just finished everything up through Episode 2! or Chapter 2! or however else you wanna call it i can't stop you.
important fact: i do not actually properly know japanese. i've picked up a few phrases and words (which has already come in handy), and i can read hiragana and katakana aloud for the most part, but beyond that i'm absolutely clueless. this in mind, i have opted to go for using Capture2Text's built in google translate hotline to machine-translate the game's text enough that i can mostly work out what's going on. it's....... well, it's finicky at the best of times, and it isn't all that good presumably because it was not meant to work on text this smol and crispy. but it ""WORKS"", and i CAN understand what's going on with some effort on my end using my fragmented bits of knowledge to fill in the blanks (you don't even want to know how many times it read Rockman as "Mouthman" or some variant of "that mouthing idiot".).
but... behild all that obfuscation of janky OCR-into-machine translation setting-up, all those entirely unintentional layers of Lan insulting his brother or girlfriends causing incidents on the web or the funny Progs being absolutely unintelligible to the translation box five out of eight times until i go find a site that converts katakana into hiragana... there's DEFINITELY something here. it succeeds at feeling like a Battle Network game, stripped down to its leanest - the real world is simply a delightful set of connected menus (i really like this actually though), the internet is sparse of detail and very much not isometric, both dungeons thus far have had very lean 'gimmicks' (nothing in the case of Mayl's PC, conveyors in the case of the school water system), the backgrounds behind it all are little more than a single bare color. there's like, one overworld track and one cyberworld track, plus your standard battle and boss themes, and i think the final dungeon has its own tunes too for final dungeon reasons but i'm not there yet i can't say.
and yet... it all works! it does great at really feels like the pocket edition of the series that's already on a handheld system to begin with. most of the core faces you know and love, sans Yai for... some reason, are here and roughly as good a bunch as ever. though it's perhaps a little choppier, the battle system survives the transition remarkably well - it's as fun as ever to build yourself a solid folder with what you can scrounge up, then wreck house on your foes. it even has its own equally-pared-down-as-the-rest-of-the-game NaviCust replacement in the form of the Skill Editor. there's plenty of chip shops around and Requests to do... and also i'm fairly certain that every random-thing-you-can-jack-into comp is bespoke instead of just one or two of the same maps over and over, as compensation for the Real World having absolutely zero actual walking around. it's a lot of fun if you're already a battle network fan who wants to hang with this fun cast a little longer and you're in the mood for a fun slightly-stripped-back side game. totally recommend checking it out.
just... maybe don't try to kludge together programs to spit often-half-intelligible yet hilarious machinelations at you after enough wriggling of the text capture zone. i'm gonna keep doing it, because i'm stubborn as hell, but aside from being sexy and cool and completely right in all matters factual and opinionated, i am a very bad role model. maybe just wait for any kind of translation patch to come along.
or don't.
i'm not your mom.