Before I get started, I'd just like to inform everyone that the other night I spent like three straight hours trying to S-rank Gridman Beta so that I could get his DS chip with my crappy alphabet soup in-game folder. Why did I not just wait until I built one specifically for S-ranking? Stubbornness, that's all. At least I succeeded in the end, with a nice stack of ninety-nine Gridman Navi chips to use as Chip Trader fodder.
Now, back to our regularly-scheduled program. Heading through the point-of-no-return secret door brings Lan to the Soul Server room, where he's finally reunited with his father. Yuuichiro's captivity hasn't left him in the best of shape, but he urges Lan to stop Regal (who's now at a control panel atop Soul Server itself) before he activates Soul Net. Oh, and Baryl and the other members of Team Colonel are there too, apparently having changed their minds regarding staying behind.
Well, it's too late, because Regal activates Soul Net, represented by a green grid being overlaid over the area. Immediately our teammates start exhibiting negative emotions – not just anger but also doubt, sadness, and confusion. Just like before, Lan is unaffected by it, and here is where we're supposed to learn that the amulet Lan has is made from magnometal, the only thing that can block the Soul Net signal. Regal's got some too, which is why he isn't going crazy either. Getting over himself, Regal brandishes a CD (as flash drives weren't that ubiquitous yet back in 2004) and says that this contains Nebula Gray, the program that he shall use to corrupt people's souls. Wait, if he hasn't installed Nebula Gray yet, than why's everyone already going bonkers?
That said though, I do kinda like the image of Regal with the CD, since it serves as a reminder that all of these super-advanced AI Navis and giant Cyberworld kaiju are still just man-made computer programs like any other. Well not quite like “any other”, but you get the picture. Anyway, he puts the CD in, and Lan jacks in to Soul Server.
Just like how Soul Server looks like giant metal brain, its Cyberworld contains lots of brains marinating inside of glass cubes. Heading forward Megaman finds himself surrounded by purple flames. Surprise! The four Darkloids are back!
Surprise! Our teammates come back too, Megaman's voice “guiding” them out of the Dark Galaxy. Colonel and posse square off against three of them, while Roll, Gutsman, and Glyde finally do something in this game by stopping Blizzardman. We're free to move up, where Megaman finds a blue ball of flame floating in front of a gigantic portal. This is Nebula Gray, Regal explains. He claims that it's a digitized evil human soul, which given the Pulse Transmission System isn't too far-fetched for the series. Just imagine that this “soul” is just made up of the brainwave data created from negative emotions. The whole dark power stuff was human in origin, what a surprise. Regal goes on another one of his “hate breeds hate, hate is perpetual” tirades before a mass of purple flames come out of the portal and coalesce to form an apparition of a chained giant. Our final boss, folks.
Nebula Gray
◊
HP: 2000
Element: Normal
Attacks:
- Black Prominence – A small stream of flame will leap from one panel to another for 80 damage.
- Grave Fire – Nebula Gray shoots a small fireball on to Megaman's side of the field, upon which fire will temporarily follow him around, dealing 100 damage on contact.
- Dark Sword – Megaman DS appears and swings a 2 x 3 sword for 100 damage.
- Dark Thunder – Megaman DS appears and fires a large ball of electricity that homes in on Megaman, paralyzing him and dealing 80 Elec damage on contact.
- Dark Meteor – Megaman DS appears and meteors randomly fall on the field for 100 Fire damage per hit.
- Dark Lance – Megaman DS appears and sharpened shoots of bamboo stab Megaman's back column for 100 Wood damage.
- Hellfire Serpent – Nebula Gray turns into a dragonlike form and smashes into Megaman's area, damaging a 3 x 3 area for 100 damage and cracking the affected panels.
- Thousand Hand Death – A volley of hands fire out of the portal, draining away 90 HP and healing Nebula Gray by the same amount.
For this battle I find it essential to have either Float Shoes or Air Shoes installed as Nebula Gray has many tracking moves and if the field gets damaged, which it will, you're gonna be out of luck. So, keep moving.
Nebula Gray's weak point is the blue flame which circles clockwise around the main body. Since it's moving, using Knight Soul to power up Drill Arm chips is my preferred strategy in this battle. It can't be pushed back and it won't flinch, so doing so lets you get a lot of hits in with the drill. It also helps that Drill Arm is fast, so you won't be a sitting duck for one of Nebula Gray's other attacks while Megaman's standing in place.
A final thing to note with Nebula Gray is that, like Duo, he can't be hit with attacks that need panels to land on/travel across since the back two columns of his field are empty. Oddly enough, the Quake series of chips still work though.
Nebula Gray's body explodes but the portal and flame remain. Regal laughs about how it's impossible to defeat dark power as purple fire streams out of the portal and smothers Megaman. Yes, Regal's trying to take over Megaman again, since that worked out so well last time. Though I do suppose trying to corrupt him straight from the source instead of using a Dark Chip proxy would be more effective. Encouraging words are useless at any rate, so Lan resorts to taking off the magnometal amulet, thereby making his soul join Soul Net so that he can directly reach Megaman that way. This is far less dramatic than it sounds.
