Mega Man Battle Network 2 (GBA, E10+)



Here's a little story with me and this game. Waaaay back when I was in high school I loved me some Battle Network 1, although seeing people dunk on it now makes me wonder if that was more of teenage me being a colossal dumbass who didn't realize Leonard in Drakengard was a pedophile. I eventually hopped into Battle Network 2 and something about it wasn't clicking with me the way BN1 did. I eventually got to a point where you have to ask for information on a message board and got stuck for days trying to figure out how to get a response. I can't remember if I finally looked it up or just happened to jack into the Marine Harbor's server, but you have to jack into a certain port to finally get a response. I guess they expected you to go right to that server from your dad's lab instead of going home to jack in, but I didn't realize you could jack in there.

Right after this, a "friend" stole my copy of the game. Yeah, it's taken me twenty years to finally fire up my second copy. I even repurchased it new, and still have the packaging to my first copy in my closet.

Battle Network 2 is mostly the same grid-based combat/deck-building hybrid as the first game with the biggest difference being Mega Man gaining the ability to change forms based on an element and a play style halfway through the game. But they hadn't figured out how to make Mega Man transform so you're just randomly offered a combination after a certain number of battles. I was stuck with AquaGuts for most of the game and electric enemies tend to be some of the nastiest in the game (thinking of those electric balls that move in sine waves in the final area). Also, a fire Mega Man is immune to lava panels and wood heals on grass panels, but water and electric don't gain any advantages from any panels while still suffering the downsides. I'm sitting here wondering why they couldn't have made it so a water Mega Man doesn't slide on ice (in fact, future BN games do exactly that) and electric doesn't get yanked around by magnet panels. Okay, I think the magnet panels only appear in the airplane scenario but they could have come up with something.

Ultimately I enjoyed it, but I was also noticing some of the cracks that turned me off or would have turned me off even more as a kid. QuickMan is an asshole. The story can get really dopey (I don't know how anybody could come up with a nation primarily known for is its amazing food called "Yumland" without imploding from embarrassment). And some of the scenarios range from boneheaded like when you get all your non-equipped chips stolen and have to fight an electric-elemental boss as part of the quest to get your shit back and if all your wood-based chips were in your folder, well, sucks to be you, to "can eat all the shit" like the entire Freezeman scenario where you have to keep backtracking back and forth across the entire Net.

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Doom Patrol (Written by Gerard Way, Illustrated by Nick Derington, Tom Fowler, et al)



When Way uses Morrison's stories and philosophy as a foundation to form his own adventures with the Doom Patrol upon, he can come up with some real bangers. The high point is the storyline with Retconn and the Disappointment (guest starring Mr. Nobody), and special shoutout to the the heartbreaking finale of the book. Unfortunately, Way spends too much of his run alternating between trying way too hard to be KUH-WUR-KEEEE and begging "Notice me Morrison-senpai." Yeah, the storyline where a kid falls into the comic and runs into Cliff and proceeds to fanboy over him as he fights the Scissormen? It's hard not to imagine that kid is Way's self-insert.

Way's Doom Patrol is also a great example of of how important the art style is to the tone of the story you're trying to convey. The muted colors and gritty style of the Morrison run meant when the story veered into horror territory (Cliff meeting the Archons of Nurnheim, the Telephone Avatar, the Candlemaker disemboweling that kid), it could get genuinely fucked up. The bright colors and cartoony style of the Way run means comic is constantly in goofy mode. The first major storyline ends in a fake Danny exploding into Tetsuo-style mass of organs, but I couldn't tell if the situation was supposed by horrifying or silly. In the third volume there are some bleak moments that use rougher art and darker colors to further their point, but most of it is still bright and cartoony.

(And if you're wondering what's going on in the feature image and if this comic features bestiality, through the course of the story Casey's pet cat is turned anthropomorphic and that's when she sleeps with him)

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Batman: R.I.P. (Written by Grant Morrison, Illustrated by Tony Daniel, Sandu Florea et. al.)



Yeah, I read the death and resurrection of Batman trilogy (for lack of a better thing to call it) out of order but I didn't even realize R.I.P., Final Crisis, and The Return of Bruce Wayne were meant to form a trilogy until after the fact.

On my first reading I was pretty lukewarm to Batman: R.I.P. but maybe that was just because I was looking for Deltarune similarities instead of taking in the actual story. I warmed up to it a bit when I reread it after The Return of Bruce Wayne and saw how this was leading into that, but I also feel like the metanarrative Batman: R.I.P. is going for - that no matter how much a writer tries to break Batman and turn him into something else he's still Batman and will always be restored at the end by the Dreamtime - was done better in The Return of Bruce Wayne.

It's also a commentary on people obsessively analyzing every little thing in a story, searching for this one tiny detail that reveals the SHOCKING TRUTH that CHANGES EVERYTHING WE THOUGHT WE KNEW. You know, the very mentality that leads to channels like Game Theory. Batman is trying to piece together the clues Joker and the Black Glove are leaving for him to get ahead of them, taking extra care not to overlook even the most minute detail that that solves the mystery, but in reality the Joker is just throwing shit at the wall and letting Batman decide it means something. This a reference to readers over-analyzing an earlier Batman book by Morrison to the point they were claiming there was some deep meaning in the shape of the bloodstain left when Joker murdered Jason Todd, when in reality it was just a bloodstain.

There's also a twist where the big bad is actually Thomas Wayne who faked his death, but maybe he isn't, and this is all likely a commentary on retcons that get undone anyway so don't give it too much thought. And I knew Jezebel was going to betray Bruce from the start (her name is freaking Jezebel) so her gushing about Batman needing to learn to love was cringey but again, the book is loaded with metanarrative so maybe her betrayal being so blatantly obvious to the reader was the point?

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