The Mega Man Battle Network series takes place in a completely different timeline from the regular Mega Man (or Mega Man X) games. In this world, everyone has their own digital assistant AI and some random fifth grader happens to have named his assistant MegaMan.EXE. Other digital assistants are also named after previous Mega Man games.

The gameplay is split between real-world exploring as the kid and cyber-world exploring as MegaMan.EXE. While in the cyber-world, Mega Man can have random enemy encounters with viruses. It’s all very childish since the main character is in elementary school, but the RPG elements are pretty good. I thought the grid-based real-time battle system was pretty fun, although the random encounters get tedious (like in any RPG).

I’m pretty sure anything that includes cyberspace is basically considered cyberpunk-by-proxy so I’m suggesting Mega Man Battle Network is cyberpunk. Yes, it’s from a child’s perspective (so the world isn’t exactly nihilistic), but I think it still fits.

There were six games in the Mega Man Battle Network series, all of them on the Game Boy Advance. So you could easily grab an emulator and play these games. Or, you could get the Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection (Vol 1 and Vol 2) to play them on Steam, or Switch, or Playstation.

There was also an anime based on this video game series, called MegaMan.EXE. It was renamed to MegaMan NT Warrior in the US, but I’m not sure if all of the episodes were localized. I think there were more MegaMan.EXE episodes than NT Warrior episodes. But I already feel like I’m taking a chance with this post so I’m not going to start talking about a kids anime. For what it is, I think the world-building is pretty good, but this is definitely a video game series (and anime) made for kids.