Mega Man Battle Network's Creators Are Taking Note of Demand for Series Ports

Many Mega Man games have been gradually finding their way over to new consoles as part of Capcom's ongoing retro efforts. Missing among them is one of the franchise's spin-off series, the seemingly niche yet often fondly remembered Mega Man Battle Network series, known as Rockman EXE in Japan.

TV Tokyo (translation via Rockman Corner) recently sat down with Masakazu Eguchi, the scenario writer for the Battle Network series, as well as other members of the series' development team for a retrospective on the net-brawling action card game.

After being asked about the various games, which haven't been ported and are on hardware that's difficult to acquire these days, Eguchi says he will "take note of it." The other developers present mused on how difficult that might be, though; designer Tomoyuki Hashinaga reflected on how much work he put into getting things just right for the Game Boy Advance.

"As a designer, I fussed over the color adjustments to match the darkness of the GBA screen, so I'd actually like to play them on the hardware they came out on instead of in a port," Hashinaga says, laughing.

Ultimately, Eguchi says it would be harder to fit "upcoming times" into the Battle Network world for a sequel. Overall, it seems like a version of the future would be harder to predict or pick apart, compared the BBS battle arena of Battle Network. Mega Man 11 producer Kazuhiro Tsuchiya notes that while there's no rule that says they won't make a sequel to Battle Network, there would be a number of factors to get right, from current trends to market conditions.