With the game beaten a shiny gold Black Ace emblem is added to the title screen. The title screen stars no longer form the shape of Geo's pendant, instead just being laid out in a row above the main title like in the latter half of the Battle Network series. You'll notice if you hit the Team Star Force emblem once starting up the game that for some reason Boreal, Goodall, Woody, and Lee have been dropped from the roster, leaving Geo as the only member of the Team.
Upon firing things back up we get an email from WAZA saying that a large amount of inference has been detected around WAZA and to proceed with caution when investigating. Pulsing out from Meteor G and we'll see a Noise tear in the rock wall next to the shutters that lead to WAZA's Wave Liner station that is visible even in the real world. Heading through that will kick off the postgame, but first it's time to take care of a few new jobs that have cropped up:
WAZA Job 5: Bud Bison
Unsurprisingly Bud's problem revolves around food, or rather the lack thereof. His favorite meal, ginger beef if you recall, has been vanishing on him and it's up to us to catch the culprit. Bud gives us some microwaveable ginger beef to set in his room as bait. Set it, go outside, come back in, and the bowl is empty. The only one around is Taurus in the Wave World, and he claims to have seen nobody. Is that so? Omega gets the idea to take some spices from the fridge in Bud's room to lay a trap, so this time we dump enough spice onto the ginger beef to make even the most vengeful Indian chef cry “Uncle!” This time we hear a cry of pain when we step outside, and heading back in leads to us catching Taurus red-handed. He fesses up, admitting that it just looked so good that he wanted to have a taste. I guess he could eat it, or subsume it I guess, if he were materialized. Tangentially, I always assumed that FM-ians/AM-ians sustained themselves by absorbing cosmic rays or something. Returning to Bud and filling him in has him exclaim that Taurus should've told him as he'd have been more than happy to make some extra ginger beef for his partner. He says that maybe he'll surprise him with some and gives us an HP + 500 and Bud's Brotherband strengthens to give us 100 Link Power instead of 60. Thanks Bud, out of all of Geo's friends you came off as the most genuine.
WAZA Job 6: Zack Temple
Take a good, long, wild guess at what his request will entail. Another G virus marathon in his house later and we get a Giga Class + 1 and a maxed Brotherband. Farewell Zack, you were kind of a jerk at times but I guess most of the time you meant well. Putting aside the whole “World Myteries” fiasco of course.
WAZA Job 7: Luna Platz
Luna's job concerns a rumor that if you knock three times of the girl's restroom door at Spica Mall and say a magic spell a ghost will appear. She insists that she doesn't believe the rumor (her thoughts, naturally, say otherwise) but that it's her duty to look into something that's scaring the students at school...or at least delegate it to us, I guess.
First we have to learn the spell, and to do that we must go to school and seek out a girl in our classroom who gives us the Urban Legend item that reveals that the spell is “letsplaytoday.” Creepy alright. Heading to the mall and inputting the code at the door results in a creepy voice saying “Come...play...” and we're suddenly thrown into a battle against G versions of ghostly viruses. After deleting them Omega concludes that they were trying to scare humans for kicks, and returning to Luna earns us the Anti-Damage ability, a maxed Brotherband, and an admission that Geo's very reliable. Well thanks Luna. Your character was kinda squashed a bit after the first game but you were on the road to recovery in this one.
WAZA Job 8: Sonia Strumm
Sonia wants the Black Hole 1 battle card. Handing it over gets us the Float Shoes ability and another maxed Brotherband, lifting my Link Power up to 900. Your character didn't stray all that far from “Ms. Perfect” but you were the most consistently pleasant of Geo's friends.
WAZA Job 9: Rob Sidkic
This guy's got another mission for us. We're to investigate a suspicious individual inside the Cyber Core of Echo Ridge's Wave Liner stop, and it turns out to be a terrorist Mal Wizard that wants to blow it up for entirely nonsensical reasons involving human evolution. Defeating him and reporting back to the officer earns us the third Giga card: Break Time Bomb, the extra-powerful time bomb. Red Joker has Ox Tackle, featuring Taurus Fire charging down one row.
