In what initially seems like a pointless scene, Lan meets Yuichiro coming out of his school after some unspecified job, and the only thing you could get out of the scene is that it’s pretty wild Lan just testified at a trial without his parents knowing he was even going to do it. But as you can imagine, this will come up again later. The next day, we learn that Yuichiro almost certainly upgraded Mr. Mach’s digital “blackboard,” though again, it’s not clear why this is important yet. Far more suspect is the banging noise coming from inside the broom closets, which Lan repeatedly describes as being large enough for a child to hide in, but he never once looks inside? We’re gonna have fun in a month or two when Lan finds Tab’s skeleton.
After school, things finally pick up as Lan receives an email from his mother announcing that his father has been arrested! Haruka has punctuated the thing with dramatic ellipses and everything, you have to respect her commitment to tone. You head home (Kyle talking to every NPC on the way, like you do in an emergency), and she tells you that Yuichiro has been accused of trying (and failing) to hack the JudgeTree. Lan heads to the court, only to arrive just in time to see the gavel fall, and his father sentenced to “100 hours of zapping.” Lan learns he only has an hour to solve the real case!
Prosecutor Ito was the man in charge of the case, and explains that the case was cut-and-dry because the JudgeTree itself is a witness! Wow, thanks for the reminder that it should not be judging its own case! Still, it’s interesting to see an AI treated as a witness in this way, and it won’t be the last time we see something of the sort!
Ito explains the concept of “alibis” to the two boys, and Lan realizes that hid dad might have been at the school when the crime was committed. I’m not saying it would prove him innocent or anything, but I think it’s weird how Lan and MegaMan initially act like they don’t even know when they saw their father. Hub, literally the first thing I said about you in this Journal series was that you were a glorified alarm clock!
Mr. Mach can’t remember who came to upgrade the board (hey wait a minute, why was an AI researcher performing a minor maintenance job on school equipment?), and the game encourages you to find “someone” who might have seen him. This is a trick: you actually have to check the security camera. Hey, they set that up last Session and everything with that camera pointed at the class pets, full marks! Naturally, the device MegaMan uses in his digital world to interact with the camera’s computer is addressed as… a computer. And then, as he’s accessing the data, Viruses come out of the computer and into the computer! Doesn’t that mean they’re incredibly tiny? This fight featured two corn cob recolours (seemingly just a stat upgrade), but also the KillrEye virus, which debuted in BN3 and hasn’t been seen since. Kyle instantly wasted the thing, and we haven’t seen any more since, so I’m not sure if its behaviour has changed in any notable way.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t just a virus on the computer’s computer. The Real Criminal, as the Hikari boys have taken to calling them, erased all footage of themselves and of Yuichiro. MegaMan phrases this in a poor way, though, first saying the footage from “around” dad’s repair job is gone, and only later clarifies that it’s all blank up to the present?
Luckily for our middle-school sleuths, a Mr. Prog comes up and wants to share a strange incident that happened the previous day, even though yesterday is completely irrelevant to the case. The poor little green guy just wants someone to listen to him! Long story short, the video shows Mick shoving one of the school’s SecurityBots into the broom closet, and no, he’s not working for the bad guys, even though you’d think he’d be on guard against harming the SecurityBots after last time. No, this is just his idea of a prank. Another weird writing quirk here, where an NPC in the hall said they haven’t seen any SecurityBots around. Did… Mick shove every single one of them into a locker? Once you let the poor thing out, it’s practically having a panic attack. As Kyle put it… we know Yuichiro has spent a lot of time arguing the ethics of creating intelligent AI, and there are arguments to be made in either direction… but you made a robot with claustrophobia, man!
Naturally, the SecurityBot has been watching the room the entire time it’s been trapped, though how it does so isn’t clear – Lan just declares that it can see through the door, somehow, and I have no idea if he means there’s an opening or, like, the robot has X-ray vision, or…? Long story short, not only does the robot have footage of Yuichiro at the time of the incident, but of The Real Criminal hacking the camera, though the game gives us a round of that good old-fashioned time-wasting by forcing you to re-navigate BlastMan’s dungeon to get the footage. Thankfully, with the locks disabled, all you have to do is clear the first room and then walk forward for a few seconds, I’m not even sure why they bothered?
Gosh, I can’t imagine who it’s going to be in this story with only one new character, who just so happens to be responsible for the computer that was just hacked, it’s such a mystery – yeah, it’s Prosecutor Ito. Lan is disappointed because he idolized the guy, which despite my sarcasm, plays out pretty well, but it also relies on you thinking that anything going on in the GreenTown legal system was admirable to begin with, which… urm.
Lan has apparently done all of this within 40 minutes (Ito did claim he was going to try to delay dad’s sentence, but now that we know he’s the villain, that’s doubtful), and thankfully convinces a bailiff to let him go to the PunishmentRoom, where Yuichiro is strapped to what can’t help but look like an electric chair, especially with those electric coils in the arms, even though the game repeats that the SecurityBots are going to mildly shock him, instead. What a weird design choice, did it take a few weeks for the devs to realize they couldn’t sentence Yuichiro to death in their children’s game? A guard insists that you have to get the JudgeTree to see the evidence, so why did the bailiff send us here? He’s also really upset at the idea that something could go wrong with their perfect legal system, which was governed by a tree. You guys. I hate this. So much.
