Game Breaker/Video Games/Platform Game/Mega Man/Mega Man Battle Network

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Strap yourself in, this is going to be loooooong.

Repeat Offenders

  • In general, there are 2 chips that are the single most game changing chips in the entire series, and both of them debut in 2. First is Area Grab, which is a simple chip that takes one row from the opponent's field. Second, is Full Cust, which as the name implies instantly fills the custom gauge. The former allows you to control the field, simultaneously giving you more room to move around while restricting your enemy's movement in turn, with the added bonus of making certain attacks (such as LifeSword) impossible to dodge. The latter is a simple, yet deadly tool that instantly allows you to load up a new selection of chips. It's even more prominent in the second game, where you can have FIVE of them in your folder.
  • Fast Gauge made its debut in the very first game, and withstood the test of time by being probably the most dominant chip in both single player and multiplayer. At first, it seems like the Dollar Store version of Full Cust since it simply speeds up the rate at which the Custom Gauge fills up instead of instantly filling it. However, it ends up being even better because the effect lasts until the very end of battle instead of when you reload your chip folder. It's especially a godsend when you're in single player, since making it your Default Chip means that you've made S-Ranking bosses and getting their V3/V4/V5/SP chips much less of a hassle.
  • In general, anything that gives you a bigger chip selection than the default 5 slots. The sacrifice option, Custom Style, Custom+ Programs, Number Soul, Number Open... all of them, simply because they make it easier to set up powerful combos, or form Program Advances.
    • The same applies for strategies that allow you to begin each turn with a full hand of chips. This is why Monocode/Bicode folders are popular setups, and why Asterisk-coded chips (wild cards that can be paired with any other chip code) are in high demand.
  • The hilariously broken combo that is multi-hitting chips paired with attack-boosting chips and transformations. Since the boost applies to each individual hit, even the weakest multi-hitting chips like Vulcan 1 can do a startling amount of damage with the right setup, while infamous hard-hitters such as Tornado, Snake, and the Air Hockey family will shred even the toughest bosses into confetti. This strategy is cranked up even further from the third game onwards thanks to the introduction of Full Synchro, which doubles the power of any attack following a successful counter hit. As you may be able to guess, the attack boost from Full Synchro stacks with every other boost.
  • Prism from the second and third games, as well as its successor Voodoo Doll in the fourth onward. Prism's gimmick is that when you attack it, it'll reflect the damage dealt to it onto every surrounding space. Naturally, this means that catapulting it onto the middle of the enemy's side of the field will make it impossible for them to avoid the splash damage generated by hitting the prism, but this alone isn't what makes it overpowered. What does is the fact that attacks that hit both the prism and the enemy at the same time will lead to the offending attack's damage output doubling, meaning that Program Advances with a wide reach such as Life Sword and Heat Spread will deal an obscene amount of damage. While Voodoo Doll did away with that quirk, being able to nuke your enemy's side of the field just by hitting a stationary target is still nothing to sneeze at.
  • Most Program Advances are this, more often than not. Combining several chips will create an insanely powerful super-attack that hits harder than using its component chips separately. Many Program Advances are so powerful that in the pre-5 games, competitive and boss-killing folders often revolve around using multiple copies of the same Advance to overwhelm the enemy. Eventually, the higher-ups realized how insanely broken and over-centralizing this strategy was, and made it to where you could only use one of each Program Advance per battle.
  • Neo Variable Sword. A mega class chip that dealt 240 damage one square ahead of you, unless you input a special button combo ala most fighting games. Input the right one, and it becomes 2 hits of 240 to the two rows directly in front of you. Area Steal leaves your opponent with only 2 rows. Proto Soul lets you charge up any sword chip for 2x damage. Combined, you can instantly kill any player in only 2 chips, both undodgeable.
    • Supposedly, the guy who created this combo was kicked out of a tournament because he killed his opponent so quickly nobody would believe he hadn't cheated.
    • In Battle Network 3, Variable Sword was an even bigger Game Breaker than its future counterpart. It only did 160 damage, but with the right button combo, this could be turned into four attacks, one in each element, which meant that if your opponent had any sort of elemental affinity, it would do an easy 800 damage (160 x 5) without boosts. And unlike Neo Variable Sword, this version was just a standard chip, meaning that you could have up to four copies of it in your folder.
  • While many Soul Unisons are exclusive to the games in which they make their debut, that doesn't apply to Number Soul, Search Soul, and Proto Soul. All three are version-exclusive Soul Unisons in the fourth and fifth games, and are all powerful transformations in their own right.
    • The Blue Moon/Team Colonel-exclusive Number Soul (mentioned above) allows you to select from ten Battle Chips for three turns, making it a lot easier to put together Program Advances, Chip combos, or simply boost your multi-hitting chips. And the last option is actually perfect for Number Soul, because its other passive effect applies a +10 Attack buff to your non-elemental chips, meaning that VideoMan, KendoMan, Bass, and the Vulcan family of chips are great chips for a Number Soul-focused folder.
    • Search Soul, hailing from Red Sun and Team ProtoMan, is another Soul Unison that improves your chip selection. But unlike Number Soul which increases the amount of chips you can select from per turn, it allows you to shuffle your current chip loadout up to three times. You can hold onto individual chips while shuffling the rest, meaning that if you pair this Soul with NaviCustomizer programs that increase the amount of chips you can select from, it becomes a lot easier to put together Program Advances and the like. Its Buster shot is also a good one, since it deals 50 damage and automatically homes in on the enemy no matter where you are on the field.
    • Proto Soul, usable in Blue Moon and Team ProtoMan (duh), is a powerhouse of a transformation, and a godsend to players who love Sword chips. By charging up any Sword Battle Chip in your arsenal, you double its power and get a massive boost to your attacking range by stepping forward two panels (basically, the Step Cross battle chip's attacking range) before slashing the enemy, making their short range much less of an issue. Your charge shot is also a Wide Sword that can hit enemies to the sides of the panels in front of you, making it safe to punish certain attacks (and in Battle Network 4, It triggers Full Synchro). You can also nullify most attacks and unleash a 50 damage counter hit simply by pressing B and Left on the D-pad, which throws up ProtoMan's shield. It's even more broken in the fourth game since you can spam the ever-loving hell out of it without having to worry about any sort of cooldown like you do in the fifth game.
  • Buster MAX. A new feature added to the Legacy Collection, Buster MAX supercharges the Mega Buster and makes piddly little uncharged Buster Shots deal an obscene amount of damage that will end just about any fight in ten seconds or less (aside from a handful of enemies who can't be directly attacked, such as the Goofball family of Viruses or DrillMan.EXE). You can toggle it on or off whenever you want, meaning that you can snap each game in half, make a joke out of specific Demonic Spiders and Those Few Bosses, or simply make chip grinding a hell of a lot easier all at your own discretion. While using this means that SP versions of Navi chips can't deal more damage than the bare minimum until you beat their corresponding Omega Navi legitimately, it does mean you can at least grab them for completion's sake.

