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Mega Man Battle Chip Challenge

Mega Man Battle Chip Challenge is an odd concept that even more oddly almost seems to work. It’s a game where basically, you set up the peices and watch where they fall. You know those people that say success can be attributed to 10% preperation and 90% presperation? Well, Capcom probably figured that sweating is gross and disgusting, so why not just make do with the “preperation” part, eh? In theory, you’re preserving the most integral part of the experience without any of the excess. In execution, you’re leaving gamers with only 10% of a game to play.

Mega Man Battle Chip Challenge is a spinoff of Mega Man Battle Network, itself a spinoff of the original Mega Man series (ah, those wacky folks at Capcom). With the Battle Network series looking a tad long in tooth (the fourth installment is on the way as we speak, and it would seem that still very little has changed since the first), Battle Chip Challenge was quite possibly crafted with the intent of keeping the series fresh and interesting, although Battle Chip Challenge actually shares less in common with Battle Network than one would think.

Battle Network was a kind of action-RPG with gameplay that wonderfully meshed the fast-paced action of the Mega Man games with the strategic thinking of an RPG, featuring a unique plot an interesting world to explore. By contrast, Mega Man Battle Chip Challenge has absolutely no exploration, has virtually zero plot, and completely abandons Battle Network’s gameplay in every way but the vaguest aesthetic resemblence. In fact, the only thing that ties this title to the Battle Network series is its aesthetic theme and characters.

This time around, the entire focus of the game is on building your deck of battle chips. You do battle to get more chips to do better in battle to get more chips…. and so on and so forth. Except, take out the “you do battle” comments, because you don’t actually do that, the game does it for you. Your job is to make sure that your “deck” is well-crafted enough to stand up against your opponent’s.

Creating a “deck” in this game isn’t quite like creating one for Battle Network. You can only have nine active chips at a time, plus one automatically assigned to your robot of choice and two that you can actively use once at any time in a battle, your only input into the actual fight itself. The nine chips are positioned in a pyramid formation that a path is randomly drawn through each turn to decide which chips you use. This is where the strategy kicks in. Chips higher on the pyramid are more likely to come up in battle. Placing one healing chip on the highest rung of the pyramid means there’s a 50% chance you’ll be healed in a turn, and placing two on the highest rung ensures you’ll be healed every turn.

Chips higher on the pyramid are also less likely to take damage from attacks that target the chips directly. Throughout battle, some types of chips damage not only the user, but the user’s chips, over time capable of destroying the chip, making it unusable in battle. In fact, one method of constructing a deck involves using many chips capable of doing this, which would theoretically completely strip the opponent’s ability to take any action over the cource of battle. With enemies’ decks also capable of this, you also have to consider methods of countering this, such as a “go for broke” deck focused on dealing massive amounts of damage before the enemies’ can whittle away your resources.

As you can see, there looked like a lot of potential for something truly unique and interesting here. Without a doubt, the game presents the player with a plethora of strategic options, and creating the perfectly-balanced deck is something that would require a great amount of skill and tactical thinking. Sadly, far too many problems interfere with this purity of design.

First off is the fact that even behind the “you don’t control any of it” curtain, the gameplay is very different than Battle Network. The chips and abilities look the same, the characters look the same, but the game plays drastically differently…. well, if you were actually playing it, that is. As a result, it seems like a tutorial explaining the new rules would be in order, but any in-game help you get is limited to basic functionality, meaning that players either have to read the instruction manual (yuck!), or learn as they go.

The second problem is caused by the fact that the gameplay isn’t the only thing that’s random. The enemies you fight are random (making it harder for you to anticipate how to build a deck around them), the chips you win in battle are random (and sometimes you won’t win one at all), but most importantly, the chips you buy to build your deck are random too. Want to make a deck with a healing focus? Pay the fare and roll the dice. You might get a good healing chip, or a crappy healing chip, but odds are you’ll get another bomb or shotgun that will do you no good for the deck you want to design.

All of this avoids the central issue: You don’t actually play the game! Aside from the two one-time item uses, you have zero active control over the flow of battle. Zero. If your enemy throws up a shield that reflects all attacks, and your next three actions are massive power attacks, you can’t change them, you can’t even stop them. All you can do is watch your character attack in futility and get the crap beaten out of him as a result. Supposedly the fact that you built your deck means it’s ultimately you that’s responsible for how well your robot performs, but with his actions completely randomized, that control is far more vague and diluted than it should be.

In short, this game had some very good ideas that were outright radical, and in order to succeed would have required the greatest delicacy in their handling. If you’re not going to give the player direct control, you’d better make damn sure their indirect control is superb. No attempt was made at that here, and in a result, we have the finest example of a game that’s completely unplayable by design.

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Tags: Mega Man Battle Chip Challenge

Posted by Jake McNeill on May 6th, 2004 and is filed under GBA Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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