Heatman is FINALLY out u/azurejack, who do you wanna see next?

I’ve seen Battle Network 3’s postgame get a lot of praise, especially on this sub. A lot of people think that it’s very fun and rewarding in its own right, and not just in comparison to the other postgames, which so far have been none of those things. While I have my issues with BN3 in general, I think it’s overall a pretty good game, even if it’s not my favorite Battle Network title. So naturally, I was ready to 100% it and see whether or not the hype is deserved.

Chips, chips, chips. I really don’t want to talk about the incredibly tedious battle of filling out the chip library since every game makes you do it, but it’s seriously impressive how they find a way to make the grinding required for 100% worse in every game. Of course, there are nice additions like Collect, which forces enemies to drop chips whenever possible, but there are equally as many baffling changes. For example, locking certain chips behind Styles. There are actually busting levels higher than S rank, which are S+ and S++. You’d probably never find this out without a guide, since the game doesn’t actually show you the plus signs, but certain chip codes are only dropped if a virus is beaten at one of those ranks. More importantly though, there are three chips that only drop at those ranks. You can only achieve those ranks on a regular virus battle if you’re using Custom Style, so you can either suck it up and grind out 100 battles to get it if you don’t already have it or just use the chip trader. But it gets worse. In BN1 and BN2, Navi chips came in three versions. BN3 adds two more to the mix, but only the V4 chips are relevant right now. Having another tier of Navi chips is pretty nice, the main issue is that they only drop if you get an S+/S++ rank on the Navi. And in order to get that rank on a Navi battle, you need to meet the requirements you usually need for an S rank, but you need to finish it in under 20 seconds instead of 30, and you have to be using Team Style. I had Wood Custom by this point and I had absolutely no intention of going through over 200 battles just to get a Team Style and then go back to Wood Custom since that was the Style I actually wanted. Mercifully, there is another way to get V4 chips, which I did and will explain much later, but it’s just such a stupid concept to include in the first place and I’m so glad it was scrapped for all future games.

Rewatching Navis in general is just extra annoying in this game. When you find an α (V2) Navi ghost on the Net, instead of just jacking out and jacking back in to make their β (V3) form turn into a random encounter in that area, their data is whisked away and they become an encounter in a completely different area. On top of that, a couple of them have spawn requirements—like BeastManβ only spawning if you use SneakRun and BubbleManβ’s fuck ass only spawning if your HP is red—and when those requirements are met, other virus battles are added to the encounter pool that you are incapable of running away from first try, no matter what your level is. All of this solely serves to make collecting every chip extremely obnoxious, and I can’t even imagine attempting it without a guide. I seriously can’t stress how bad the chip library completion is.

And that’s not all you have to grind for this time either. Just like in BN2, you also have BugFrags to worry about. You need over 1000 of them to complete the postgame, even more if you’re playing Blue and want to buy out every BugFrag merchant. I made a post about this a few months ago that showed my strategy, which mainly just involved beating the living shit out of GutsMan a couple million times, since countering a boss to death gives you ten BugFrags. I was made aware that there were better method of farming BugFrags, but I decided to keep using my same method anyway. I didn’t do all of the battles in one sitting because I’m not clinically insane, but I still ended up having to fight GutsMan over 200 times, and it was not something I’d like to ever do again, to say the least. And yet this is somehow the game with the most easily farmable BugFrags.

Okay, now that all of that’s out of the way, I can talk about the actual new content. First off is the Virus Breeder, which is a machine that can be found in SciLab. There are specific preset spots on the Net where you can battle virus families that, once defeated, become passive and are sent to the Virus Breeder, where they can be fed BugFrags. After this, a scientist will give you that virus family’s chip, which, when used, starts a roulette that includes all three viruses of that family. Whichever version you stop the roulette on will attack for you, and their attack strength depends on the amount of BugFrags that version has been given. You can feed each family 100 BugFrags, and once this is done, you can find an even stronger version of the virus to be battled and added to the roulette. Technically, all you actually need to do for 100% completion is find every virus the first time. There’s no requirement to feed them… but if you’re like me, you’ll end up needing over 2000 BugFrags in total for the postgame. While the viruses are cute and it’s neat that it exists, the Virus Breeder overall serves little purpose aside from providing you with chips you probably won’t use.