MegaMan Battle Network

  • The first game's Guts Shoot, which is Simple Yet Awesome incarnate . It's easy to construct since it uses MetGuard and Dash Attack alongside GutsMan's Navi chip, and all three chips are very easy to come by and can be obtained super early on. It does 500 damage to one enemy on the row you are standing on. The highest amount of health that any boss can have in this game is 1000. Need we go on?
  • Anubis. You plop down a poison-spewing Anubis statue, and laugh as your opponent's health drops like a stone. While Anubis is in every game in the series, it was nerfed hard in the second game, where its insane health-drain effect was given to the Poison Pharaoh Program Advance (though Anubis is one of its component chips, so this status still applies, in a sense).
  • Dynawave. It's the strongest version of the Shockwave chip obtained from the Mettaur family of Viruses, and fires an insanely fast shockwave that deals 100 damage to whatever it hits. Very simple, but very effective.
  • The S Code in general is full of powerful battle chips. AreaGrab, Hero Sword, and Dynawave can all come in S-code, but the real Game Breakers are a quartet of powerful Navi chips...
    • StoneMan.EXE. In a sharp contrast to his Robot Master counterpart's Power Stone weapon, StoneMan's battle chip is one of the deadliest. He drops three sets of rocks onto the battlefield, with each individual rock hitting for 100 damage and adding up to a monstrous 300 damage if every set of rocks hits an enemy. This is supposed to be balanced out by the rocks falling onto random panels, but using this chip in tandem with AreaGrab makes it a non-issue: by stealing a row of panels, the rocks now have less panels to fall on. And since StoneMan's V2 and V3 chips cut down on the RNG-laden nature of this attack by increasing the amount of rocks that fall per interval, the odds of dealing 300 damage with one attack are increasingly stacked in your favor once you start getting the stronger version of his chip.
    • SkullMan's chip is as hilarious as it is useful, with him throwing his head, enlarging it, and sending it crashing down onto a single target. It deals a respectable 150 damage at its weakest and a monstrous 210 damage(!) at its strongest, automatically targets the enemy with the most health, and will hit them no matter where on the field they are. Even better is that his chip is actually really good against MagicMan, since it will always target him even when you get his health lower than the Viruses that he summons.
    • SharkMan acts as a Jaws-flavored screen-nuke, and summons a pair of fast-moving fake fins that will go tearing across the field to hit every enemy on it. While his strengths lie in crowd control, being able to deal up to 130 damage no matter where you're standing is still one hell of a boon.
    • ShadowMan, much like SharkMan and SkullMan, will hit his targets no matter what, regardless of your positioning. While he can nuke the field with his shurikens, his strengths lie in boss-killing, since summoning him against a single enemy will lead to every single shuriken embedding itself in its head for a whopping 300 damage with the strongest version of his chip, and 240 with the weakest.

