Yeah the official art book goes over those very rules you mentioned. It's a good read. I think the book even points out that Protoman doesn't actually have hair, and that it's basically just a solid clump of mass that looks like hair. As for the navi designs in Chrono X, most of them are fine and can be neatly slotted into the other games. EXCEPT Riffman. As you said, he breaks a lot of the rules and looks way too human.

@@DoritoGOD2811 Yeah Riff Man, Ghost Man, Dark Mega, and Zeta comes to mind when I wrote this comment, though maybe the latter two were purposefully breaking convention. Also, Cactus Man's clothing could be more navified but that's probably more of a personal opinion

And people said hell and damn plenty of times in 2.

It may actually be over a decade at this point. I always think it got cancelled and forget about it for a few years, and then a new version comes out that made a little more progress lol

My brother in net battling, the author decided the story. Chaud would be in if the story had been written differently. Idk if he left Chaud out specifically to include his OC, or if Chaud was left out for other reasons and this OC was added at a point when the devs didn’t want to change the story, but it’s not like this is a live action project and an actor was unavailable so they had to be replaced (think Morpheus in Matrix 4) Granted, I haven’t played the game yet. Maybe the character is well written and this is an over reaction

@@UncalibratedAimbot The reason I'm okay with this is pragmatic. It isn't as easy as just writing Chaud in. He has to actually JUSTIFY it. Chaud is in college classes overseas as well as him intending to eventually go into a international offical branch. He'd need a reason to even be there, not even as part of the story. Protoman appearing can work easily, we're talking internet after all. But Chaud himself is really hard to just justify. Hence why I'm okay with a Chaud replacement.

​@@UncalibratedAimbotChaud is in the game

Yeah I agree on the color restriction. Maybe if the game implemented more modern elements like alternate loadouts for the navi cust, so that you could have a loadout for every memento, then it would be fine. But as it is now, adding in more mementos will only make it more of a headache to switch between them. Everything else in the game feels like a sequel to BN6, but since the memento system is seemingly based off of style change it feels like something you'd see in an alternate timeline version of BN4. Like you said, it feels out of place.

Yeah, I'm honestly surprised there's no fangame that just mashes both versions together. That way you just have all the forms and bosses. Though I think having every form from 2-6 in one game would be a bit much

Yeah Heels and Standard Navis were enemies in 4, so this isn't new for the series. Pretty sure I said as much in the video. I haven't played 4.5 because it honestly didn't look very good.

@@DoritoGOD2811 It's something of a game that's for sure. I recommend only playing 4.5 if you use the Real Battle patch though as the game is very bad due to the AI being poor as you don't get to control the Navis. The patch solved this by giving control back or the player plus they made grinding chips a lot easier. It still has the core issue of everything being tied to the real time clock and that's my #1 complaint on that as most days you won't get much done.

@@Ziko577 You can change the time and date on your PC so that it changes in-game

@@Toxin-56 I actually did that toward the end of my playthrough as I was tired of waiting for the weekend tournaments to come up to advance the game plus I was aiming to collect all of the chips and needed to go to places at certain times to do the grinding of viruses and frags. The last few I got just by winning tournaments and I stopped playing after that as my goal was met and after 7 playthroughs, the game wore its welcome.

Yeah it is similar to the scarf worn by Bass cross Megaman. Still, I don't think it makes much sense for Dark Megaman to be wearing it. Like, Bass got his cloak sometime after he turned evil. It's not a part of him. But Dark Mega in CX just popped out of the digital womb with his scarf???

Sad that Technodot is ceasing the development of Shanghai.EXE. It made the development way slower. At least the core story is done.

Hadn't heard of it before. I'll probably play it at some point, but to be honest the anime girl aesthetic is not at all my thing.

@@DoritoGOD2811 I thought it would be a turn-off for me, but they do a good job of translating a lot of it to the BN aesthetic.

Yeah, I’m going to second the recommendation. The “anime girl” aesthetic you’re thinking of is toned down and borderline non-existent, with a couple minor exceptions on one or two individual Navi designs. Most of the characters look like they could fit in with the official games. The difficulty is a bit higher than the actual series as well. I started a side quest and got into a boss fight against a NormNavi, and it started pulling out Program Advances to fight me. (Yeah, it’s a side quest, so it doesn’t necessarily have to follow the normal difficulty curve, but damn…) Plus, there’s a series of Virus bounty hunting missions that pull some neat tricks to trip you up and you’ll have to plan around.

I'd dare to say Shanghai.EXE may take the "Best BN game" title from Chrono X. It's that good.

I also follow this opinion. I tried Chrono X and cannot get into it. But I am in a second run of Shanghai.exe. The cute girl aesthetic is extremely toned down compared to other Touhou Fangame and the characters are actually interesting and legit has many funny moments. Also, some of the battlechips are amazing and the style system is a great mix of style, soul unison, and cross soul altogether. Lastly, the Navi design are great (I wished that Druidman is an official design). If you consider it a con, then the difficulty spike might be the problem (Those SP5 Navis make even Bass BS feels like a joke)

Theyre working on it but its a team of like 6 people that suffered quite a bit of turnover through covid

Also Mementos Pretty decent. And the online play is useful to keep busy until new updates

@XIguy And I can't stand people who talk about it as an excuse that can't be used or people who don't understand Indie game development. Covid tore up numerous triple A studios ability to deliver games delaying some even up to 2 years. This is an indie project. The original team behind the game which started development prior to 2020, got torn apart. It was originally a larger team, and they lost important members of it crippling their ability to develop at the pace they were. This isn't some major AAA studio who can just replace a really good sound developer, programmer or story writer. It's a small group of dedicated fans who are choosing to create something on the side, NOT as their main source of income and have had issues with retaining staff that they need to be able to actually continue development. They also create a lot of original assets for the game instead of pulling created ones. Even many level design assets are original. Thats why they had about a year stretch or so where no story content was added and they focused on Quality of Life updates. They simply didn't have some crucial positions filled nor the time to cover for that missing role. If they don't have someone to fill an important role it slows development, it isn't laziness, it is common senae. Especially if it's a role that none of the others have much experience in. Also Covid continued into early-mid 2022 before most countries properly began opening up entirely. And even then many games by big studios were suffering setbacks in release because of Covid cited reasons as they suffered larger than expected development issues through it

Shanghai.EXE: Genso Network... is quite finished, aside from some small postgame content

Probably 4-6 hours

No

They're still working on it yeah

Yeah I can definitely agree that I came across as overly critical of this game. It's just easier to pick apart the things I don't like, so the negative part was a lot longer than the positive one. I still like this game a lot tho, and as you said it's pretty much the official sequel in my eyes as well. For the use of the different navis from past games, I agree that they're definitely using ones that haven't already been used as alt forms before. And like you said, this isn't a real problem, it's just a matter of personal preference. Like, I would have loved to have a form based off of Zero from Network Transmission, or Cloudman from 5, or a whole bunch of other stuff. But it's not my game.

No

That does nothing to refute my point about how he is derivative of Chaud/Protoman. Also, his father being a scientist working with Lan's dad was all the Starforce connection I felt was needed. Just mention that the guy has a kid on the way or something and that's enough.

Plantman from BN3 tho

And Woodman, Snakeman, and Tomahawkman.

The quick man form is actually normal/null type in this game