Mega Man Star Force: Legacy Collection Review (Switch)

Well, folks, it’s finally here. After working through remasters of all the most popular Mega Man sub-series, the remaining question was whether Capcom would then go on to bring back some of the Blue Bomber's less successful major adventures. While our hearts still go out to fans of Mega Man Legends (any day now...), Mega Man Star Force: Legacy Collection has arrived to satiate fans of Mega Man Battle Network’s ill-fated successor series.

Mega Man Star Force: Legacy Collection aggregates the three (technically seven) games from the Nintendo DS with some welcome extra features to modernise them a bit. And while, yes, these games didn’t all quite manage to fill the big shoes left by their GBA predecessors, they nonetheless prove to be worthwhile experiences and I’d suggest you look into this if you loved the Battle Network: Legacy Collection from 2023.

Set a couple of hundred years after Mega Man Battle Network, the narrative of Mega Man Star Force primarily follows an elementary school student named Geo Stelar who lives in the town of Echo Ridge. Here, network technology has become impressively advanced, and now the cyber world is built around EM Waves that are still plagued by a seemingly endless tide of mischievous viruses.

The story kicks off in the first game with a mopey Geo who's mourning the supposed death of his father on a space station that mysteriously disappeared. While watching the stars one night, he encounters an “FM-ian" alien named Omega-Xis, whose incorporeal form allows him to navigate both the real and wave worlds. Omega-Xis decides to join Geo, and the two can combine their bodies to form the titular, virus-busting Mega Man.

What follows in the dozens of hours to come are interstellar adventures in which Geo and Omega battle both human and FM-ian foes to defend Earth and slowly uncover the mystery of what happened to Geo’s father. Along the way, Geo is joined by longtime friends like Bud and Sonia and frenemies like the angsty Solo, filling out a diverse and interesting cast that nicely supports the shonen storytelling themes.

Though the narratives across the trilogy won’t win any awards for excellence in RPG writing, I found them to be charming and generally well-paced. It’s clear that the writers understood what made the GBA predecessors so beloved and were able to replicate that magic with a new cast and setting.

Navigating is a matter of jumping between the real and wave worlds, with the latter being coolly superimposed over the former via wave roads that you can jump onto through various access points as Mega Man. It can be cool to come to a new location as Geo and put on your Visualizer (special glasses that let you see the wave world) to see what techy things in the environment are accessible for further exploration, and most of the main plot beats require you to jump between your human and combined forms to overcome obstacles and save the day.

As you explore the environment, fight enemies, and find collectibles, you can then build a battle card folder for Mega Man that’ll come into play each time you get pulled into a fight. Every battle card represents a single action, such as a specific attack or heal, and you can put a few dozen in the folder at a time. While your starting folder is relatively basic, you’re inundated with new cards over time that introduce all kinds of interesting strategic ideas to tweak your available actions to the needs of the enemies you face in a given area.

Not only are some cards objective improvements over weaker variants, but factors such as elemental weaknesses may justify redoing your loadout to maximise your advantage over opponents. This leads to a progression system that remains dynamic and interesting throughout the whole length of the campaign, as new chips tease new synergistic possibilities and coveted rare chips keep you chasing after things like optional boss fights.

While folder building is pretty familiar, the combat represents the biggest evolution over the battle system of the Battle Network games. The battle flow is still round-based, prompting you each round with a selection of six randomly selected cards from your folder to take into the fight, and as you battle viruses, a gauge slowly fills up that loads another batch for you to pick from when you’re ready.

Yet rather than viewing a 3x6 field from the side and moving Mega Man around freely on his half, you now view a 3x5 grid from an over-the-shoulder perspective and can only move him left and right to dodge incoming attacks and line up your own. To account for the more limited mobility, you also have a temporary shield you can trigger at any time to block many attacks from common mobs.

Admittedly, I’m not a huge fan of the changes made to combat here. I can see what Capcom was going for by using the Battle Network system as a base to build upon for something new, but it feels like more was taken away than added in this shift to the ‘3D’ style. It could’ve been interesting if they fully committed to 3D and gave you a limited field to freely move and shoot, almost like in Mega Man Legends, but I'd guess the limitations of the DS hardware prevented this from being feasible.