MegaMan Battle Network 2

  • Certain attacks are considered game-breaking and thus frowned upon in one-on-one NetBattles, but a legendary example would be Gater, a Program Advance in Battle Network 2 that deals 900 damage (before boosting), freezes time, and hits everywhere. Much like GutsShoot, all its components are either G or Asterisk-code chips that can easily be found fairly early into the game (though in this Advance's case, roughly around the halfway point), and the hilarious amount of damage that it deals will make a joke out of even the strongest bosses.
  • And Gater's hardly 2's only Game Breaking Program Advance. Stronger versions of Life Sword can be formed from elemental sword chips, with the strongest version, Life Sword 3, dealing 600 damage, and coming in asterisk coded chips to boot. Other standouts include Bodyguard, which essentially locks down the enemy's movement for a ridiculously long time while dealing massive damage (and by massive, we're talking 1800 damage if every single attack hits), and UltraBomb, mainly for being an attack that deals 400 damage, hits a 3x3 area, and pierces the otherwise impenetrable defenses of Hardhead, Dominerd, and Goofball Viruses.
  • The ToadMan navi chip from the same game. This chip deals heavy Elec damage and stuns and tracks the target. Since you can keep five of the same Navi chip in your folder in this game, this means you can potentially spam multiple ToadMan chips one after another, stunlocking whatever poor sap you're fighting while taking massive bites out of his health. Oh, and one of the chips from T code (ToadMan's code) is Tornado, a Difficult but Awesome multi-hitting chip that deals a ton of damage, but only on the panel two spaces ahead of you. Naturally, ToadMan/Tornado is a very, very deadly combo.
  • Snakeman's another powerful Navi chip. Easy to set up (some area grabbing, Geddon for holes), massive damage especially after popping an Attack boost (Particularly Wood +40), and it doesn't give Mercy Invincibility upon hitting. It is, alongside Gater, considered the best boss-killing attack in the game. And while SnakeMan may only be in this game, he left behind an only slightly less powerful legacy in the form of the Snake chips, which do the same thing that he does sans bite attack.
  • The Japanese version of Battle Network 2 (which ended up being restored worldwide upon being rereleased as part of the Legacy Collection) also has a game-breaking glitch: Throwing a TreeBomb on a Prism results in neither object disappearing after the hit; instead, the TreeBomb would repeatedly hit the Prism, which would then deflect the hit onto the surrounding 8 panels and deal a crap-ton of damage. This works especially well on bosses.
    • A similar glitch exists with Prism and Varsword. Basically, in 2, Varsword's shockwave is multiplied 5 times when it hits the prism. With some area locking, and timing, you can basically throw the prism, unleash the Varsword shockwave, and win against the boss without much effort.
  • Hub Style, the most powerful of the game's unlockable styles. It cuts your HP in half, but the tradeoff has it give you the positive attributes of every other style in the game with no elemental weakness included. Yeah. Like its successor, HubBatch, it's an Infinity+1 Sword that required you to S-rank all the V3 Navis, which in turn requires completing the WWW Area, which in turn has other prerequisites.
  • Battle Network 2 is notorious for the Darkness (literally named Dark Messiah in Japan) PA (Bass V3 X + AntiNavi X + Any Gospel chip X), where Gospel appears and uses his dark breath on the front and middle columns of the enemy's side of the field. If anything survived the initial onslaught, Bass would attack the back column. The kicker? Both attacks did 3000 damage each. The first attack alone is enough to kill the final boss himself in one hit-- and it pierces shields, so you don't even have to wait for him to open his mouth!