Regal poo-poos this, saying that there's no chance that Lan will reach his Navi since all of the world's souls are part of the network (Soul Net is supposed to be global, but if it weren't for that line you'd forget easily). Of course he's underestimating them, especially as Lan invokes Hub's name for the first time since Battle Network 3. This causes, well...I suppose such a high rate of Full Synchro that Megaman emerges from the flames not as his normal self, but with the visage of Hub Hikari had he not died (imagine Lan with Yuuichiro's hair only messier). With a wave of his hand he seals Nebula Gray away in some kind of metal ball (magnometal?). Lan thanks Hub and Megaman's appearance returns to normal.
That sequence is immediately shown to be completely pointless for the Nebula Gray flame immediately breaks out of the sphere and attacks Megaman again. This time it's Colonel that saves the day, leaping in front of Megaman to block the flame. He urges Megaman to fire, but he's too drained. So Colonel calls upon all our allied Navis assembled behind us to pour as much power as they can into their souls. They're all connected via Soul Net, so this doesn't require any more rationalization. Also, Colonel was the one to do this in Team Protoman too, so he's pulling double duty here in his own version. Megaman is energized by this, enough to finally destroy Nebula Gray once and for all with a well-placed buster shot.
In the real world Soul Server starts to explode while Regal stands in befuddlement, defeated at last. Only upon seeing Baryl does he react to anything, and it's here where we learn that Baryl's basically Netopia's head Official. He says that it was due to a “certain someone's” request that he put together Team Colonel with the ultimate goal of destroying Soul Server, and that it's destruction is bringing the volcano to life. Everyone leaves, but Yuuichiro insists on staying behind for a bit to speak with Regal personally.
Once they're alone, Yuuichiro's speech is that, simply put, Soul Net as a concept embodies the hope for an ideal world that each generation passes on to the next. Regal tries to poke a hole in that by pointing out that Dr. Wily was his father, but Yuuichiro does mention that perhaps deep down he still had hope for the world since he never tried to use Soul Net to do evil. I find this whole segmentto be incredibly confused since once Yuuichiro says his bit and passes out from...I dunno, the heat maybe, Regal suddenly has an epipthany regarding the next generation being the world's future and realizes that he was wrong the whole time.
Bwah? This would work, maybe, if Regal's character had actually been explored or given even the slightest bit of motivation beyond being a Generic Doomsday Villain. Like, believing that Humans Are Bastards and wanting to bring about a world where people embrace their inner evil because he feels that that's their true nature through-and-through. Basically like he was running Tadashi's and Wily's old dream through his own perverted filter.
Well, as the game stumbles awkwardly to the finish line, there's one more fellow who makes an appearance. Out of freaking nowhere Wily
◊ (he has a different design than he used to, but I haven't found any clean art of it. You can see it here
◊, at least) himself simply strides right into the room, I guess because whoever wrote the game realized that they had never really played up the Wily-Regal connection and realized that this was their last chance. I'm not even going to go into the issues surrounding Wily surviving the events of the third game – we've already been over that sort of territory enough already.
With a single word Wily gets Soul Server to restart and reveals why he's here: to use Soul Net to erase Regal's memories so that he can start over. This whole scene strikes me as being out of character, but he at least does provide some justification by saying that he didn't raise Regal right. That line is the deepest the game goes into their relationship. Regal insists that Soul Net can't do anything since he has magnometal but soon enough he's clutching his head in agony and collapses. Soul Server then continues to self-destruct, and Baryl comes back to take custody of Regal. Yeah, Wily's the one that tasked him with taking Regal down. We'll learn why in the next game. This scene is mostly exclusive to Team Colonel, BTW. Wily's appearance is omitted from Team Protoman, so in that game Soul Net just kind of spontaneously erases Regal's memories all by itself.
Cut to SciLab Mission Control, where the team is fully assembled and Baryl and Yuuichiro announce that Nebula has been completely shut down and the Dark Chips are being recovered. Finally, the main story is free of the hokey dark power. Oh, and Yuuichiro's also here to announce that Dr. Regal's going to be working at SciLab now, and the man himself enters and obliviously introduces himself to everyone. The image is hilarious because the developers didn't even bother to say, revert his design back to what it was in Battle Network 4, so he still looks like a megalomaniac. At least in Double Team they game him a new mugshot that looks more benevolent rather than a scowl.
Anyway, Baryl officially dismisses the team and they all depart with their heads held high. When it's Baryl's turn to leave Lan asks if they'll ever meet again, to which Baryl that since everyone's interlinked they can meet at any time. After he's gone Lan's reunited with Dex, Yai, and Mayl again, and Lan decides to show them around the ACDC Vision Burst. And so, the scene ends with the traditional jack-in sequence. The credits roll, and there's not really much that's notable about them other than that if you tap the touch screen Gow will run over to that point. Oh, and it seems that Lan's voice clips were provided by Mark Gatha, the voice of X in the later X series games. How about that.
After the credits the final, final scene shows Megaman introducing Gutman, Roll, and Glyde to the ACDC Vision Burst, where they're reunited with Gow, who's made it through everything okay after all. Yuuichiro calls everyone up to invite them to a party the Hikaris are throwing to celebrate his return, and everyone jacks out.
That's the end of the main game. It's last five hours or so were somewhat problematic, but it was overall a pretty good game, and hey, at the very, very least you can say that it was better than Battle Network 4. Next up is the postgame, which is thankfully quite a bit longer than 4's. I certainly won't be able to fit it all into a single update like I did then!
Soundtrack
- Vs. Nebula Gray
(DS)
- My second-favorite final boss track in the series after Alpha's.
- Chain of Wish (DS)
- If you listen closely, you can hear a reprisal of the series's main theme.
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