Topic: 2020/11: Mega Man: Battle Network 4: Blue Moon / Red Sun (GBA) - Will Mallia

[JonLeung]

Mega Man: Battle Network 4: Blue Moon / Red Sun

For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to Will Mallia's Mega Man: Battle Network 4: Blue Moon / Red Sun (GBA) maps.

In Mega Man: Battle Network 4, Lan and MegaMan.EXE once again battle to purge computer networks of viruses and NetNavis. This time around, there are tournaments to become the greatest Netbattler in the world, as well as an asteroid that threatens to destroy the planet!

Will Mallia, a major contributor to VGMaps, is clearly a Mega Man: Battle Network fan, having mapped (and remapped!) the many isometric locales of all six main GBA games, not to mention the Japanese-only Rockman EXE 4.5: Real Operation. Noteworthy about Mega Man: Battle Network 4 is that this has the first of a few crossovers with Hideo Kojima's Boktai series. Check out Castillo Park's Vampire Manor!

As with other portable games aimed at a youth audience around this time, this was released in two versions, a trend that likely began with Pokémon: Red and Blue Versions. The choices for Mega Man: Battle Network 4 are similar, with "Red Sun" and "Blue Moon" versions. How fitting that we just had a blue moon, and if you had to pick: are you red, or are you blue?

So to recognize the effort of adding the world of Battle Network to the real Internet, Will Mallia's Mega Man: Battle Network 4: Blue Moon / Red Sun (GBA) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for November 2020.

[Will]

I personally think that Battle Network 5 is the best in the series. The fourth game was trying something new, but the downsized sprites are perhaps a bit off putting. The plot is rather a mixed bag, if you think murdering the planets' population is going to purge evil. What's the morale of the story? Duo wasn't that evil in Mega Man 8. And what weird continent names they have on this planet such as Netfrica, Netopia and the like. This is proof that the Battle Network universe is not the same as the Mega Man classic universe which takes place on the same Earth we live on.

It's no surprise that the Red Sun and Blue Moon titles are rather a Pokemon Red and Blue similarity. All the maps you see before you are from the Blue Moon version, which seemed to have better colours or perhaps I was just continuing off from Battle Network 3 Blue version (Don't really know why I picked this one over the White version). Combining the maps together seemed like a good move, giving the impression you're looking at a realistic location and not some flat architectural plans. The labels I put in certainly make it easier to find hidden chips and powerups and to let you know where you can jack in. Perhaps in future I ought to find a way to finish off the Star Force maps (if only DesMume had hotkeys for enabling and disabling layers not to mention timing the graphic frames).