MegaMan Battle Network 3

  • The Blue version-exclusive FolderBack is Battle Network 3's resident Bad Idea. Where do we start? It returns every single chip to your folder, including itself. It also functions as a Full Custom, restoring the turn gauge so you can instantly pick your freshly recycled chips and continue your assault. Your opponent also gets the intermission screen, but they're not the ones with a totally fresh deck. And it's got the * code, which means it goes in everything. And just in case that didn't sound ridiculous enough, you can buy it halfway into the game (specifically after DesertMan's scenario) if you're willing to do some grinding so you can afford the 200 BugFrag pricetag!
    • Don't forget its White version-exclusive counterpart, Recycle -- it, too, can, in the right hands, become a Game Breaker. How so? It will literally recycle ANY Navi chip that was used last. That includes fellow Giga Chip Bass (which deals a truckload of damage and normally requires a special panel to exist for it to work), even if the Dark Hole that's needed to use the actual chip is nowhere to be found. Let's also not forget that it can also recycle any of the OTHER Navi chips, essentially letting you use the same Navi chip TWICE (which is especially bad for your opponent if you happen to use a multi-hitter that they're weak to -- like BubbleMan or PlantMan). Even better, it keeps any bonuses you had when you used the first chip - e.g. Atk+30s.
  • This game is home to some of the most disgustingly broken Navi chips in the series. Entire folders have been built around FlashMan, PlantMan, and BubbleMan, though they're far from the only contenders.
    • FlashMan's damage output is low, but the insane utility he gives you definitely makes up for it. He can, all at the same time, nuke the entire screen with an Elec-element flash of light that stuns every enemy it hits, pierces guards (Looking at you, DrillMan), and can hit through Mercy Invincibility and invisibility. Not bad for the game's Starter Villain!
    • BubbleMan may be an obnoxious, Gonkish Dirty Coward and That One Boss, but his chip is absolutely worth the pain and suffering that you'll endure to get it. He fires multiple Aqua-element harpoons straight ahead, meaning that element, navi, and pure attack boosting chips all work on him. Any combinations of his chip and any of these boosts will turn this fat little idiot into an angel of death, and very few things are as satisfying as turning one of the game's worst bosses into your ultimate weapon.
    • PlantMan is overpowered for many of the same reasons as BubbleMan: his chip hits its targets multiple times, and it's an elemental attack meaning that you can pump it full of the same buffs (albeit, you'll want to use a Wood-boosting chip instead of Aqua). However, it also pierces guards and locks your enemies into place, meaning that you can heap on some extra abuse while enemy Viruses and Navis are having the life squeezed out of them by PlantMan's vines. As powerful as BubbleMan's chip may be, many consider PlantMan's to be even better, if not the best chip in the entire game!
    • While a much more obscure example than those listed above, BeastMan's chip is hiding a lot of power behind a secret command code that will shoot its already respectable attack power through the goddamned roof. Pressing A or B while one of his claws or his head is on a panel will lead to him doing extra damage to that panel, and if you mash those buttons he'll hit the panel up to 14 times. Unboosted, this chip's damage output rivals or outperforms just about every other chip, but when it is boosted? Have fun leaving every other Battle Chip in the dust.
  • Speaking of BN 3, take a look at the B, P, and E Chip codes. Basically, all three of those codes carry an arsenal of powerful Battle Chips and Chip combos: there are a lot of B-coded Navis and all of them are powerful: there's the aforementioned BubbleMan and BeastMan, but ProtoMan and the Blue-exclusive BowlMan deal plenty of damage themselves. P, on the other hand, combines PlantMan with the Hero Sword, Step Cross, and Step Sword chips. Not only do they form the incredibly powerful EvilCut Program Advance, but they're all powerful attacks even when used separately. However, the E code stands out the most, thanks to its ridiculous versatility, and near invincible defensive chips like Sanctuary and Barrier 500.
  • It gets better. In Battle Network 3, thanks to Compression Codes for Navi Customizer programs, it's possible to use the HubBatch program (which gives you All Your Powers Combined, literally - every Style Change from Battle Network 2's signature abilities are given to you and then some, at the cost of a bug that cuts your maximum Hit Points in half while it's set). This includes:
    • Moving over any type of panel hazard without ill effect, save one type (poison).
    • Not flinching when hit.
    • Calling up a shield that nulls non-piercing damage.
    • Putting an extra Mega Chip in your folder.
    • Starting the battle with one more Chip in the Custom Menu.
    • Having both your normal and charged attack pierce shields and armor.
    • Being able to survive an otherwise lethal hit and instead be reduced to 1HP.
      • Hub.BAT is a Game Breaker with or without Bug Stopper. You're still at least as ridiculously powerful just by putting it in next to the rest of your favorite programs, even with 500 HP instead of 1000. Of course, it's also an Infinity+1 Sword of the highest order - merely getting it requires you to make it to the last stage of Secret Area (which itself requires several kinds of One Hundred Percent Completion), fight your way through a handicapped Random Encounters run, and then survive through a twenty-round chain battle featuring some of the toughest and most annoying viruses in the game. And then you have to know the key input to shrink it and the enabler code unique to your Style. At least you can still use it on the Bonus Bosses.
      • The enabler code also prevents you from using EX codes, which normally can give you +350 HP for no cost. 350 HP is still nothing compared to the benefits of Hub.BAT, though.
  • Wood Style, which heals the user while standing on Grass panels, the Undershirt program, which lets you survive a lethal hit while above 1 HP, and SetGreen, which makes the battle stage start off as Grass panels. Against non-fire enemies and enemies who can't crack floor panels - which includes the non-secret final boss - this is unbeatable and simple. (A perfect example of a trick that breaks the game itself into tiny pieces but will utterly destroy you in multiplayer, by the way.)
  • Incidentally, if you get Bug Style (not hard, with the program itself equipped), you can get a part that lets you ignore all bugs, as which the half-HP counts. This dovetails well, shape-wise, with another program that kicks all three buster stats up to the maximum of 5, but also has a bug, this time making it a pain to use chips.
    • Also, Bug Style itself can be a Game Breaker-- occasionally, the negative effects of the style (Forced movement, HP loss, being unable to stand on middle tiles, and your buster glitching up) don't appear and instead you only get the positive effects (Buster Max, a Barrier at the start of battle, or having ten chips selectable at one time). At most, you can get one of the negative effects but all of the bonuses at the same time. Nice.
  • Imagine a magic user being able to cast one specific spell whenever he likes, so long as said spell is on the second page of his spellbook and he's wearing three magic rings on one hand. That's the essence of the 11th Chip Glitch. Initially, players are allowed to select from five chips per round. By earning or trading certain programs, players can boost this up to ten. With duplicates, players can quite literally boost their chip selection up to or past eleven. As the game only has 10 spaces, this results in a glitch which gives players unrestricted access to whatever chip happens to be in the second slot of their unshuffled folder.
    • VarSword is considered the second most broken standard chip in BN3. The most broken goes to Sensor. What did it do? It put a Killer Eye in front of you that checks in a straight line had it been put on the middle line. If it hits, it does damage that pierces Mercy Invincibility and stuns the victim, and the eye is active for a long time. It doesn't deal as much damage as Variable Sword did, but it forces you to stand on ONE row and being open to attack, or move and open to attack and with proper timing, it can even stunlock.

