Megaman NT: Chargeless Chipless Challenge

Megaman Network Transmission: "Chargeless, Chipless Buster Only"

Q: What is this?
A: A category I made up that makes the game significantly more challenging for no reason.

Q: What are the rules?
A: There are 3 rules; 1) Never upgrade the "Charge" attribute of your buster; 2) Never use any kind of battlechip for any reason;
3) Make it to Life Virus R.

Q: Why can't you kill the final boss?
A: Life Virus R. has an aura of a random element that sustains 100 damage unless it is hit with its opposite element (aqua beats fire, fire beats wood, wood beats elec, elec beat aqua). The normal buster is my only weapon and therefore, I can't even scratch his barrier with my 15 damage maximum.

Q: What are you going to use to survive?
A: The "Rapid" and "Attack" attributes of my buster will be maxed out, I will use some subchips and I will equip armor to decrease the damage for certain foes. I'll also safety save quite a bit.

Q: You have a timer, does that make this a speedrun?
A: In one sense yes; the timer will be used to track how long this ridiculous challenge takes me. I expect it to rip this challenge to rip me to pieces against certain bosses and this will probably include multiple game overs. I estimate if this goes well that it will take 3 hours. It could take much longer.

Q: Why are you doing this?
A: For fun and to see how hard the game would be if it were in the style of the old MegaMan games.

Q: How does not using chips hinder you?
A: This game is designed around using a customizable folder to utilize battlechips to kill enemies. There are many strats and shortcuts that I will be prevented from using, such as:
- No special shot high-powered or high-stocked weapons to make any battle or obstacle easier to kill with spamming
- No elemental weakness advantages (double damage), i.e. using Elec Blade against IceMan.exe or Heat-V on NeedleMan.exe
- No use of Barrier to block attacks
- No use of Double Jump to significantly reduce the amount of level I have to endure in certain levels with optimized shortcuts; i.e. skipping half of Swordman.exe's stage and skipping hard ladder/platforming sections in other later levels
- No use of Star Arrow to make Shadowman.exe's stage much easier and faster

Q: How does not charging your buster hinder you?
A: From Swordman's stage onwards, a fully charged buster makes most enemies and bosses die very quickly. Thus, it is used heavily in the endgame of any% speedruns. The charge shot also manipulates enemy RNG (esp. Pharaohman.exe) by not fatiguing a boss. This results in certain attacks not being used at critical HP. At maximum charge, the buster charges in less than 2 seconds. With maximum attack, that charged shot does 90 damage. The hitbox of the buster shot is also significantly larger for a charge shot which makes timing buster shots unnecessary. This is extremely useful against large enemies but is also an advantage for small enemies, which in some cases, I can't hit with my regular buster.

Q: Why are you allowed to increase attack and rapid?
A: If I never upgraded attack or rapid, I would not only NOT be able to defeat bosses, I would almost certainly waste minutes at a time fighting normal enemies and that wouldn't be fun for the the player or the viewer. At level 1, my buster does 3 damage. Every additional attack increase does 3 more damage. So this really doesn't help me THAT much. Every boss will still take well over 30 buster shots.

Q: Why are you taking forever to kill a boss?
A: The damage output available to me at the absolute maximum is 15 damage. That means that even when my attack is at max, it will take about 45 or more individual shots to kill a boss.

Q: Why don't you have splits?
A: Because I don't know what order I'm doing certain levels in.

Q: Are you actually going to finish this?
A: I'm going to try my hardest, through damage and subchip abuse to survive all the way to the end.