Mega Man Battle Network série

What if Mega Man weren't a combat robot but a program living in the depths of the internet? It's precisely on this idea that Mega Man Battle Network rests — an alternate universe in which Capcom took the classic brand and turned it into one of the most addictive action RPGs on the Game Boy Advance.

In this world you're an ordinary boy named Lan, and your partner is a NetNavi called MegaMan.EXE, whom you send into the interconnected network to carry out tasks and fight. The story combines everyday life with adventure in cyberspace and builds a surprisingly rich, distinctive world with its own mythology.

The heart of the game is an utterly unique battle system. Fights take place in real time on a 3×3 grid, across which MegaMan moves, dodges attacks and returns them. Your ammunition meanwhile is assembled from a deck of Battle Chips — cards with various attacks and effects that you put together both before each clash and during it. It's a clever mix of an action reflex game and deckbuilding, without any real equivalent.

Building the deck, hunting for rare chips and optimizing your strategy make Battle Network an incredibly addictive affair. You collect, combine, tune — and before you know it, hours have vanished. The series comprises six main installments, and each develops the mechanics and story further.

In Japan, Battle Network became a genuine phenomenon, accompanied by an anime and a whole multimedia machine. For many players it was a gateway to the RPG genre altogether, and today the series belongs among the most distinctive things the GBA offered from the Capcom workshop.

Why play it: An original mix of grid-based action and deckbuilding in a cleverly built cyber-world — a huge, addictive and unmistakable series.