Surprise! The boss of Undernet 4
◊ is Colonel! Nebula's corrupted him like they did Megaman, except here he seems to be brainwashed too. At least, that's what I hope the implication of his opening line, “So you're the enemy of the Officials, huh?” implies instead of just being a translation error. After getting over their surprise, the team vows to free the area and purify their leader.
There are no new gimmicks introduced during this mission, but the layout of the map is quite winding, so it'll take forever to fight all the way over to where Colonel is. That's where Toadman shines. His ability is called Life Melody, and what it does is basically buff a teammate's liberation range. Instead of only liberating one panel they can liberate five vertically, and this can even “pierce” through barriers and Dark Holes, though it obviously won't liberate them. This is very, very useful, and well worth the fact that this technically uses up two turns.
In battle I find Toadman surprisingly useful, since he's sort of like Shadowman in that his charge attack, Frog Smack, briefly protects him from damage as he “dives” under the stage before popping up in front of the nearest enemy and smacking them for a good bit of damage. Very useful in taking down Bladias. His chip, Shock Melody T, is a little less handy but it can paralyze enemies, which is always good.
Still, even with Toadman's buffs, there's still a lot of ground to cover, so it's still important to plan out ones path so that they can get to the end within the target phase limit. Fortunately Order Points seem to be in good supply, so that's one less thing to worry about here. Paralysis traps aside, this mission goes by pretty quickly if you know what you're doing and snag the keys with Shadowman or Numberman as soon as you can. You can easily reach Colonel in a mere six phases. Colonel's field skill, incidentally, is to hit enemies in range with his sword for 100 damage but since the range of the move is so small it'll only hit if you're parked right in front of him.
Dark Colonel
HP: 1200
Element: Normal
Attacks:
- Screen Divide – Colonel swings his sword, projecting either a diagonal or <-shaped slash onto the target's side of the field for 120 damage.
- Colonel Cannon – Colonel fires a bazooka blast down one row that deals 160 damage. If it does not hit the target it will instead explode their back column.
- Colonel Army – A Rock Cube is summoned to the field. It will turn into a soldier upon the target stepping either in front of or behind it.
- Long Sword - The soldier will slash with a Long Sword for 90 damage if the target moves in front of the cube.
- Machine Gun - The soldier fires a machine gun for 30 damage per hit if the target moves behind the cube.
Colonel's a strong opponent if you let yourself get careless. Screen Divide can absolutely tear through your teammates' HP, and his other attacks aren't slouches either. But, alas, the format of liberation battles once again heavily skews the odds in the player's favor. Still, you want your guys to have a decent amount of HP recovered before taking him down.
Prize time:
- Under 9: Z-Saber Z
- 9-10: Colonel C
- 10+: 5000z
Ah, the Z-Saber (moronically typoed as Z-Saver in-game) is a Mega chip that depicts Zero as he appears in the Megaman Zero series. It lets the player replicate his famous three-strike saber combo – Long Sword, Wide Sword, and then Life Sword range, I believe. The more mundane award, Colonel's Navi chip, has him use Screen Divide just like his charge attack, albeit with the > reversed.
Incidentally, this battle actually counts as Colonel's Alpha fight. Afterwards Colonel Beta can be found towards the back of Undernet 3.
Like with Megaman, simply beating Colonel isn't enough to restore him to normal. Shame too, since this time Cosmoman whisks Colonel away before the others can do anything. Megaman is undeterred, promising that they'll get him back next time. And it's Toad Soul time.
- Activated by sacrificing Aqua chips
- Megaman becomes Aqua element
- Charge Shot becomes Shocking Song
- Aqua chips are powered up by thirty points when Megaman is on a sea panel
- Aqua chips can be charged for double power with the A button
- Megaman can “hide” under sea panels
I'm not really that concerned with Toad Soul. What I am interested in is Toad Chaos. Despite the fact that it looks goofy as hell, the ability to call upon Dark Wide, 300 unavoidable Aqua damage, is absolutely nothing to sneeze at.
Time to check in on Regal again. He's at the Nebula control center again, bragging to a manacled Yuuichiro that his efforts to resist have been in vain since he's finally recovered Gow, aka the Hikari Report itself. Finally it's revealed exactly what it does: it contains research on something called Soul Net. With Soul Net he'll finally be able to usher in an age of evil, the utopia that he will rule over.
Oh boy, a patently Nebula plan alright. While the concept of Regal's plan this time around is a lot more sound than the mess with Duo's asteroid, the game is very...confused about it. It'll become clear later on exactly how bungled it is, but for now not only is the intent contradictory, but we get absolutely no motive for why Regal does anything he does. He just comes off as a no-effort Generic Doomsday Villain.
Anyway...Regal then turns to a bank of consoles and begins communicating with some unseen minions, telling them to halt Dark Chip production and to transmit something called Nebula Gray to a series of microservers planted all over Electopia. Everything will be evil when he's done with it you'll see!
I can't believe I can type this stuff with a straight face.
Virus Listing
- Dominerd
- Returning from Battle Network 3 these door/domino viruses normally take only one point of damage from all non-breaking attacks when their mouths are covered. They attack by warping directly in front of Megaman and chomping down on him, briefly leaving them vulnerable to conventional attacks. Higher level Dominerds tend to stay invisible and guard other viruses on the field. When struck they will become visible and attack Megaman. They use the Geddon chip to restrict Megaman's movement.
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