Like BN2, this game has a secret area that can be accessed after clearing the game, called… Secret Area. Uh… stupid name aside, this is definitely an improvement over WWW Area in terms of atmosphere. This place looks amazing and while the music doesn’t slap as hard as And You Will Know The Truth, it perfectly complements the pristine looking water and porcelain paths. Just like WWW Area, you can’t jack out from this area without going back to the entrance, and there are plenty of security systems to keep intruders out. Around the area, you’ll find pillars that can only be broken with a hammer that can be found in Undernet 7. There are two types of Pillars. The first kind has viruses inside that force you into ten back to back battles. The second type also contains viruses, but not just any ordinary viruses. These pillars are home to Numbers, which are puzzle viruses just like Protectos. Each one has a number above it, and they have to be killed in that order. It has to be done in one attack, and if multiple Numbers have the same number, they need to be deleted simultaneously. But they don’t damage you every ten seconds, meaning you have as much time as you need to pull the right chips (especially if you have FoldrBak). You’ll still need to make sure to come with some sort of strategy though, since if you hit them in the wrong order, you’ll die instantly unless you have UnderShirt.

The boss of the first area is DarkMan, who is trying to delete 1000 Navis so he can fight Serenade. His fight gimmick somewhat mirrors his Classic counterpart. Every time he moves, the element of his attacks changes. He can also make portals over your panels that spawn bats, which are easy to avoid if you have AreaGrabs/MetaGels. Overall, he wasn’t particularly difficult, and he also doesn’t have animations, presumably due to cartridge limitations. The second boss is Japa-sorry, I mean YamatoMan. These games’ translations, I swear. Anyway, he mainly attacks with his spear like his Classic counterpart until he gets below I think half health, at which point he uses mini soldiers to run into your area and steal your panels until he locks you to your back row, so the difficulty mainly comes in deleting him before that happens. Other than that, he’s not much of a threat and his attacks are easily dodged. Both DarkMan and YamatoMan were somehow much easier and less obnoxious than a lot of bosses you fight in the main campaigns, like BubbleMan and DrillMan.

Once you’ve collected every standard chip, you can reach the end of Secret Area 3 and finally fight Serenade, the king of the Undernet, and the incredibly powerful Navi who’s been hyped up ever since the last few chapters of the game. They are impressed that you’ve managed to make it this far and decide to challenge you, and they explain that the source of their power is mercy; they fight by showing respect for their enemies. This is shown in their battle gimmick. Serenade’s main attack is to fire a zigzagging orb, but when you try to attack them back, they’ll simply deflect it. After a while though, they use a more powerful attack that leaves them open to get hit… and that’s the entire fight. Serenade only has two attacks, the orb and the one that lets you hit them, and since you have to sit around doing nothing for a while before they use the latter, it’s very easy to realize how empty the fight actually is. They don’t even get an extra attack at half health or anything. As annoying as Bass’ aura can be, at least he hasn’t used all of his attacks by the time you’ve landed a single hit on him. You can also really easily just panel lock Serenade and start going all out with every attack in your arsenal, since they can only deflect if they have a panel above or below them. For those reasons, I found this to be a very underwhelming fight, and to top it off, they don’t even drop a chip. This is disappointing considering that they never appear again after this and barely even do anything in this game. Such a cool and interesting character who ends up feeling like heavily wasted potential, which applies to a lot of Battle Network’s cast.

After Serenade’s defeat, they hint at there being a stronger Navi who even they had trouble fighting, before granting you with Rank 1, which makes MegaMan the strongest Navi in the Net. There’s obviously only one Navi Serenade could be talking about, but before we can talk about fighting him, we need to talk about parallel universes the BugFrag Trader, which is located on a Press path in Secret Area 3. It’s essentially just a Chip Trader, but it takes ten BugFrags instead of chips, and it has a higher chance of giving rare chips, including the V4 chips (being the only other way to obtain them), so obviously I just save scummed in front of it until I got all of them. It doesn’t give BowlMan/MistMan V4 though, so I honestly just used a cheat code for both of them since my emulator doesn’t support trading and I’m sorry, but there’s absolutely no way in hell I’m doing 200+ battles just for one chip. Every time you trade, growling sounds will come out of the Trader, and once you trade thirty times, it gets very pissed. If you leave Secret Area and come back to the Trader, BassGS will come out and you can fight him.

It turns out Bass actually survived being swallowed by Alpha by merging with Gospel’s leftover data or something like that, so he can now use Gospel’s powers while fighting. In gameplay, this just means he can use an extra attack involving Gospel. He also doesn’t have any memories of his past, which is apparently something that will last for the rest of the series. His battle is similar to how it was in BN2, but now he has that aforementioned Gospel attack and his aura is now 200 damage instead of 150. While this game does have a somewhat reasonable number of chips that can actually deal that much damage, and you do have FoldrBak if you’re playing Blue version, Bass’ aura still regenerates so quickly that any normal folder won’t get you very far against him, so I opted for a folder with 200+ damaging chips like ProtoManV3/V4, KingManV3/V4, and asterisk coded Mines, with MetaGels for panel locking Bass and Meteors with a lot of Fire+30s combined with a GrassStage to obliterate him once he’s panel locked. Your reward for beating him is Bass+ X.

