Come the morning of the Wilshire Hills trip Geo's supposed to head straight to the bus stop to meet his friends, but first I'm going to go out of my way to plunder some new ESes that've been unlocked in Echo Ridge since yesterday. There's the mailbox by the condominium complex, the doghouse in front of Bud's house, and the roof of Big Wave to check out, and between the three we find an HP Memory 10, a Small Energy, a Long Sword, and 400z. The mailbox has a Merchant Hertz that's selling some Sub Cards:
- Small Energy – 100z
- Unlocker – 4000z
- Search Eye – 6000z
During this short little side trip I happened to encounter a G virus. These giant viruses serve a purpose in this game other than dropping double the usual amount of zenny, and that's to drop a battle card variant called a star card. Star cards have a star after their name and they're a little stronger than their starless counterparts. There're three extra slots in the folder for them, and each one powers up any starless cards with the same name. The more stars after the name (up to five) the more they get powered up. So it's not a critical thing to include in one's folder, but it's a nifty little tool. You can bet I'll be popping in any star versions of multi-hitters like Mad Vulcan.
The meeting at the bus stop doesn't star off all that well as Bud gets there late which majorly PO's Luna (the game conspires to keep her in a foul mood most of the time for one reason or another). She's right on the mark in claiming that Bud stayed up too late playing video games, as since they're Brothers she knows him too well. This leads into another tutorial, this one on Brotherbands – the electronic link between close friends. Unlike the previous game, here there are ten Brotherband slots instead of six, with four reserved for in-game Brothers and the remainder for other players. The Brotherband system itself has changed in that it no longer bestows Link Abilities, but something new called Link Power.
Link Power...where do I begin with it? Link Power is a numerical value that's displayed on everyone's personal pages that somehow quantifies their bonds and how well regarded they are. Each Brother one has increases their Link Power, with the increases being larger the stronger their bond is. Sounds simple right? Well get a load of this: this isn't just a gameplay element (what it's used for will be revealed in time), it carries over into the universe as well. It's a literal example of More Friends, More Benefits, as there are lots of perks people can get if their Link Power is high, such as going overseas without a passport, easily being admitted into prestigious universities, or, in Luna's case, get half off her bus fare. So, in addition to the question of how this can be quantified (it bears repeating) congratulations, these people have come up with a society that discriminates against the shy and introverted!
Anyway, Luna and Geo are about to re-register their Brotherband (Geo's old ones were wiped since he upgraded to his new terminal) when the bus arrives and they put it on hold. Why they and the others can't just do it on the bus I don't know (yes I know, Gameplay and Story Segregation), since it kind of undermines the whole bond thing that they don't.
Especially since it takes an hour to reach their destination. Wilshire Hills is a large, bustling shopping/entertainment concourse with lots of tall, plasticky-looking buildings. The boulevard where the bus stop is is absolutely packed with people, prompting Geo to comment that it's a lot like the Milky Way. Zack used the “Zackpedia” (basically his way of stating the obvious) to point out the elevator that we're supposed to take up to Wilshire Hills proper, but first I'm using the wavehole next to it to poke around the Wave World. There happens to be an ES coming out of a traffic sign inside which is a Cloaker, and elsewhere there's a warp that can be gotten to by walking over top some backed-up traffic on the highway below which leads to another Merchant Hertz:
- Large Energy – 200z
- Cloaker – 500z
- Search Eye – 6000z
Upon taking the elevator up two-hundred meters to the main concourse, the group is immediately assailed by holographic advertising for its many commercial businesses. There's some time still until the movie begins, so we're free to look around a little ourselves. Almost right away we're introduced to another new element of the game: Matter Waves. Matter Waves are pretty much just Hard Light projections that people use to create all sorts of things, and in the scene in question a guy's trying to impress a girl with his collection of Matter Wave vehicles. In another part of the concourse are video advertisement screens featuring Sonia Strumm hawking some sort of drink. Apparently she's started singing again, according to a bystander.
Entering the Wave World allows us to access the ESes of two video displays, one being the Sonia one and the other for the Ghost Crisis movie, for another Small Energy, a Recovery 30, and 450z. One of them has another Merchant Hertz that's selling wallpaper for Geo's personal page, this one being the Hertz Wallpaper. It's a useless novelty, and costs 3000z to boot, so I'm passing. On the wave road there's a BMW that's blocked off by a security door that requires a Link Power of 100 to open. There're a few of these doors scattered about the game world, so I guess they're like Battle Network's skull doors.
After talking to everyone, Luna and Zack suggest that they look at a nearby attraction: the tallest building in Electopia, IFL Tower. Now that you're done groaning, the entrance to where the base of the tower is is off to the east side of the concourse, and as the kids are admiring the spire from ground level a voice asks them if they know why the tower is so important. They're startled to see a man wearing a bowler hat and coattails now standing behind them, who the player will recognize as Hyde from his mugshot. Hyde explains that in addition to being tall, the IFL Tower is famous for controlling all the EM waves in the country, and indeed when Geo puts on his Visualizer he sees wave roads and Hertzes swarming the outside of the structure. Hyde tells them to picture a world where the tower doesn't exist and walks away chuckling to himself, prompting Luna to call him a nutjob. Gee, ya think?