While hacked into another electric chair, Kyle fought some Cragger Viruses, giant rock-men, and was very adamant about getting their Chip? Craggers seemingly act in sync, and can break tiles with their fists, and if they hit MegaMan, instead, the tile cracks, instead, which isn’t much better! They also take half damage from all (Ed. non-Breaking) attacks, which wasn’t great! As for the Chip, GolemHit1, it hits the nearest enemy automatically and every square around them. The very first thing Kyle did with it was to smack himself in the face.
Lan confronts Ito, who confesses to everything, and like… more than he really needed to do, even. He explains that he’s working for, “the organization that has caused you so much trouble.” Gonna have to be more specific, my guy! I’ve got a waiting list! The game clearly thinks this obvious, even though you spent the last two and half games fighting Nebula, but no, we later confirm we’re talking about WWW. We wouldn’t want to end the series without one more go at WWW!
Ito confirms what you’re probably suspecting at this point: his job is to “lawfully” eliminate potential threats to the WWW, and that includes punishing failures (after giving them the impression that they’re going to get off scot free, I guess to convince them not to defend themselves? Why would that be necessary if you control the JudgeTree?). And then, I guess realizing that Lan’s too crafty to be arrested without raising a fuss, Ito orders the JudgeTree to arrest everyone in town. “I PRONOUNCE EVERYONE GUILTY!” I do love the scene of the kid shouting that he’s only guilty of sneaking snacks, because earlier in the game you could overhear some lawyer Navis debating whether or not that’s legal, great touch. The moment Lan is out of the room, he also barricades the door, having apparently forgotten that the only way to access the JudgeTree is via that ladder from below? C’mon devs, it’s not like Lan has a rocket launcher. His mom grounded him the last time he bought one!
There’s one last “puzzle” to solve on your way in, but it’s a no-brainer: you have to find the answer to another legal question (about Navi rights – huh, we weren’t confident they had those!), so all you have to do is go back to your legal study team, who are about 0 random encounters deep into the GreenTown net. Seriously, what is with Capcom’s stall tactics in this scenario? Inside the door, you see the JudgeTree, and, uh, devs, I don’t know what you think you know about trees, but that thing is 100% dead. It’s just a stump with a much narrower computer tower on top of it. There’s no bark, and none of the other outer layers, either! The inside of a tree is functionally dead wood! The topic is complicated because “life” is such an abstract term (check out this neat page where eight University of Santa Barbara scientists debate the matter on a site dedicated to K-12 readers), but I promise you, if you literally cut away the cambium and the sapwood like you seem to have done here, all you’ve got left is a dead tree. You’ve attached this entire cyborg gettup to a tree skeleton!
The gap is too wide for Ito to reach Lan (even though Lan was able to touch the JudgeTree and is almost a head shorter than the man?), but he warns Lan that not only is his Navi, JudgeMan, guarding the computer, but so is another WWW Navi, who “is very powerful, and very evil, indeed.” Like you always say about your coworkers. Ito then explains his motives, saying that he’s realized the legal system can never stop all criminals, and sooooo… let’s kill everybody! I think, mayhaps, you have skipped several possible alternatives between points A and B.
As soon as MegaMan steps into the computer, a voice calls out to threaten him. MegaMan instantly recognizes the voice, though he doesn’t tell you who it is, though the general thrust of all these hints from Ito and MegaMan are that you’re about to run into Bass. I admit it, that’s what I expected, too! They had me completely fooled!
The JudgeTree dungeon is surprisingly short? It only took Kyle 18 minutes. I think they expected the little kids to have a lot more trouble with it, since these kinds of puzzles are often sold to adults? I’m talking about the kind of puzzle where you have to draw a path from one point to another without ever stepping on the same square twice (this is all tied up in an elaborate fiction about backtracking being illegal re: walking on digital grass). Normally, these demand you touch every square, but that’s not technically necessary here: you just need to touch several switches and reach the exit. Mystery Data pickups also appear in the mazes and might distract you, but even if they mess things up, they can’t complicate the next trip because at that point, they’re gone! The game even gives you the option to look ahead, panning across the map with the D-Pad, which is the real key to winning this. Enemies attack you while you solve puzzles (they have no choice, the dungeon is practically all puzzle), but nothing you haven’t seen before, providing you’ve encountered Craggers.
If you do step on a square twice, the game will wait until you pass the exit, after which a robot will chase you down, and you’ll be tossed back to the start of the room (which means repeating earlier puzzles!). There, you’ll suffer a punishment based on how many squares you repeated. We only saw HP damage, but it presumably goes up the more squares you touch. This is a very odd system. You seemingly can’t get away from the robot, but if you can’t, why waste time on it? Why not just punish them directly at the end of the maze, or better yet, the moment they touch the grass in the first place? (Ed. Azulmagia explains that you can sneak past the robot using the Slip Runner program, which might or might not be intentional?)