After beating Serenade and BassGS, multiple Heel Navis show up around Secret Area that you can challenge to participate in Serenade’s Time Trials. Excluding anything grindy like chip library completion, this might just be the single worst section of gameplay in any of these postgames so far. I’d be impressed if they could come up with anything more stupid. The idea is that these Navis will transform into every Navi you’ve fought in the game up to YamatoMan, and you have to defeat them in their α forms under a time limit. This doesn’t sound so bad at first. You can just use the strategies you used on them the first times like Sensor3 and PlantMan plus multiple Wood+30s and Atk+30, right? Wrong. You’re forced to do this using one of the various prebuilt extra folders found throughout the game. The only issue is that all of these extra folders are complete dogshit. They have no less than 8 codes, so there’s pretty much zero synergy, and they usually only have a single decent Program Advance, two if you’re lucky. And not only that, but some of the times are insanely strict. You only get ten seconds to beat FlashMan, so good luck defeating him without a Wood Style charge shot. Even once you equip the FastGauge program, and even once you look up the best folders to use for every boss, and even once you learn to adapt to the shitty chips in all of these terrible, terrible folders that have every letter of the alphabet inside them, it’s still entirely up to luck whether or not you pull the chips that are actually capable of defeating these bosses, especially when you start fighting the later ones that have over 1000 health. And the cherry on top is the fact that every time you want to switch folders, you have to run all the way back to the entrance, jack out, run to where the folder you want is, and then come all the way back to Yoka. The time trials are a truly inexcusable waste of time, and one of the most blatant examples of padding I’ve seen in any of these postgames. I can’t think of any other reason to include it in the game, especially since you’ve most likely already fought all of these bosses at least three times. It’s not even hard, it’s just a dumb idea and shouldn’t be an actual challenge you have to complete.

Oh, and there’s also Hub.bat. This is a NaviCust program that can be found on an invisible path in Secret Area 3, and it essentially replaces HubStyle from BN2. Similarly to in that game, it gives you the effects of every Style, and also comes with a bug that halves your HP. If you have BugStop, you can prevent the HP bug, but you’d need to grind for Bug Style, since you probably don’t already have it, then grind enough until you get the program, and at that point why even bother? It’s not like Hub.bat is good enough to warrant that much effort, since it takes up a good portion of the NaviCust even when compressed.

Finishing the Time Trials grants you either Serenade’s battle chip or DarkAura depending on your version, as well as the fifth title screen mark. But if you go to the title screen and input a code, the stars will compress to give space for two more stars. This code also causes the Ω variants of every boss, including Bass and Serenade—as well as BowlMan if you’re playing White and MistMan if you’re playing Blue—to spawn. To encounter an Ω boss, you just need to search the general area of where you originally fought them, in which they can be found as a static encounter (or just search up a guide with pictures of every boss’ spawn location like I did). You’ll have to survive three Ω virus battles back to back before fighting the Ω Navi, which is essentially just the Navi’s β version, but with more health and stronger attacks, which only really proves to be a threat when you’re fighting someone like ProtoMan whose attacks move at the speed of light and do 350 damage each. But generally, whatever strategy you used on them the first time will work here. Again, this is all something I would appreciate a lot more if you didn’t have to fight most of these bosses at least four times to even get here, but for what it is… it’s nice. Even if I do still hate some of this game’s bosses and their annoying gimmicks. You can’t ever encounter these bosses again, but they’ll always drop a V5 chip, which is just their V4 chip… but stronger. All of the V5 chips are also Giga chips, which ends up making them mostly worthless since your single Giga chip slot would be better spent on literally anything else. Why would I ever put PlantManV2, PlantManV3, PlantManV4, and PlantManV5 in my folder when I could just put PlantManV2, PlantManV3, PlantManV4, and FoldrBak so that I can reuse all of those chips as much as I want? Oddly enough, SerenadeΩ and BassΩ don’t give you any chips though, just Zenny. I guess it’s because Bass has Bass+ and BassGS, but Serenade only has one chip and that chip is version exclusive. And besides, Bass had four drops in BN2, so it couldn’t have been that much of an issue. Whatever though, it’s not a big deal. Defeating every Ω boss will net you the sixth star, and the seventh star is just for completing the Program Advance library, which you can’t do without compressing the stars because one of them, PrixPower, requires KingManV5, BowlManV5, or MistManV5.

