The Strange Case of Mega Man and Boktai

Normally I try to bring a faux-expertise to what I write here. While I can at least meaningfully speculate on something that confuses me, I generally try to have as informed an outsider perspective as I can manage. This isn't the case here, but I wanted to talk a bit about the curious dynamic between the Mega Man Battle Network and Boktai series in the early ‘00s. This'll probably run short but I'll do a bit of history for interest.

For those unfamiliar or who have forgotten, Mega Man Battle Network was a series of Action RPGs for the Game Boy Advance that ran through that system's viable lifetime, the first releasing in March of 2001 and the last releasing in November of 2005 in Japan. In that time they managed to release 6 entire games and multiple spin-offs. If you've ever wondered why Mega Man fans can get antsy when there isn't a new game in a couple years, I think a fair few are still recovering from the period when you could conceivably buy a different Mega Man title every 3 months without exaggeration. Battle Network was different though, in that it didn't just attract hardcore fans of platformers. Battle Network was popular among actual children in a way the series had been having difficulty doing since its heyday late in the NES's lifespan. For a while this meant that there was a ton of spin-off material. In that four and a half year period there were 10 different versions of 6 mainline games released (1, 2, three versions of 3 in Japan, two versions of 4, three versions of 5, and two versions of 6). There were two different spin-offs that attempted to turn the subseries into a platformer ("Mega Man Network Transmission" on the GameCube and a Japan-only game called "Rockman.EXE WS" for the Bandai WonderSwan which is its own can of worms). There were multiple not-quite-proper games in the franchise such as the deck building RPG "Mega Man Battle Chip Challenge" or the surreal Japan-only hybridization of a personal organizer and an aimless dungeon crawler "Rockman.EXE 4.5 Real Operation." This isn't even to mention the four or so years worth of anime loosely following the game's plot, at least a few seasons of which were dubbed into English inexplicably keeping some localized names while completely changing others. Suffice it to say, Capcom hit this series hard. Mega Man Battle Network 4 remains one of the best selling games in the franchise and one of the few individual entries to crest a million worldwide sales. It would be fair to say that this was likely the peak of Mega Man's relevance to a wide audience of casual fans.

Around this same time Konami was seemingly in search of something to sell to the lucrative "kids with GBAs" market. Between an ungodly number of sports games, Disney licensed sports games, Yu-Gi-Oh simulations, and Castlevania games, they still seemed to want to break into that same portable Action RPG space. Eventually they brought out Bokura no Taiyou or Boktai as it was localized. This was a quirky stealth action RPG executive produced by their then golden boy, Hideo Kojima. The gimmick that caught some degree of attention at the time was that the game had a sensor in the cartridge to detect sunlight. Cute as it was, this inherently made the game more expensive to produce, and more niche. Despite receiving three sequels, it never really gained much of a foothold, or at least not the kind Konami wanted it to have. There was definitely some desire to make it a bigger deal. That's where what has crossed my mind really comes in. Boktai ads were inserted into Mega Man Battle Network games. As the MMBN games wore on these actually got more overt.

The crossover content started out pretty mild. Mega Man Battle Network was essentially built around deck building. Every 30 seconds you would get access to 5 chips from your deck that you could use. Conspicuously none of these chips ever referenced another franchise except for the Boktai chips that became a staple starting in MMBN4. Still, the Boktai chips are relatively subtle. You get chips that give you Boktai protagonist Django's solar gun that just melts the HP of any enemy in range. Cute and useful but not too overt. With Battle Network 5 the amount of Boktai content suddenly increased. The solar gun chips were now aided by a chip that just summoned Django into the game—his chip is, in fact, extremely strong and basically deletes any random encounter when used. It's much more memorable because it's frankly kind of a ridiculous chip. That wasn't quite enough though. Protagonist Lan also now has a Django poster hanging above his bed. In the most overt display, there exists a late game conversation where a number of villainous characters leaving messages for each other have a conversation that consists of, to paraphrase "I may be extremely evil but even I love SOLAR BOY DJANGO." The game's copy editing is horrible and misrenders this as SOLOR BOY DJANGO, but bear in mind also that the Boktai game released contemporaneously with this was literally named... Boktai 2: Solar Boy Django.

I'm really not quite sure how this crossover ended up happening. Hideo Kojima is credited in MMBN4 but it's unclear what actual deal was struck and it's fascinating to me. The apex of this collaboration would probably be Battle Network 6 where we go from ad to full-on crossover. The crossover quest was sadly entirely cut from the English release of MMBN6 because Boktai had done poorly enough in the U.S. that Konami didn't bother localizing Boktai 3, which was the tie-in/advertisement game. I assume money changed hands, but I'm not sure what even the genesis of this would have been. Likely no one with knowledge of it will ever speak up, which is a shame.

There's a broader point I could maybe make here. I've liberally described these as ads when the marketing massaged version would be crossovers. I'm given to understand that Boktai 3 has some Mega Man Battle Network content in reciprocation. Crossovers are inevitably ads though. This is why as companies have become so brand- and crossover-centric, people have become more exhausted with the concept. A crossover can intentionally tell a story that utilizes all its constituent parts, but on some level it must reckon with the fact it exists to sell people on at least one IP they might not otherwise be interested in. Advertising is inevitably crass capitalism dressed up in persuasive appeals. Every part of that is going to exhaust people who don't have (or ultimately lose) their buy in. Maybe I'm being silly trying to act like I had a broader point, but it is sometimes worthy of examining at what point something is just an ad for another brand. Certainly though in Mega Man Battle Network's case, these are ads. Ultimately they're so weirdly implemented that they come off as amusing and benign, but they are ads nonetheless.