MegaMan Battle Network 4

  • Dark Chips from Battle Network 4 are a Deconstruction of this trope. On the surface, they make the game seem like a joke by dealing a shitton of damage that outdoes that of many Program Advances. If you use them enough when you get the option to do so, you'll eventually get the option of starting out the battle with them. However, you're warned ahead of time that using them will lead to all sorts of major drawbacks, and if you're willing to test your luck? You'll quickly find out that this isn't hysterical doomsaying.
    • First: While you can curb stomp a lot of your opponents with these things, they'll permanently take away one HP every time you use them, which adds up faster than you think. And when you're on your third or fourth playthrough, damn near every single battle pits you against the strongest versions of enemy Viruses and Navis, and their attacks are devastating when your health has been crippled by Dark Chip usage.
    • Second: You can not use Dark Chips against Duo.EXE, the final boss, so good luck fighting him with reduced HP and without the arsenal of nukes you've been relying on.
    • Third: It prevents you from using "Light" chips like the NaviSP chips. While this was supposed to balance out the fact that you can now use "Dark" chips like Muramasa, it ends up failing hard, as the Light chips are vastly superior.
    • Fourth: You'll get raped in multiplayer.
    • Of course, using enough Dark chips means your base max HP will be reduced to 1... But you can easily place a pair of HP+500 programs in your Navi Customizer to counteract this, as customized HP can't be permanently lost from Dark Chip usage. However, by doing so, you'll take up valuable Navi Customizer space for far more useful programs like Super Armor, Buster Pack, and Air Shoes...
  • The light karma perk in Battle Network 4 is commonly considered to be the most broken passive effect in the entire series, and makes dark karma look like a total joke. Full Synchro, normally a status effect that is achieved through counter hits, doubles the attack power of your next chip. The light path perk gives you a rather high chance to enter Full Synchro with any successful attack, counter hit or not. This, when used along with chained multi-hit battlechips, can almost immediately destroy any boss that is not immune to being stunned. So broken that the perk was completely removed in the fifth game.
  • Even without the benefit of Full Synchro, Air Hockey is hilariously broken. It's a multi-hitting attack that dishes out a ton of damage, stunlocks the enemy, and thanks to being Break element, can plow through shields and destroy any object in its path. You can load your folder with all three variants of Air Hockey, form multiple Pit Hockey Program Advances (basically a more powerful, longer-lasting Air Hockey), and watch almost every boss' HP plummet. Unsurprisingly this chip was nerfed in later games, but it's still a powerful damage dealer in spite of that.
  • The Gun del Sol family of chips rely a lot on precision, strategizing, and careful positioning, but will absolutely melt even the toughest of enemies when used correctly. They're solar guns that light up an entire column of panels two rows ahead (unless you're using the Gun del Sol EX Mega Chip, in which case, it's targeting a 2x3 area two rows in front of you) and deal constant damage for as long as an enemy is on one of the effected panels. They also bypass barriers, aren't weakened by Holy Panels, and ignore Mercy Invincibility. They don't stagger or stun enemies that they're frying, however, meaning that they're free to weave in and out of their attacking range as much as they want, or hit you and cancel the attack. But whether it's using the gusts generated by Wind Soul to pull your enemies to the front row, using Thunder Soul's charged shot/chip ability to stun them and keep them rooted in place, using Invis to keep yourself from being counterattacked, or simply using AreaGrab to give them less room to move around on, there's plenty of counterplay to prevent them from falling into Awesome but Impractical territory.
    • It should also be noted that these chips are at their most effective if Lan's currently outside and in the sunlight. Thankfully there are plenty of places to jack into from the outdoors, and most of the game's main story areas are counted as outdoor areas, but still: take Lan's location into account if you want to use them!
