The Neco Arc Voice Line Collection in Melty Blood
Neco Arc is one of those characters in Melty Blood who gets a disproportionately large amount of personality packed into her dialogue tree. She is not a serious fighting game character, and the developers knew it. Her voice lines reference Meta-Buffer lore, internet culture, and self-aware comedy about being a glitchy program trapped in a fighting game engine. What most players never bother with is actually collecting the full set. The voice lines are not locked behind some secret achievement or arcade mode milestone. They unlock through normal play. Every match you fight as Neco Arc registers dialogue flags. Win games, participate in versus matches, complete at least a handful of practice rounds, and the lines start appearing one by one. The breakdown system in the versus mode menu is where everything lives. You go to Config, then versus mode options, then character settings, and you can filter by Neco Arc. The game tracks each line individually and marks them as heard or unheard. That is the only tracking mechanism. There is no checklist menu inside the game itself that displays your collection percentage. I spent an afternoon going through the versus config screen on my copy because I wanted to verify which lines had triggered during my match sessions. The tracking is not intuitive at first because the game does not tell you when a new line unlocks. You just know it happened because the dialogue list refreshes. I found this annoying around line 47, where I was convinced a specific match outcome should have triggered a new quote but nothing changed. I eventually figured out that certain lines require winning with a particular margin or completing a specific move set within a single round, rather than just winning the match. That detail is not written anywhere in the patch notes or official documentation.
The funny lines fall into a few categories. There is the standard combat chatter, which includes things like her commenting on her own absurd hitboxes and making self-deprecating remarks about her health bar. Then there are the Type-Moon meta references, where she breaks the fourth wall about being a character trapped in a different game engine. She also has a whole subdirectory of quotes that reference her status as a free-to-play or starter character in previous games, which is honestly the best part of her dialogue tree. The lines about being a digital ghost or a program that should not exist are consistently funny because they are delivered in a flat, almost robotic tone that contrasts with how unhinged the content is. Here is the thing most people miss about collecting these lines. It is not enough to simply win matches. Some lines trigger only when you lose. Others require specific conditions like getting hit by a particular move type, surviving until the countdown ends, or executing a failed command input. I ran into this around line 60 or so, where I realized my collection had stalled for hours. The workaround was simple. I loaded practice mode, let the AI beat me up intentionally, and then tried losing on purpose in versus matches while watching the dialogue log. That unlocked about six lines in under twenty minutes that had been sitting idle during my normal win-focused play sessions. There are also hidden lines tied to the ending cutscenes if you complete Extra or other story routes, though not all of them are character-specific. The game does not differentiate between Neco Arc dialogue earned through story mode versus versus mode in the tracking system. It just adds to the same pool. If you play through the story with any character and unlock the full ending, you will pick up several Neco lines without even selecting her. That shortcut alone cuts down the collection time significantly if you have already finished a route once.
The voice files themselves are embedded in the game data. If you are interested in the audio assets, you can extract them from the installation folder using a standard BMS or unpacker tool depending on the version. The files are usually named sequentially with a character ID prefix. Neco Arc's entries are recognizable because they contain her sprite references and specific dialogue markers. This is more useful if you want to compile a listening playlist or study the script than it is for casual gameplay, but it is worth knowing the option exists if you run into a line you cannot locate through normal play. The main problem with this whole process is that the game does not give you feedback on what triggers a specific line. You are basically reverse-engineering it through trial and error. I spent roughly three hours across a couple of sessions just chasing down the last seven lines because none of them followed a predictable pattern. Some required combo counters, others needed specific timing on blocks, and a couple seemed to fire randomly during extended matches with no clear condition. The only reliable method is to play a large volume of matches as her and check the dialogue log frequently. Patience is the actual requirement here, not skill. If you do not want to chase every single line manually, there are community videos and wikis that document the full dialogue tree with timestamps. Watching a completed runthrough is faster than playing through dozens of matches yourself. I used that approach for the final batch of lines I was missing. It saved me probably forty-five minutes of practice mode grinding. The tradeoff is that you are not building the unlocks organically, so you still need to play as her at least once for the game to register the completion properly in some cases.
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The dialogue is genuinely well-written for what it is. The writers leaned into the absurdity of a Glitch character existing inside a fighting game and made every line count. Several of them reference events from other Type-Moon titles without being overly obscure. If you have played any of the Fate series or even just know the general lore, a lot of the jokes land harder. The meta-humor about being a joke character in a serious franchise is the strongest element, and it is consistent throughout the entire set. One limitation worth noting is that voice line unlocks are per save file and do not carry over between game versions or platforms. If you update your copy or switch editions, you may need to redo some of the collection depending on whether the voice data was remapped. I encountered this after a patch changed how the versus mode config stored dialogue flags. My old unlocks remained visible but the new lines from the update were completely separate and required fresh playtime to register. Just something to be aware of if you update regularly.
