It’s no secret that I love Megaman Battle Network, so I definitely took the time to play Star Force as well. Effectively, StarForce serves as a reinvention of the Battle Network series as it made it’s move from the Gameboy Advance to the DS. With an entirely new world, characters, and revamped gameplay, Star Force created a brand new story. This one stars Geo Stelar, a boy whose father disappeared during a venture into space. Then one day, when looking up at the stars, he encounters an alien named Omega-Xis made up of EM waves. Fusing together, they become Megaman, a hero to save the world from harm.

Starting with the story, as this is one of the best parts of this series. We get a tale with a lot more emotional depth as Geo suffers greatly through missing his father. It makes it harder to form connections, which is the central theme of the series. The world around him is based on the power of those connections that come in the form of brother bonds. Kind of like friend requests, but with much more significance. It’s a more intense tale that really balances the humor and jovial nature that it carries over from Battle Network, but includes a lot of moments of emotional intensity that separates itself from the series.

The differences in how the world is designed are really cool, too. Powers come from EM beings that are able to fuse with people. Not everyone has one, but there are many origins for these beings. Some are aliens, others come from ancient times, and as the world progresses, there are some that are artificially made. Another thing I loved about the series is how the world evolves over time. It has a surprising amount of world-building as society advances from the first game to the third.

The characters are pretty interesting, but if you’ve played Battle Network, you know which roles they are playing. Obviously, Geo is the replacement for Lan, but effectively every iconic character in Battle Network has a clear counterpart in Star Force. While the characters are more emotionally grounded, the purposes they serve are without a doubt carbon copies of what we’re already used to. It works, and I enjoyed the characters, but the ones I liked the most were the ones that fell outside of this aspect. Characters like Ace, from the third game, who felt original to Star Force was among the standouts for their uniqueness.

Gameplay carries over the use of battle chips from Battle Network, but the rules are different. Chips are used to make various attacks in the game, and here the location of the chips on the screen decides which ones you can use. It’s a nice change as it allows you to use a greater myriad of combinations and provides more flexibility in how you want to play the game. The downside, though, is how the battle maps were done. You use a one-by-three grid and have a view from behind Megaman as you defeat enemies. Having less space made the gameplay less enjoyable for me than Battle Network. I still had fun, but it was a clear downgrade, even if the fights were visually more impressive.

Star Force also struggles to optimize its new mechanics a bit, but gets better as the series progresses. Fusing to become Mega Man allows him to access wave roads separate from the real one, this is a mechanic also used to travel from place to place. The problem is that, in doing so, every spot is a potential spawn point for a random encounter. That means going from place to place is noticeably more tedious. There are some areas that I just did not enjoy going to, because it took needlessly long to get there. Thankfully, the Legacy collection comes with some quality-of-life upgrades to make this easier.

With this collection, we not only got a huge improvement on the visuals in battle and text boxes, but also in mechanics. You can make the game easier by increasing your power, decreasing damage, and moving faster. You can also toggle your encounter rate and even turn it off entirely. I’ve found this was super helpful, as I’ve already played the games before and just wanted to revisit the story. This allowed me to do so without grinding for rare battle chips or walking for several minutes in spawn encounter areas.

So overall, I do think Battle Network has better gameplay. That being said, I loved the story in Star Force and its emotional intensity. I also really enjoyed how the world of Star Force changed over time as the developers added improvements to the game to fit the entirely new world they created. It’s a fun series, maybe a bit flawed at times, but a lot of fun.