Front-page Two Japan-exclusive Mega Man Battle Network spinoffs games get fan-made English localizations

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Back in the mid 2000s, the gaming scene saw a whole slew of exclusive games released for portable cellphones, with a wide variety of them running under a build of Java for mobile phones, and in the case of Mega Man, the franchise saw quite a handful of titles exclusive to these now forgotten mobile devices.

The Mega Man franchise saw 8 releases on feature phones, with the titles specifically being Rockman Pinball, Rockman GP, Rockman Panic Fire, Rockman Bug Sweeper, Rockman Dash: Great Adventure on 5 Islands, a trial version of Rockman 1 (Mega Man 1 on NES) with the feature to add as Roll in the game, and lastly, the two titles that we'll be focusing on today, Rockman EXE: Phantom of the Network and Rockman EXE: Legend of the Network, which follow a very similar play style to that of the GBA Battle Network titles, with completely new characters, stories and settings.

These games originally came from a Panasonic P-06C phone, and thanks to a very thorough debug cable technique, these games have been properly preserve for posterity at the end of 2023 by SciLab Secrets, with the games being fully playable through the DoCoMo Java (or DoJa) emulator, with the SquirrelJME emulator being planned to support these titles later on.

Now thanks to the collaborative effort of talented hackers and designers from The Rockman EXE Zone, people outside of Japan can fully experience these long-forgotten titles in the Mega Man franchise with a full English localization, which they didn't only localize the entirety of the games, but also added some extra features, updates and changes:

• Added Buster MAX Mode, similar to Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection.
• Restored the online ranked virus battle mode in Phantom of the Network.
• Restored the animated backgrounds from the EZweb version of Legend of the Network.
• Added in-game methods to obtain BattleChips required to 100% the game, which were previously Chip Trader-exclusive.

Those interested in trying out the English localization for these titles can do so from the blog post released on the Rockman EXE Zone. Be mindful that you are required to obtain the original Japanese i-appli game files for both games in order to do so and to play them through an emulator.

The credits for the full English fan localization are as follows:

• MegaRockEXE: Logo Design
• MidniteW: Editing, Promo Artwork
• Midori Woodley: Translation
• Prof. 9: Programming, Editing

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