We can't go into the tower itself, so it's back to the main concourse and entering the shopping plaza where the movie theater is. Only Bud raises a fuss at the entrance over losing his ticket. In a way for the game to kinda-sorta revisit his character development from the first game he decides to sit this one out to not cause trouble for the others, but of course Luna won't have that. They came to see the movie together, so that's what they're going to do, even if they have to scour the entirety of Wilshire Hills to find that ticket!
Of course, “they” won't be the ones to find the ticket, I will (it's like Battle Network never ended). It's been blown away somehow and is currently resting atop a neighboring building's rooftop. What's more, there are no wave roads stretching out that far so no cheating through Wave Changing. The solution to this conundrum is to speak to the Matter Wave guy from before, but he'll only help if give him some assistance on his girl troubles. He charges us with finding out what the girl's in to, and even gives Geo some pickup lines to get hr attention with. It goes about as well as you'd expect. After being stonewalled Omega comes up with a better idea: to look inside her Star Carrier. In this game we can do that simply by trying to speak to people while in the Wave World, and just like the last game Geo's hesitant to invade someone's privacy while his alien friend could care less. There's a message in the Star Carrier about how its owner really has a thing for guys with high Link Power (and also her page says that she dislikes flatterers, which should've been a tip off to the guy since pages are publicly viewable), and our hapless charmer takes the news in stride, letting Geo have his hoverboard Matter Wave.
Available Matter Waves have to be selected from the item menu screen, and they all have names and personalities. This hoverboard, or “skyboard”, is named Ollie, and speaks just like you'd expect. Through Ollie's coaching, Geo conquers his fear and is able to fly around on it and is able to retrieve the ticket. So Bud learns...the same lesson he learned at the end of the Taurus Fire scenario in the previous game. This ties into what I said in the introduction about this game being rather meandering – it pretty much spins its wheels for the most part as far as characterization is concerned. Not that that's anything unusual I suppose, given Battle Network was much the same way, but coming off of the character-driven nature of Star Force 1 it stands out all the more.
Anyway, to the interior of the shopping plaza building. This place has three floors, with the movie theater at the very top. There's nothing interesting on the first floor, but the second has an exhibit featuring a variety of Matter Wave vehicles, and there's a familiar face here: Aaron Boreal
◊ of the AMAKEN research center. It seems that he's actually the inventor of Star Carriers, and since the shopping plaza sells them he's hanging around to survey the operation. That's about where his role in this game ends. He'll explain what Star Carriers, battle cards, and the like are if you talk to him, but that's about all he does. He'll have a larger part to play in the third game.
After showing their tickets at the counter on the third floor the group heads into the theater to see Ghost Crisis at last. The film's advertised as using “the latest in 3D EM wave technology” (I guess the 3D craze continues its cycle of dying and reviving every fifty years or so) but it's not set up like a normal movie. The seating is situated around a hologram projector instead of facing a giant screen, so it's more like watching a play than a movie. Heck, there're even haunted house set pieces set up around the edges of the theater. All Matter Waves of course. It's the hot new thing after all. There's not much to say about the movie other than that it's an obvious riff off of Ghostbusters what with a “Ghost Duster” using a vacuum pack to suck up ghosts that're terrorizing children (I guess the industry's trend of endlessly regurgitating ideas, reboots, and retools continues well into the 23rd century too). There's eventually an intermission (I guess cinema's also gone back to its vaudeville roots) giving Geo the opportunity to go out and buy a drink from the concession stand outside, thus giving me an opportunity to check out the shopping plaza's Wave World thanks to the wavehole right outside the theater doors. Here we can access a hidden security camera's ES to obtain 550z, and by the elevator is a third Merchant Hertz:
- HP Memory 20 – 1000z
- HP Memory 20 – 3000z
- HP Memory 20 – 6000z
- Recovery 30 – 600z
- Mad Vulcan 1 – 800z
- Synch Hook 1 – 1300z
- Jet Ski 1 – 2000z
Geo can't take the elevator as Megaman to access the other floors, but luckily there's a set of wave roads and warps that provides access to the goodies down there instead. Wrapping up the exploration, we let Geo buy his drink (he also learns that they sell Matter Wave replicas of the Ghost Duster's vacuum) and while he's heading back to the theater he sees Hyde standing in front of the doors. He says something about this being the greatest horror movie ever and enters. Geo's reaction to hearing this is an oblivious “He was at IFL Tower before.”
Back inside the theater it's not long before the projector abruptly switches off and a voice announces that everyone's about to witness a special once-in-a-lifetime show. A masked, cloaked figure is seen standing on top of the set pieces and just as Omega tells Geo that he's an EM being and not an effect the phantom summons a horde of ghost viruses to terrorize the audience. What's more, he declares that the “film's” climax will be at the top of IFL Tower, and since every film has to have a heroine, he snatches up Luna. Luna's damsel in distress tendencies do not get any better in this game. If anything they're worse.