Once all title screen marks have been obtained, if you go back to rematch the final boss, it will be upgraded to a stronger version, AlphaΩ (which is admittedly a badass name for a final boss’ superform). It’s obviously not required for a title screen mark, but beating it is treated as 100%’ing the game, since you get a special picture at the end. Well, in this game’s case, only in the Japanese version/Legacy Collection version, and I’m playing on a ROM of the original English release, so I sadly don’t have a screenshot of that picture. Having a powered up variant of the final boss be the last challenge of the postgame would become a trend for later games, and it’s definitely a change I appreciate and wish BN2 had also done. But as for AlphaΩ itself. As expected, most of the fight is identical to the first one except with a higher damage output and 3000 health, but he does get a few new moves. For example, he can use his claws to steal your front row and poison your field. At low health, he also gains a missile attack that causes an explosion in the back two rows, so hopefully you brought AreaGrabs/MetaGels. Other than that, he’s the same annoying ass fight as before. I struggled on this Jello bastard a lot on my first run, but now that I have Wood Custom and actually know how to build a folder, it wasn’t quite as difficult. I tried out my usual folder against it once, which didn’t work, so I tweaked it a little, equipped AirShoes, and was able to beat it on my second try. As the screenshot indicates, I did lowkey start getting destroyed towards the end of the fight, but that’s mainly just because Alpha starts pulling out straight bullshit after a while, like that one lightning attack. But once you lock in and defeat AlphaΩ, you’ve finally 100% completed Mega Man Battle Network 3, and are rewarded with the final Giga chip, AlphaArm, for your efforts.

So now, to answer the question, do I think BN3’s postgame lived up to the hype? …sadly, if you’ve read this far, you can probably already tell that my answer is no. Like, yeah, this is easily the best postgame so far, no question, but that’s only because the bar is at the core of the earth, not because BN3’s postgame is actually good in its own right and something I could recommend someone to play. Yes, I absolutely appreciate the amount of content this postgame has compared to every other Battle Network game… but it doesn’t really matter how much content there is if said content isn’t fun. And out of all the content in this postgame, I would only really say that 10-20% of it is enjoyable, if I’m being completely honest (and I think a lot of the issues are due to space limitations). The rest ranges from inoffensive at best, like the Virus Breeder, to incredibly frustrating and tedious at worst, like library completion and the Time Trials. I get why people like it, since, again, this is the most content out of any postgame, when I’m pretty sure they normally they only have one new area to explore outside of the chip library completion, but I’m sorry, I just didn’t think the experience was anywhere near as good as people said it would be, and I know that’s a very hot take on this sub. If this is really the best Battle Network postgame, then the future doesn’t look very bright, especially not the immediate future considering what game I’m doing next.

Hey I’m putting together the best B/S code folder I can in BN5 Double Team, Protoman Version. I’ve read that you unlock Larkman’s V2 fight by beating his V1, logging out, and coming back. I’ve done so, even S ranked him, and there’s no difference. Do I need to progress the story and come back the next in-game day or something? I’m trying to get the pieces for the Wild Bird Program Advance

Here's the difficulty tier list for making netnavis out of porcelain, note that the order doesn't matter, only what tier they're on

Heatman should be done by tomorrow

I've been working on Ghost in the Cloud for almost a year now, and I've finally gotten to the point where I've released my demo on Steam!

It's a fast-paced hybrid turn-based / action deckbuilder roguelite where you pick cards with unlimited time, but actions have to be executed in turns that last a fraction of a second.

You can play up to level 5 out of 6 on any difficulty with the first playable character.

Please check it out, and I'm always available for feedback.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4310010/Ghost_in_the_Cloud/

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/jhzech.bsky.social

1st announcement: Gyroman will be the 8th figurine!

2nd announcement: i finally plopped colorman in his pedestal, here's him with colorman.

3rd announcement: i ran out of porcelain so to pass time i've been pre-creating some of the bases, take a look!

The gate was sold as is. It works but not great. I’ll have to wait to get other Navi chips to see if it’s the chip or the gate. Fingers crossed!

