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I admit, I've never played many Megaman games other than the Star Force series, but the Battle Network looks very similar to it's gameplay. I'm actually pretty interested in this now.

Scorpio Rat: Battle Network is the predecessor to the Star Force series, and they may even be in continuity with each other (I personally think they are, but don't quote me on that).

They definitely are. There's a little sidequest in the second game that reveals that Lan was responsible for Star Force's Brother Band system. You can also see PE Ts located in the junkyard in the first game.

After seeing this liveblog, I decided to start replaying the MMBN series. One oddity in the first game is that text shown while investigating things doesn't end with a period, which felt rather strange. Just started up the second game, and it's fixed... Well, that was nice and unrelated

I'm willing to cut the devs some slack for this game. They had two big things working against them: First, they were remaking the setting from almost scratch, so they couldn't rely all that much on the Classic, X, Legends, or the soon-to-be-released Zero timelines (in other words, they were making up the setting as they went here). Second, this was the first Mega Man RPG (which meant they were making up the gameplay as they went along).

For those of you who haven't played the games, the bad guys in Battle Network have a high chance of either A, having a lousy disguise, B, preforming a Heel Face Turn, or C, both.

And yeah, Program Advances in BN 1 were hard to use; too many relied on the letter codes or chip types matching (for instance, the most basic PA in BN 1 is Cannon A, Cannon B, Cannon C; the second most basic was a same-coded Sword/Wide Sword/Long Sword). Admittedly this is partly the fault that BN 1 was in love with coded chips; as you go further along in the series, the universal *-coded chips became more common to the point that BN 6 drops the code system entirely.

For those of you who don't want to wait for this to be explained in this LP (and don't have issues with spoilers) EDIT: Okay, apparently spoiler tags don't work here. The information is on the work page for the series, look for it there.

Also, BN 1 is the only game in the series to use the armor system; every other game uses either the Style Change system or the Double Soul system to give Mega Man an elemental alignment.

Interesting note on future games: They figured out the Chip Trader exploit before BN 2; starting in that one, the game saves after you use a Trader. Admittedly, save stating using an emulator might get around that, but that really wasn't an option for the average player back then.

Interestingly enough, Lan really shouldn't be on/getting the Officials mailing list due to the whole "not being an Official Netbattler" thing. Of course, by the end of the game, he has enough influence between his dad and Chaud that even if they found out he was on it, they wouldn't do anything about it.

And then BN 2's early plot comes along and Lan passes a test to become an Official anyways...

Yeah, one of the nice things in BN 1 was (in my opinion) the After Combat Recovery; even though I rarely needed to use them, I still rather disliked the Sub-chip system in every other main-series BN game.

Incidentally, I define "main-series" for the Battle Network series as the 10 GBA games (1, 2, and the two versions each of 3-6) and Double Team DS for the DS (which was simply both versions of 5 stuck on a single Game Card and then given some tweaks to allow the use of the lower screen, the GBA slot, some bug fixes, adding a second save slot, and finally allowing the two "games" to talk to each other without needing a second Game card and DS). I might also include Operate Shooting Star in there, despite not getting an official English translation (and mostly being a remake of BN 1 with an extra chapter that unlocks the ability to switch between BN Mega Man and Star Force Mega Man).

I don't include Battle Chip Challenge, Network Transmission (insert DIFFICULTY RAGE here), or any of the other untranslated games.

The moment when Lan turns off the generator was a bit jarring to me, as it's apparently controlled by a cartoonishly large lever which is electrified while it's operating (ok, that's probably Elec Man's doing, but still). Lan gets an electric shock, but recovers with no problems whatsoever.

And damn was that dungeon annoying.

It's nothing compared to the finale of the second game!

Ah, the start of the long-running partnership between Megaman/Lan and Protoman/Chaud. Remind me, in which game is it obvious that Chaud's first response to finding out about trouble is "call Lan and Megaman and fill them in"?

Yes, the "Megaman is Lan's dead twin brother" thing is the edited spoiler I had back on part 7. Outside of Full Synchro, this little tidbit has some interesting effects on the rest of the series, most obviously at the end of... 3, I think it is; might actually be 4.

Honest admission here, I've only ever played 1, 2, 5 (Double Team DS, to be exact), and Network Transmission; my knowledge of the other games comes from spoilers on the 'net and what little is mentioned during the events of 5. No, Network Transmission can't fill me in on things, it canonically takes place between 1 and 2.

And we'll see you again, for BN 2 and later.