Echo Ridge Job 8: Angel Wise
One of the other two members of the science club is concerned that Woody's overworking himself and asks us to go buy a health drink for him in Alohaha. The drink vendor in Alohaha sends us on one last “find the ingredients” scavenger hunts. We have to find a coconut (examine the nearby palm trees), a hibiscus flower (examine the planter nearby), and snake juice (uh, is that really healthy?). That last ingredient is found by talking to a guy out on the beach. The vendor turns these three into the E-Tank Drink, and returning to not the client, but Woody to deliver the drink (predictably it's quite strong) and then going to the client earns us an HP Memory 20.
That's all of the sidequests in the game. Only twenty-three of them compared to the fifty or so the previous two games seemed to have.
My next course of action was to get the remaining two Mega cards so that I had all of the ones currently available to me. This endeavor took me back to the orbital base where I discovered a Hertz that was selling the Humor Word ability. This is the return of the Humor program from Battle Network and it works the same way: when equipped hitting L to talk to Omega will instead get you your very own comedy routine. Instead of corny jokes you get little skits, so you've got stuff like Omega claiming that he can access Meteor G to learn who Geo's going to marry, Laplace trolling Solo by erasing the save files of the video game he's playing, the WAZA chief trying to test Geo's detective skills via a very poor imitation of Queen Tia, and a confirmation that yes, a lot of people did think that Hope was really hot in the past.
Now I'm finally ready to tackle the postgame. So, you like rematches against super-powerful forms of every boss in the game plus change? You like backtracking? Then this is the postgame for you! Entering the Noise tear at WAZA takes us to Noise Wave 4, where we're immediately met by a haggard Astro Hertz. The guy says that he has an urgent message that must reach Earth: his home planet is under attack by some monstrously powerful entity and that their only hope is their Brother on Earth. Omega tries getting him to expand on that, but the Astro Hertz ceases functioning before he can say exactly where he's from. Geo figures that since the Noise Wave probably connects somehow to the Astro Hertz's planet (I guess they bend time and space now) it's up to them to investigate, and Omega's game.
So, Noise Wave 4 has a relatively straightforward layout; one central path with a bunch of small side pathways that lead to Mystery Data and a connection to Noise Wave 1. One of them has a security door that only opens if you've fought at least five-hundred battles. The stats given at the end of Battle Network 2 put me at around sixteen-hundred at a similar point, so I'm sure I've accumulated somewhere in the neighborhood of that number by now. Behind the door is the fourth Giga card: Darkness Hole, which instantly deletes enemies if they're below a certain HP threshold. Red Joker has Destroy Missile, which hits all enemies standing on normal panels with missiles. Two Giga cards in short order for very little effort; me likey. This area's the first place where you can encounter Dread Joker V3.
The exit leading further in is blocked by a security door, and a nearby Noism tells Geo that it was set up by a “big guy with a blue arm and a red arm” who then used a floating device nearby to go somewhere. Geo examines the device and reads “Transmission Log: Spade Magnes R... Natl WAZA HQ Cyber Core.” Geo wonders what this means since Magnes is still in space and then there's the matter of the R and Omega says that they should search WAZA and see if they can find him as the device hints.
So that's the deal with this postgame. Along the way we'll run into a number of these doors and have to find and refight “R” versions of the bosses, which are in between V3 and Omega in terms of power, to open them. Thus we're going to be doing a lot of back-and-forth before we reach the traditional postgame area. In fact, the bulk of the postgame is simply getting to the postgame area. Hopefully wave forms don't get blisters.
So to start off we pulse out and then find the Cyber Core that this Spade Magnes R is inside of. It happens to be the small satellite dish on the building's exterior and when we talk to him we see that his speech is a lot more coherent than the regular version. He's surprised to see that there's a wave form like Megaman on Earth and says that we deserve to be deleted. For being from an Insignificant Blue Planet. Space racist.
Spade Magnes R
HP: 2000
Element: Elec
Attacks:
- Magnet Missile – Two missiles are fired down two columns for 150 Elec damage. Black missiles briefly leave behind balls of magnetism that pin Geo in place.