What we got then is something that feels like the worst of both worlds — the fixed 3D perspective is kind of gimmicky and sometimes makes it a bit difficult to gauge depth, while the lateral movement on the 2D grid feels rather stiff and limited.

Yet, it’s still a competent battle system, and I enjoyed the puzzle-esque element of strategically selecting battle cards on the bottom screen between rounds and learning the ‘tells’ of each enemy encounter. There’s something really rewarding about not only learning how to respond more effectively to the movements and attacks of enemies, but also then gaining their attacks in the form of battle cards you can use in future battles to cut down your time and get higher ranks.

Much like the Mega Man Battle Network Collection, Capcom opted to include the option for online battles here in a surprisingly robust side mode that feels like a natural extension of the primarily single-player gameplay of these games. You can engage in both casual and ranked modes with both random match-ups or friends, using either your own curated battle card folders or ‘rental’ ones that are premade for you. Playing against a friend or random really helps to bring out the best side of this combat system, as you’re forced to engage with a foe who responds to your movements and attacks in a way far less stiff than the enemies you face throughout each adventure.

Given that these games are nearly two decades old, there are some rougher edges with design decisions like the high encounter rate in Mega Man Star Force 2 that can drag down your enjoyment a bit. Luckily, Capcom has addressed this through the introduction of a robust ‘cheats’ system that can individually adjust things like damage, random encounter, and health values to make a customised difficulty tailored to your skills.

Graphically, Mega Man Star Force adheres closely to the isometric art style the Battle Network games pioneered, portraying an optimistic, technologically advanced world that features some aesthetic similarities to the modern day. There’s a charming quality to the expressive DS-era spritework here, and Capcom smartly opted to redraw battle chip and character portrait art in HD to limit the blockiness that comes with scaling up these assets to a higher resolution. There’s also an option in the menu to apply a high-resolution filter to the gameplay to smooth out the jagged edges, though this tends to make sprites look not quite right, as if they should be more pixelated, but aren’t.

Meanwhile, the battles shift the art style to simple 3D models that have been neatly up-rezzed to a more modern standard. It’s still obvious that these models were made for handheld hardware that could barely handle 3D, but they overall match their 2D sprite counterparts well and make the shift between 2D and 3D as you jump in and out of combat much less jarring.

Overall, I’d say that the Star Force games are a bit inconsistent in their quality, featuring both the best and worst that this brand of Mega Man RPG has to offer. Mega Man Star Force bears the burden of being the ‘first game’, and feels a bit forgettable as it establishes a new cast, setting, and gameplay that has to thread the needle of not being 'Mega Man Battle Network 7', while also showing that it retains a lot of the same elements.

Mega Man Star Force 2 finds its footing a bit more with its gameplay, but this is then undercut by a middling narrative and a truly irritating random encounter rate that’ll have you reaching for that cheats tab pretty quickly. Things are then salvaged with Mega Man Star Force 3, which offers some excellent gameplay, challenge, storytelling, and replayability all in one compelling package.

I’d say this collection is worth buying just for Mega Man Star Force 3 alone, but there’s still lots to love about all three games. Together, you’re looking at easily over a hundred hours of gameplay if you want to complete everything, not counting replays or playthroughs of alternate versions of the same game.

I'd also like to especially highlight that the collection itself is wrapped up in a nice package that feels very carefully crafted. Capcom could’ve easily just dropped some ROMs on a basic menu screen and called it a day, but the developers went the extra mile to make all three games feel like part of one organised and cohesive experience. Not only are you greeted by a 3D model of Mega Man on a slick opening menu screen once you boot up, but nice goodies like a ‘Gallery’ tab for concept art and marketing materials show the attention to detail and history that went into making this collection.

The Star Force series may have ended a bit prematurely due to low sales, but Capcom has demonstrated with this collection that it still cares about this interesting era in the Blue Bomber’s long history.