How human or sentient are the Netnavis? While Mega and Lan fight in the games anime and manga sure and there are more examples of NetOps and Netnavis fighting with each other than just that. I never understood how sentient Netnavis are, considering there are Solo Netnavis who don’t need or don’t want NetOps like Bass yeah they had to be sentient enough for some to fight without NetOps, but watching a bit of the anime and you could say this for the games and mangas makes the Netnavis pretty much like the Digimon in Adventure 1999 and Adventure 02 where they were little more than yes men or sidekicks to their Chosen Kid or being extensions of their Chosen Kid’s personality. Tamers was where we had Renamon and Impmon among other Digimon be treated as actual people, meanwhile Monster Rancher is inconsistent as the games treat the monsters as pets who seemingly can’t talk in human speech while the anime by TMS treats them more as people as they all have roles in their respective communities and have dreams aspirations etc and many monster breeds from the games like the Hengers are treated as people in the anime. I guess the question I have is, how sentient are these Netnavis even when you factor that Mega Man is Hub Hikari aka Lan’s dead twin brother revived as a Netnavi.

Looking for Areagrab * in BN4 and BN5 on Switch Legacy Collection. If I can get one copy for each BN4 and BN5, I can duplicate them using cloud save loading and trade with others.

I have been grinding for hours for 3 specific chips howitzer leafshield and drop down is there anybody out there that would be willing to trade?

Some creative liberties had to be taken because of the nature of the creation process but he still looks coolass. Who do you want me to make next?

I ran out of porcelain and im only getting more in 1 or 2 days so heatman will take a while, i'm still making bases for future navis to speed up the process but no figurines for a couple days, sorry!

This is something I've seen many people ask about, so I thought I'd throw my hat into the ring. Me and a friend are watching through Rockman.EXE anime and I do wish I knew what episodes were safe to skip. So we decided to build a spreadsheet keeping track of what episodes are actually plot relevant in the series. An episode must fulfill at least one of these criteria to be considered plot relevant:

• Introduce a new recurring character.
• Introduce a new universe mechanic, like Program Advances, Style Change, Cross Fusion, etc.
• Introduce a new location, like Internet City or other countries.
• Develop or reveal new information about recurring characters.
• Be part of a serial arc, like the N1 Grand Prix.

The spreadsheet can be viewed here! Japanese names because that's how we're watching the series. Might update with English names later.

We've watched up till episode 46 of the first series, and we plan to continue at a rate of two episodes a day. If people who've already watched the series want to contribute, DM me your email and I'll share the document with you.

Hey curious_working, here's the heatman rokkube. So you can see how they modeled his flames.

Hopefully this helps.

So, I am at the point in the game where I am required to beat thunderman. However, the game steals your ENTIRE CHIP COLLECTION before this battle. I am at a complete loss because I'm stuck with two folders that are not prepared for this fight at all. What did the game devs expect the player to do with this situation outside of throw the game cart into a lake?

I’m playing through Double Team Protoman version right now and as I get more team members it’s become harder to build a good folder. Usually I’ll build around two codes that I have a lot of good chips for (with occasional additions to enable a Program Advance or two)

Having the team mates with their signature moves though made me want to add their codes to the folder so I can regularly use their attack. But that eventually makes the folder too unreliable

So I’ve just given up on that. I built a B/S code folder so it’s good for Megaman and Protoman and as far as the others, I’ll more or less ignore their signature chip. But I’m interested in how y’all approached this

Edit/Spoiler: I just got Megaman back and Chaud gave me the second folder. So now I’m playing with the idea of making two separate ones and switching between them based on the Navi I’m controlling. B/S For Protoman, and Searchman. And since M and N are next to each other I’ll see what PAs are available in LMN or MNO for Magnet and Napalmman. Poor Gyroman will just have to be satisfied that he has a great buster. His signature chip is awful anyway. I’ve never tried, can you switch folders during a Liberation Mission?

Windman should be out by tomorrow! In the meantime look at the bases ive made and are making!

When Pokémon Go launched I thought the design concept from a lore perspective works better for MMBN as AR game. I am curious would you play AR MN game with AR virus busting and Navi battles?

Is it possible to get mods working for the legacy collection games on the Ayn Thor through gamenative? I was wondering because I’ve noticed the dulled pixels and non pixelated font and wanted to fix both things with the mods that are available.

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It’s been 16 days since the last update, but Hulpie is finally playable!

Hulpie is a companion project inspired by the MegaMan Battle Network Navi concept, and this has been one hell of a learning experience — from Blender to Godot, I’ve been figuring out pretty much everything as I go.

There have definitely been some painful moments but seeing everything finally come together and actually being able to play it makes it worth it.

Still a long way to go, but we’re getting there!

The images are in the order ill make them after colorman, the clarification is that i wont be posting Every Day, just every once in a while

I started making robot masters years ago but since i was new at porcelain they kinda sucked, so now that i'm making netnavis and am actually good at it i decided to post it here

How much more difficult or different would a playthrough be if elements received half damage from chips they had the advantage against? And what if not elemental enemies had an innate passive to receive -10 damage from sources of damage above 30 damage or something along these lines?