  • While the game's tournaments (and thus, the obtainment of Soul Unisons) are unfortunate victims of a Random Events Plot, you're guaranteed to get Guts Soul and Aqua Soul as your very first Souls depending on the game. Blue Moon players, unfortunately, are stuck with the weak and middling Aqua Soul, which struggles to deal meaningful damage thanks to a bad charge shot and being stuck with a piss-poor selection of Aqua Chips to empower. Red Sun players, however, hit the fucking jackpot, because Guts Soul is easily one of the best souls in the game despite how early you get it. Along with giving a +30 attack boost to Panel-Cracking chips, it also boosts the power of non-elemental Chips by the same amount, and there are a lot of heavy hitters among them that take full advantage of this perk. The Vulcan family of chips, VideoMan's Navi chip, KendoMan's Navi chip, Bass' Navi chip, the Holy Dream Giga chip... all of these are multi-hitting attacks. From the start of the game to the very end, you'll punch massive holes through your enemies, and since Guts Soul's Panel-Cracking element has no weakness, you get a lot of reward out of very little risk.
    • And everything mentioned above? That's merely the effect it has on Battle Chips! Its MegaBuster effect is also one of the best out of all the Soul Unisons. Rapidly pressing the B button will activate a rapid-fire machine gun that turns you invincible during its duration, meaning that you can face-tank attacks that are hard to dodge without getting hurt. And if your enemies get too close, you can whack them with a 60 damage Guts Punch as your Charge Shot! Alternatively, you can punch Rock Cubes into people for a whopping 150 damage with every successful hit. The sky's the limit with this baby!
  • Also hailing from Red Sun is Roll Soul. However, it's not a brutal powerhouse like Guts Soul is. Instead, it's an excellent supportive ability that proved to be so overpowered that the series' next healing-based transformation (BN5's Meddy Soul) would handle its mechanics very differently. While this Soul is active, every Battle Chip MegaMan uses will restore a good chunk of lost health, making it a lot easier to survive tough fights. Its charge shot, Roll Arrow, will also destroy the Battle Chips your opponent has on hand. Every. Single. One. This thing is a nightmare in competitive play thanks to how devastating it is to lose your entire hand to one attack, and it's also a handy tool in your second/third/fourth runs of the single player mode, since enemy Viruses and generic Navis will use chips of their own against you.
  • Metal Soul from Blue Moon is that game's equivalent to Guts Soul, but might just be even more powerful for one simple reason: you can charge any non-dimming non-elemental and Break element chip for double damage. This includes Super Vulcan. This includes Air Hockey. Stack a few attack buffs, and have fun killing almost every single boss with a single attack! Other fun effects include your standard buster shots ripping through shields and easily destroying obstacles, as well as your charge shot dealing 150 damage (though with the caveat that it only hits the panel directly in front of you. It is a punching attack, after all)!
  • Junk Soul is Blue Moon's equivalent to Roll Soul: a support-oriented transformation that is fairly good in single player, but a total monster in multiplayer. While Junk Soul doesn't empower any chips or change up the field, and has a very situational charge shot that only does damage if there are any objects on the field for it to throw, it instead gives you an altered version of 3's Navi Recycle effect. Any chips you've used during and before the Soul's activation have a chance to be recycled, and will show up in the slots that Dark Chips would normally show up in, essentially giving you anywhere from seven to nine chips to choose from. While the recycled chips are ultimately up to luck (albeit, luck that can be skewed with careful chip selection), you can potentially abuse this effect in all sorts of hilarious ways. You can cripple your opponent's movement with recycled MetaGels and AreaGrabs, repeatedly make yourself invulnerable with recycled Invis and Popups, and of course, up your damage output by recycling dangerous and hard-hitting Mega and Giga Chips. You can even abuse its mechanics to use Dark Chips without taking a health penalty! And an overlooked yet no less fun way to get more bang for your buck is to use powerful components of certain Program advances (Air Hockey, Twin Fang, etc.) and recycle them so you can use them and their associated Program Advances!

