The Misadventures of Tron Bonne

The Misadventures of Tron Bonne is the prequel to Mega Man Legends, starring one of that game's antagonists Tron as she has to pay off her kidnapped brother's debt. Being a sky pirate, this translates to to robbing everyone blind in a variety of missions while training your minions between missions. It's a real lesson in how even when your game is falling apart at the seams, you can still salvage it by just lowering the difficulty so long as you have a personality.

 The main part of the game is broken up into 4 mission types: a real time first person dungeon crawler, two variants of Mega Man Legends' third person action format (scripted robbery and gradually exploring a single large dungeon), and box puzzles where you have a limited number of moves to load boxes onto your ship. They're all pretty minimalist versions of all these things (well maybe not the puzzle game, but I'm bad at puzzles), making for a pretty breezy experience. The through line between all of them is that you have your servbots (incompetent robot minions) following you around who you can command to do things by launching a targeting bomb at things- mostly just translating to looting doorways, stunning or altering enemies for a few seconds, disarming traps or actively damaging certain enemies. They were clearly supposed to be the star mechanic that separates the game from its predecessor, but in practice the system only kinda sorta works. Having to stop movement and aim at a target mid-battle never feels great and the mediocre stun you get as a reward isn't really worth it, so you kinda only use them when a gimmick requires you to (which is a fair but not excessive number of times).

The third person sections end up feeling like a downgrade from Mega Man Legends, with enemies kind of all just having the same basic pattern of running straight at you and thus you kind of just back away from them until you have enough distance to fire off a few shots before rinsing and repeating (this is presumably due to the fact that you're controlling a giant robot with a more zoomed out camera in more wide open rooms). The first person dungeon crawler is a very simple version of the genre (think King's Field more than Etrian Odysssey) where you'll probably never get lost, but it does nonetheless feel like a fun little adventure along the way of watching the hapless servbots get plunged into danger.

 Which I suppose is how The Misadventures of Tron Bonne manages to be a good time despite also being kind of a mess: the personality is delightful throughout. The dynamic of the antihero Tron (with a tinge of a heart of gold) having to tussle with her innocent yet bumbling henchmen just works. The other angle is that the developers clearly knew none of these systems actually work that well, so they were careful to make sure the game never actually demands their mastery all that much- things like making the servbots invincible with no timing pressure to disarm traps in the dungeon crawler so having to try five times doesn't feel that bad, it's largely trivial to stockpile ten of every healing item, and when having to awkwardly wrangle horses with a combination of servbots and your own position the enemies do so little damage that you're never in much risk of having to restart it from the beginning.

The final element I haven't really mentioned is the management between missions. It's all menu based, letting you move between different rooms with different servbots in them. You can talk to them to get hints, figure out what items you got from missions to give to which servbots in order to get various upgrades, play minigames to raise their stats (or just do it with items or taking them on missions), assign them to scouting missions to bring back items after your mission, spend money for permanent upgrades, etc. Like everything else it only somewhat works. Puzzling out the key items is light and fun enough, but the training minigames are lengthy and brutally difficult with no variation to give you any reason to max out all 40 of the robots (though since you only use a few, you certainly don't need to). Sending servbots out is also pretty tedious menuing, doesn't keep a record of what items come from where, doesn't seem to use servbot stats to determine what they bring back, and frankly I'm not sure the items they bring back are even worth it- so the whole scouting system just doesn't feel like there's any progression or meaning to it. In the end the most important element just seemed to be unlocking and training up a better sniper servbot (as they boost your fire rate / damage) and getting the main upgrades. It's fine, but also feels unfinished.

So should you play The Misadventures of Tron Bonne? If you're going through the Mega Man Legends series, sure. It's a good, varied time. At around 15 hours long it doesn't even come close to overstaying its welcome. You can easily see the railing falling off the game while you're playing it, but the captain of the ship largely had the restraint to never push the player towards the railing so it ends up working out in the end. If you're only playing one of them then uh probably not this one.