A little short, but this game is excellent and paved the way for a whole new way to play Mega Man.
First, I'll explain the basics. You control a 5th grader at ACDC Elementary school named Lan Hikari through a world where electronics and the internet have become as much a part of life as eating and breathing. Most people carry around PErsonal Terminals (or PET for short), which is essentially a high tech cell phone with email capabilities. What makes PETs special though is the AI inside known as a Net Navi. Lan's Net Navi is known as MegaMan.exe. PETs have the capability to send the Navi into various electronics and into the internet through a process called "Jacking-In". In a society so heavily dependant on computers and the internet, Navi's have the ability to control just about everything by jacking into it. That's the back ground for the game, but the actual story is really no more than the misadventures that Lan has with MegaMan.EXE as he lives his life. Those misadventures just happen to involve run-ins with the Net Crime Syndicate known as the WWW. Lan has several friends that support him throughout the game, each with their own Navi's. Dex, with his Navi Gutsman.EXE, Mayl, Lan's best friend and nextdoor neighbor, with Roll.EXE and Yai, the richest girl in town, with her Navi, Glyde.EXE. Other characters include Chaud, an Official Netbattler, who commands his Navi, Protoman.EXE, with excellence.
As for the actual game play, battles happen much like RPG's, in that you don't know when they are coming (unless its a story scripted fight of course) and that you can gain treasure or zenny (the currency of this game) from them. They all take place on a 3x6 panel board which is split into 3x3 for MegaMan.EXE and 3x3 for your opponents to begin with. MegaMan has his buster and charge shot, but the real beauty of these battles is sending MegaMan chip data. This is the entire area of strategy in this game. There's 175 different chips in the game and several of them can be combined to create an even stronger chip called a Program Advance, that can be used once and then returns to normal until the same combination of chips is sent again. You can keep only 30 chips in your folder to use in battle at a time. This may not seem like much, but I never ran out of chips in this installment (however in later installments I ran out of chips on the final bosses).
The graphics in this game are very nice, especially for an early GBA title. Infact, I would say they are better than the graphics in later installments (4 & 5). The sound in the game is alright, though the music is a tad recycled throughout the game.
All in all, this game may be shorter than the rest of the series, but its most definately worth adding to your collection if you can find it. I would recommend this game to anyone.