MegaMan Battle Network 5

  • In general, this game's selection of Soul Unisons are all solid picks. Number Soul, Search Soul, and Proto Soul return and are as broken as before, and a few new Game Breakers get to join their ranks.
    • Team Colonel's Toad Soul can be considered a formal apology for Aqua Soul: Aqua Chips charge much faster than they did with Aqua Soul, and you have plenty of powerful Aqua chips with excellent Chip codes that make it easy to stuff your hand full of attacks. It also has a few excellent perks of its own, such as getting to use ToadMan's homing paralysis-inducing Elec-element music note as your charge shot, and getting to hide in water panels while not suffering from ice physics when battling on ice panels.
    • Knight Soul, also in Team Colonel, gets this status purely for the fact that it can charge Break-element chips for double damage, including the stupidly powerful multi-hitting DrillArm and AirHockey chips. But it's no one-trick pony: using any sort of non-dimming chip in the front row will give you a second's worth of invincibility, and your Royal Wrecking Ball charge shot, while very limited in range, hits every panel directly surrounding you, making it dangerous for enemies to approach. This also makes Knight Soul (and KnightMan, its associated Navi) really good in Liberation Missions, since Virus battles that surround you with enemies give everyone a smaller playing field to work with, making them a lot easier to kill with the Royal Wrecking Ball.
  • In Battle Network 5, you can combine Dark Chips with Soul Unison to produce "Chaos Unison". It gives you the Dark Chip as a free charge attack. It's at least as buh-roken as it sounds. Toad Chaos and Proto Chaos are popular for getting perfect S-ranks on Random Encounters - a 400 damage BFS or a 300 damage BFG. They only last for a turn, but that's really all you need.
    • Chaos Unison has another game-breaking exploit: When fully charged, the charge rapidly cycles between purple and green. Releasing the charge when it's purple uses the Dark Chip with no ill consequences, but releasing the charge on green makes it backfire on you. While they were supposed to have a 50/50 chance of backfiring on you, pausing stops the cycling, and if it's purple, you can release the B button then resume, and it will successfully fire every time.
      • Shadow Chaos. Its Dark Chip, DarkInvis, makes you invulnerable to ANY attack and causes Mega to go berserk, not responding to your controls... but renders him able to use ANY chip or Program Advance you've used previously.
      • Search Chaos, especially when the enemy is area rowlocked. The target will instantly eat somewhere in the realm of 800-1200 damage as a result. The attack also completely cancels out the two most common forms of defense, Invis and Anti Damage! The only thing that will completely prevent taking damage from this is a Life Aura + Sanctuary combo, and everyone knows how hard that is to set up.
      • Number Chaos. Charge it up and your next attack is now 50 points stronger. A Super Vulcan now does 720 damage.

