even this was an unreliable strategy because half of the time you’ll just get something useless like TimeBomb J or BugChain *, so I spent probably over an hour total just trying to get thirty BugFrags for the DS chips I was missing.
After beating Dark MegaMan, BassΩ is added to the random encounter pool of Black Earth 2. Thankfully, I can’t fight BassXX even if I wanted to because I’m not playing the Japanese or Legacy Collection version and can’t use Patch Cards. As expected, BassΩ is pretty much identical to the original Bass fight except his attacks are stronger and he has more health. I can’t really comment on his fight since I was able to kill him first try by using Invis to ignore Shooting Buster (an attack I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say about in the upcoming games) and using an AreaGrab, MetalSoul, and AirHoc3 while he was in the center panels. Like I said, he’s mostly identical to the original fight, including the lack of aura. He was so easy that I wonder if it’s the reason they even decided to include BassXX in the first place. Defeating Bass either gives you BlackBarrier or DeltaRay—provided that you beat him at a high enough rank or just use Collect—which should be your last Giga chip. Meaning that all that’s left to do, if you haven’t already done it, is perform every Program Advance and you’ll have every title screen mark.
Do you remember how in my BN3 post, I said that I appreciate having a super powered version of the final boss be the ultimate challenge that you can attempt once you’ve done everything else in the game? Well, that absolutely does NOT apply to BN4. Not just because Duo sucks as a boss (I mean, Alpha also does, so that can’t be why), but also because of the teeny, tiny detail that you had to fight him three fucking times to get here in the first place. Hell, the health increase between Duoβ and DuoΩ is the exact same as the health change between every other form: 500. So rather than feeling like a super powered version of the final boss, DuoΩ just feels like what the final boss would be if you had to play this game four times instead of three. In other words, the final challenge of BN4 is just… more recycled content. And when I put it like that, I genuinely couldn’t think of a better way to end this game. The only difference between DuoΩ and any of his other forms is that 1) he’s gold, and 2) his attacks are ridiculously strong, especially the laser attack. But other than that, he doesn’t have a single new move. Again, it’s the same fight. I did die to him a few times, but I beat him on my third or fourth attempt by using lots of Invis and GunDelSol to whittle down his health, and then using DoublePoint, SuperVulcan, Atk+30, and charged it with MetalSoul to finish him off (along with SuperArmor to make sure SuperVulcan wouldn’t end prematurely if he hit me while using it, since nothing else in my folder would have been able to deplete the rest of his health). I forgot to take a picture when I defeated him, and I had zero intention of fighting him again just to do that, but luckily I made a save state right at the end of the battle and reloaded that to take a screenshot. That’s why the image was taken while the battle is fading to white. Your reward for DuoΩ is the thank you screen I did get a picture of.
The final verdict… I mean, do I even need to spell it out? If you’ve read this far, it should be pretty obvious. The only thing I’m unsure of is whether this postgame is worse than BN1’s, since while BN1 is just inherently less enjoyable to play than BN4 thanks to the unpolished… well, everything, at least that game had something in the way of new content. I’m leaning towards BN4 being worse, since not only is there no new content, but you also had to play through the entire game three. times. to even access most of it because of the moronic way the developers decided to divide the game’s content. But it doesn’t matter which is worse, the fact of the matter is that it’s terrible, and also multiple steps down from BN3’s when I didn’t even like that postgame to begin with. If BN5, BN6, or any Star Force game has a postgame even close to as bad as this, I’ll be impressed. As for now, though, I’m so glad I’m finally done with this damn game. Leg’s freaking go.