...wait a minute, I've seen this somewhere before...
Shademan!! *fist shake*
Well now that a friend's in trouble Geo's ready to leap into action. The Boodach viruses that have been unleashed have cut the power to the building, so in order to activate the elevator we have to pulse in and make our way to the first floor via the wave roads to flip the auxiliary switch by the information desk. But even so, the ghosts are blocking the way out and even though Geo's perfectly capable of just walking right through them (they haven't actually materialized in the real world) they're emitting waves that Omega says would land him right in the hospital if he tried. So time for Geo to go back to the ticket counter and borrow the Vac Mac vacuum Matter Wave in order to get his Ghost Duster on and suck 'em up.
Night seems to have fallen outside and there are more viruses blocking off the entrance to IFL Tower. Since the vacuum's full Geo has to pulse in and ascend via the wave roads, leading us to our first dungeon. There are no computer dungeon-based levels in this game, every one of them instead takes place on wave roads or otherwise on the overworld to once again strengthen the wifi dynamics of the Wave World. The only downside to this is that the stage music only plays once.
Anyway, the IFL Tower wave roads are basically stealth segments where you have to dodge around patrolling Boodachs, though the only penalty for getting caught is a virus battle. Along the way Geo will have to save a few civilians on the tower's exterior from the viruses, and each time Geo discovers that he's they can see him thanks to what Omega calls the “visible zone”, the idea being that the distortion of waves brought on by the incident briefly allow the naked eye to see EM beings and wave forms. It crops up a few times more throughout the story, and I don't know why the writers had to invent a new phenomenon to accomplish that then it's been established that wave forms like Megaman can already materialize themselves if they wish.
The skull panel and boss platform is at the very top of the tower where Luna's bound at the base of the transmitter and Hyde's standing atop the antenna itself, commenting that Megaman's presence isn't in his script. Well you have to wonder why he went through the effort to kidnap Luna then. It certainly doesn't help his plan to muck around with the tower. You can already see from Hyde's flair for the dramatic that he's not very bright, and he doesn't get any better as the game goes on. He's a little surprised to see that there's someone else capable of Wave Changing (Vega's group doesn't seem to have gotten the memo on the FM-ians) and shows off the device he uses to Wave Change: something called an Ancient Star Carrier that contains an EM being named Phantom (imagine a pink energy ghost with a Phanto mask). He promptly Wave Changes to assume his cloaked form from before, which he says he calls the Dark Phantom. And of course in this form Geo can never beat him.
Dark Phantom
HP: 500
Element: Normal
Attacks:
- Stick Sword – Dark Phantom swipes the panel in front of him with his staff for 20 damage.
- Phantom Claw – Dark Phantom shoots a clawed arm down one column for 30 damage.
Dark Phantom's got the most HP out of all the intro bosses (I'm not counting Shademan because they never let you actually fight him) but that's about all he has here. He has a tendency to occasionally fade away and reappear like a ghost without taking any damage, but his attacks are easily sidestepped and it's really easy to counter Phantom Claw with Mad Vulcan 1's. Even as Dark Phantom Hyde's full of hot air.
Well, Dark Phantom isn't too put out by his defeat, claiming that there will be more opportunities to spread fear to the masses later. He vanishes, and as soon as he does it inexplicably becomes day again. By now a crowd has formed at the base of the tower, and somehow they're able to see Geo, or rather Megaman, from all the way down there. Omega jokes that he should wave back, but his partner's more concerned with freeing Luna, leading to a scene between the two where she says that what he did was awesome, or rather what Megaman did was awesome. But she does compliment and thanks Geo too so, cool I guess. They finally get around to reforming their Brotherband. Luna's Brotherband bestows fifty points of Link Power, and her secret happens to betray her true feelings, that there's a boy she likes almost as much as she likes Megaman.
Geez that took a while. As you can see, the main flaw of this game is that there's padding out the wazoo. On a more positive note though, I recently decided to pull the trigger on ordering the Complete Works artbooks for Battle Network and Star Force, so perhaps next time we run into a slog like this I'll be able to spice it up a bit with design trivia.
Virus Listing
- Hot Roader
- Demonic unimotorcycles anyone? Well that's what these viruses are, and all they do is drive up and down their column.
- Boodach
- The ghost viruses that Dark Phantom's been summoning attack by hurling the top hats they wear down their column at Geo. Like a boomerang, they will then return to their owner.
Soundtrack
- Wilshire Hills
- Even though the main concourse is like six-hundred-plus-feet in the air there's not a railing or guardrail to be seen.
- Atmosphere of Unrest
- Hm, spooky.
- Ghost Rhapsody
- Hm, spookier.
- Prelude to Battle (Star Force 2 ver.)
- It's a good, threatening track but Hyde doesn't really live up to it.
- Wave Battle (Star Force 2 ver.)
- More violent-sounding than its predecessor, and it still has that little intro to account for the camera panning at the start.
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