MegaMan Battle Network 6

  • Considering that this was the very last game in the series, which took a bad hit in sales post-Red Sun/Blue Moon that it never recovered from (with the larger Mega Man franchise falling into irrelevancy), it feels like the developers decided to let players have fun breaking the game over their knee by giving them an arsenal of Game Breakers to play with. And supporting this notion is the fact that three of the earliest chips you can get are hilariously overpowered.
    • Guard battle chips, obtained from the humble Mettaur Virus, have been upgraded into the formidable Reflector chip. While their function is the same on paper, throwing up the Reflector to block an enemy's attack doesn't send a shockwave after them. It nukes the offending enemy's entire row with an energy blast that comes out so fast, that you're nearly guaranteed to trigger Full Synchro. These chips are overwhelming for when you get them (you can get them at the very start of the game), and never drop off in usefulness since the upgraded versions just keep getting stronger (with the third tier of Reflector dealing 200 damage a pop). And even better, they come in the asterisk code, meaning you can slot them into any folder setup!
    • Mach Gun, which can be obtained as early as Reflector. These things are basically Vulcans that are far easier to aim and deal more damage to their targets to the point of outclassing them completely. They rake the column that the closest enemy is in and should the Virus die before they exhaust all their shots, they'll move on to the next enemy if there's one available, making them a boon for Virus busting since you can delete multiple Viruses with just one of these.
    • TrainArrow is just plain ridiculous: when you use it, Aqua-element arrows will spawn the entire distance between you and the end of the row you're currently on, unless an enemy gets in the way of that path. In which case, it'll be forced to eat every single arrow between you and your target. Unsurprisingly, this does a shit-ton of damage by default, and becomes truly insane thanks to Aqua Cross doubling its attack power. You get it a bit later than the other two examples (not until after you've beaten BlastMan's scenario), though, but it's still a fairly short wait.
  • BlastMan's Navi chip sends three heavily-damaging fireballs down all three of the battlefield's rows, meaning that any Virus not hiding behind another Virus or a field obstacle will get hit. It's an excellent tool for racking up Double/Triple deletions and the resulting S ranks should you need to hunt down specific battle chips, but it's also a nice source of reliable damage against bosses, most of who are forced to eat anywhere from 120 to 250(!) unavoidable damage depending on the version of the chip you're using.
  • JudgeMan and EraseMan are also great Navi chips that hit people through their Mercy Invincibility, and paralyze them on top of that. However, they shine the brightest in competitive play thanks to other effects of theirs: EraseMan deletes any Anti-X chips that the opposing player has on hand, robbing them of the ability to unleash a brutal and unavoidable counter attack upon being triggered. JudgeMan, on the other hand, will deal additional damage by way of summonable book helpers if your panels are stolen by AreaGrab and other similar chips before returning said stolen panels to you.
  • ElementMan's chip is basically a Swiss Army Knife of powerful elemental attacks. He can hit people with unavoidable fireballs, skewer them with stakes that will turn the panels they leave behind grassy (meaning that Fire damage dealt on them will be doubled), freeze them solid by turning a column of panels into ice, and wiping out an entire column of panels with a lightning strike. While the timing for picking which element he uses is tricky to pull off, quick reflexes mean that you have an excellent all-purpose tool that can knock enemy players out of a majority of their Cross transformations, mess with their side of the field, and deal a respectable amount of damage.
  • Beast Out might be the most overpowered transformation in the series. And that's no small feat, considering just how many powerful transformations have already been listed on this page. For three turns, MegaMan fuses with his version's Cybeast and turns into a Humanoid Abomination that gets a host of buffs. Gregar gets Super Armor, meaning that he won't be interrupted while attacking and getting hit won't detract from your busting score, as well as a rapid-fire machinegun buster that can deal a hilarious amount of damage to your enemies. Falzar, on the other hand, gets Air Shoes and Float Shoes, allowing MegaMan to safely walk on hazardous panels and broken panels, as well as a buster shot that covers a lot more ground. Both Cybeasts also get a flat 30+ attack buff to non-dimming and non-elemental chips and will teleport to the optimal attacking range upon using them. Oh, and you can enter Full Synchro while in these forms. While your Cross Beast forms are also powerful in their own right, the standard Beast Out forms are more than capable of kicking ass on their own.
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