Friday, September 16, 2022

Notes From Eguchi's Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection Interview


Rockman Unity has released a short interview with Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection lead Masakazu Eguchi, focusing on the game's development. Eguchi talks a little about the implementation of online play and the challenges his team faced during the port process. 

Read on for the lowdown!

  • Eguchi says his team planned to include online communication features from the start of development.
  • When MMBNLC was first announced, the demand for online functionality was greater than Eguchi expected. It was clear that online play was a shared dream between fans and MMBNLC staff.
  • Eguchi says they are investing a lot of time and effort in various aspects of the collection, not just online functionality. He declined to share further details at this time. 
  • The games aren't emulated - they're fresh ports. Eguchi says this was necessary because each game required changes to better suit current-generation hardware/ecosystems. Porting all ten games and rebuilding their respective communication features for online play required a significant amount of work.
  • 3 million Japanese characters across ten games (7,500 pages when collected into a single script) had to be translated into multiple languages. Bug checks for all ten titles was extraordinarily time-consuming.
  • Some old design documents and planning materials (such as maps drawn on paper with pencil) from the GBA era were not in perfect condition. To remedy this, the MMBNLC team consulted with former Battle Network staff members. Eguchi admits he sometimes found it difficult to answer questions from the staff in charge of porting.
  • The dev team have yet to determine if special event-exclusive distribution Battle Chips (such as GateMan SP, Gospel, etc.) will be included in the collection. (via 4Gamer)

We'll have a bit more on Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection in the coming days. Stay tuned!

5 comments:

  1. So much work is being put into this collection and I'm so excited for it!

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  2. I was really glad to read about the multiple languages thing (though of course we don't know what languages yet). i hoped they'd this, but i was not sure they would.

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  3. they should really include the event battle chips unless they plan to hold events to put them out or do some sort of online tourney for them to get players more engaged. That would actually be really cool to do.


    what i want to know if for the localized version of the games coming out west side will they include the ereader stuff and for bn/exe 6 for the west will they restore the cut boktai post game stuff since that adds about 10 hours of game play or more iirc along with it making the grave yard area actually make sense. along with restoring the boktai chips and pa and such. Also im assuming the beast battle chip has a chance of not being included since iirc that was a event or some ereader card tht was cut cause it wasnt super popular here.


    man i am getting really excited about this

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  4. It's 3 million Japanese characters, not words. Divide that by 10 for each game and by 3 for English words, and you get 100'000 words per game, which sounds about right for one 20 hour RPG.

    Still a lot of text, though.

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  5. Wow, I'm really surprised and excited to see these aren't just emulated. I hope that works out well for us. I'm excited to see what new features they put in here. It sounds like a lot of love and care has gone into this game.

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