- Axis Jet – Spade Magnes transforms into a rocket and flies down one column than up from under Geo's current panel, breaking it and dealing 250 Elec damage per hit.
- Magnet Slash – Spade Magnes creates a magnetic field to pin Geo in place and then slashes overlapping two-panel-wide ranges with his swords for 150 Elec damage per hit.
Yikes, look at those numbers. Spade Magnes R is in a whole different weight class compared to his regular forms. The big guy seems to have been fueled by some kind of nitro-boost rocket fuel because his attacks have gone from being relatively straightforward to dodge to lightning fast, fast enough that you're never given a chance to catch your breath. Invisible and other defensive cards like Super Barrier are really going to come in handy weathering the missile attacks and by this point in the game Air Shoes is a necessity because the less room you have, the more the enemy's going to ream you.
Spade Magnes R blows up, in disbelief that he lost when he had the title of “R”. Even though we won, he says, there will be more R's coming after us and everything will be wiped out by the darkness anyway. With this Geo and Omega figure the door in the Noise Wave will be open now, so back we go.
Aside from the security door being open there are two new things to check out there. First of all we can now download a set of white cards from the transmission device and a copy of Spade Magnes will be sitting next to it that we can freely battle. Refighting the R bosses like this doesn't result in any interesting drops (normally they only drop zenny, and their illegal data's nothing to write home about) but what it does do is increase the power of their GA cards depending on how fast they were deleted. What're those? It's a new mechanic that I didn't even know existed until after I started this blog because the game doesn't explain or mention it anywhere. “GA” is short for Galaxy Advance, and as you may guess from the name is Star Force's version of Program Advances, even more so than Best Combos in the other two games were.
Similar to Program Advances, Galaxy Advances work by tapping a series of cards in a specific order, you don't even have to be able to select all of them, just touch them with the stylus. Once you do so the three cards merge into a more powerful one that can then be chosen at your leisure. For example, the venerable combo of Sword, Wide Sword, and Long Sword forms Great Axe, where Geo swings an axe that has a 3 x 2 range. Selecting a Cannon, Plus Cannon, and Heavy Cannon gives you the spreading Impact Cannon. Some combos create super-powerful versions of Mega cards whose names follow the pattern of Taurus Fire GA, Acid Ace GA, etc. I didn't really use any of them, but high-Noise Finalized folders contain a couple GA cards for free use. You can keep track of your times and damage through a new “record” option on the status screen.
Anyway, onward. Noise Wave 5 is tougher to navigate since its layout I can only describe as being like a chaotic checkerboard. It also happens to be where I first encountered Moon Destroyer V3. Halfway through we encounter another transmission device that says that Club Strong R is inside an Echo Ridge Cyber Core. We'll find him (as he's hard to miss) inside the one for Luna's condo, where he says that he's part of an R network that knows everything. He reveals that his master has tasked the R's with surveying planets to add to his “collection” while Megaman's been targeted for termination.
Club Strong R
HP: 3000
Element: Wood
Attacks:
- Club Smash – Club Strong tries to smash Geo with his club for 300 Wood damage.
- Wood Tower – Club Strong sends a series of sharpened wood spears down one column for 180 Wood damage.
- Swing Storm – Club Strong generates several whirlwinds and sends them down the field for 250 damage. If a whirlwind is generated on a grass panel it will deal 350 Wood element.
- Strong Seeds – Several seeds roll down random columns. If they hit Geo they will drain 160 HP and heal Club Strong by the same amount.
- Strong Swing – Club Strong repeatedly smashes each panel of Geo's row for 300 Wood damage per hit.
Fire attacks are absolutely essential to taking him down in any reasonable amount of time. Delete him before he gets more than one Strong Swing off, because that amount of damage is crippling.
That's that. Past Club Strong R's door is a winding path that leads to a space with a security door that opens if we have Link Power at 500 or above, another very easy requirement. Behind it is the White Fang WE (Charge Shot may freeze enemies) and a Mega Class + 1 ability. Doubling back is another security door that opens for having at least one-hundred Standard cards in the library. Beyond it is a BMW with an HP + 500 and an exit that a Noism says leads to outer space. That's where we'll pick up next time.
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