It’s only after you cross the boss warning tile that you realize exactly who MegaMan heard at the start of the dungeon. It’s not Bass… it’s Colonel. And it’s not a version exclusive, it’s Colonel either way! Wow, Hub, you really do have a computerized memory, considering we only saw Colonel for like three lines of dialogue in Team ProtoMan! Anchoring this major development on a character that only half the audience has seen (less than half, remembering that Team Colonel released later in Japan!) was a poor move. More MMBN5’s fault than 6’s, but still. I’m almost feeling lucky Kyle’s played the games before now, because the only reason I know Colonel is from writing a series of blog posts about it, which is… shall we say… “non-standard.” But Kingdom Hearts was pulling this same crap around the same time, so I can’t pretend I’m surprised.
Colonel goes out of his way to underline that he’s responsible for this, even making sure you understand that your father’s punishment is his fault. He’s pretty clearly trying to antagonize MegaMan, to the point of overselling his position, but he also does try to bisect you later in the scene, so it’s too early to tell if this is an act or what. I do enjoy the part where he’s pretty clearly expecting MegaMan to fight him, but he still (vaguely) outlines his position just in case MegaMan’s in a talking mood, and even seems disappointed when MegaMan defies him: “I have a purpose greater than a sense of justice. And for that, I am standing on this side of the battle.” Like I said, he attacks at this point, but is intercepted by an unseen foe, presumably by the Navi of our equally fast, baseball cap-wearing rival character… I mean, assuming Colonel isn’t shadow-boxing an imaginary foe to excuse himself from fighting MegaMan. Notably, Colonel says his foe “slashed” him, which only underlines the possibility that this is Chaud and ProtoMan… or reboot characters so similar that they’re indistinguishable, with MMBN6 and its copy-pasted characters, I really can’t decide.
It is kind of weird to see two boss enemies hanging out together in this series, isn’t it? But JudgeMan doesn’t say a word until you’re alone, so it doesn’t feel complete somehow. Lan then gives Ito a speech about how he doesn’t understand this high-falutin’ stuff about not being able to end all crime forever, just that Ito is hurting people he loves, a list that includes Mick, whom he has known for a matter of weeks at best, and even Iris, whom he has known for a matter of minutes.Five, tops. Man, and I joke about Sora laying everything down for “retroactive friendship.”
JudgeMan can hit a three-tile row with his electro-whip, and can summon law books with teeth that will crawl around and even merge into a larger form if they overlap, but can be easily destroyed with a single buster shot. In the second half of the fight, he gets really interesting, calling up a book that will block one of his border squares, and will launch attacks that will change every time you shoot it: it can either use a Cragger’s punch attack, a flamethrower, or a three-shot bubble attack that curves around the arena. Your attacks will eventually destroy the book, but he’ll also quickly replace it. Kyle eventually finished the fight by tricking JudgeMan into attacking a Sacred Chip he had placed, which is a barrier that deals 200 damage to the first character who touches it!
MegaMan shuts down the JudgeTree (“Oh good,” Kyle said, “the Anarchy Button”), and we see Baseball Cap Kid leaving the scene. By the way, it took me literally this long to realize the devs were hoping I’d suspect Baseball Cap Kid was a bad guy. I know he had a bad introduction in the previous Session, and the gap between Sessions probably made it harder to suspect him, but I legitimately did not consider the guy as a suspect at any point! It hadn’t even crossed my mind! He outright saves you from robots at one point! The scenario ends with the JudgeTree being repaired and sentencing Ito, and Mick getting punished for the SecurityBot thing.
…Wait, you idiots still want to use the JudgeTree? This calamity against the law? I can’t help but notice that Ito also doesn’t get a defence lawyer.
In our next villain cutaway, we reveal Baryl giving orders to our next opponent, confirming that he’s also with the WWW. The new guy is named Vic and has a disturbingly wide smile with giant teeth? He’s going to be stealing some software, no doubt some arbitrary plot coupon designed to be merged with three others to create the final boss, and Baryl promises to send Colonel along with them.
We open the next scenario by confirming, oh great! They have weather control in this universe too! Something I’ve already blamed for being potentially responsible for wiping out the Classic universe’s ecosystem! But that’s neither here nor there. For now, it’s time for the next round of tests for the host Navi at the expo, which will be held in another district, SkyTown, which just-so-happens to be responsible for the weather control! On your way out, you also get an email that Dingo from Team Colonel has opened a, quote, “Chopper Operator’s School” in SkyTown, presumably our next, optional, Cross System sidequest. Huh, funny how we seem to have ended up with all the Team Colonel characters. It’s kind of lucky we knew Shuko from BN4, considering! The Cybeast Gregar equivalent is a certain “Ms. Ann Zap,” so make your educated guesses.
That was the last thing we did for the night, except to check if there were new sidequests, and since there were, and to park ourselves outside the requests machine to remind us what to do next!
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