Decline Mighty No. 9 - It's better than nothing.

[---]

I can't really understand the appeal of Megaman games.

 

[Caim]

This has got to be biggest disappointment for Mega Man fans, I pledged the minimum just because the concept seem cool but to all views it is simply mediocre; not good enough to be a poor sequel and not bad enough to be very relevant... Except to the suckers who backed this

I consider myself a fan of the classic games, but when watching footage of Mighty No. 9... I just have no desire to play it. It looks like someone tried to make a Mega Man game but failed to grasp what makes those games fun. And I'm the kind of guy who thinks that Mega Man 5 is not as terrible as people claim it to be.

The launch trailer:

From the comments:

"This is Mighty No. 9. And all it wants to be is fun."

Then why isn't it?

 

[Siveon]

I can't really understand the appeal of Megaman games.

Tight controls, difficult platforming maneuvers with challenging boss fights to create an overall rewarding game. It's not rocket science.

 

[Hobo Elf]

You forgot the cool as shit music.

 

[Viata]

Also, being able to use the bosses' powers is p. cool.

 

[---]

Meh, I only played Megaman X, considered by many the best in the series, and I found a boring game with uninspired level design, a ridiculous length and unchallenging platform sequences.
The bosses were nothing special, as regards their design, though quite hard to beat.
The music was great, though.

 

[Hobo Elf]

I've never seen anyone say that X is the best. It's a great game, but X2, X3 and X4 are very much superior.

 

[Viata]

While they are superior(X5 is my favorite, though), X is still a great game.

 

[Whisky]

Ah ha ha. My friend, who is a huge Megaman Legends fan is completely broken by this game's release.

He now says that he's glad MML3 never happened.

 

[Ivan]

At least the final boss is challenging in a good way. Took me 3 hours to get there...

 

[Viata]

Ah ha ha. My friend, who is a huge Megaman Legends fan is completely broken by this game's release.

He now says that he's glad MML3 never happened.

That is a good way to ignore how painful was to know they cancelled MML3.

 

[Chamezero]

It's even bricking consoles...
Mega Man doesn't deserve this

 

[Siveon]

Well, it's not really Mega Man. Hell Inafune was mostly a designer/producer no?

...Not that Capcom is going to use Mega Man well either but as far as I can see we haven't sullied the name more than X7 did.

 

[MrRichard999]

Guess you can get a mega man fix here. Hours of entertainment.

http://www.romhacking.net/?page=hacks&perpage=20&title=mega man&startpage=1

http://www.romhacking.net/?page=hac...erpage=20&title=rockman&author=&hacksearch=Go

 

[iZerw]

After this I can't wait to see how Shenmue 3 will turn out.

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

Well, POE and W2 turned out just good. Waiting for the new Torment.

Spoiler

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...own-all-the-problems-that-came-with-this-game

Sonic sticks the boot in to Mighty No. 9 as Inafune admits: "I own all the problems"

Sonic the Hedgehog has stuck the boot in to Mighty No. 9 amid the game's troubled launch.

Mighty No. 9 launched yesterday following negative reviews and reports that developer Comcept had sent Kickstarter backers the wrong game codes.

Now, the official Sonic the Hedgehog Twitter, which has 336,000 followers and a reputation for troll posts, referenced a quote attributed to Mighty No. 9's development chief Keiji Inafune. It's not pretty.

In a launch Twitch stream that went live yesterday, Inafune, via long-time translator Ben Judd, appeared to hit back at Mighty No. 9 critics by saying "it's better than nothing".

Keiji Inafune, left, and Ben Judd, centre, on stream.

The quote was picked up by a variety of publications and did the rounds yesterday on social media as evidence of Inafune's supposedly blasé approach to the development of Mighty No. 9, which was Kickstarted to the tune of nearly $4m.

The problem is, Inafune did not say "it's better than nothing". Rather, the phrase came from Judd, who often adds in his own thoughts when translating for Inafune.

Inafune actually holds his hands up to the failings of Mighty No. 9, saying he's to blame.

Here's a transcription of what Judd said on stream:

Inafune-san said, "You know, I want to word this in a way to explain some of the issues that come with trying to make a game of this size on multiple platforms." He's like, "I'm kind of loath to say this because it's going to sound like an excuse and I don't want to make any excuses. I own all the problems that came with this game and if you want to hurl insults at me, it's totally my fault. I'm the key creator. I will own that responsibility."
​

Judd goes on to say that Inafune says that the $4m Kickstarter figure was actually about 60 per cent of Mighty No. 9's budget, and creating 10 different versions of Might No. 9 (it's on pretty much every platform going) hurt the project.

Here's Judd:

In this case, it was do the base game and do all the ports all at the same time. And it ended up being a huge amount of work, more than they actually estimated. Definitely, when they looked at the project, they were wrong about a lot of things. They underestimated how much work, time and money was going to be necessary. All of those things create a huge amount of pressure.
​

And here's Judd, again, responding to the accusation that Inafune did not pay enough attention to Mighty No. 9 the video game during production and instead spread his time too thinly across multiple projects, such as a Mighty No. 9 anime and Recore for Microsoft.

I've [Ben Judd] seen a lot of different comments that suggested Inafune-san was only focused on being a businessman and taking the IP and making anime or manga or branching off into a lot of different directions. To your average everyday person, it's going to seem that way. But the reality is, during production, the key creative pieces really happen for the first 70 per cent and then beyond that, it's all about doing porting and bug testing.

I promise you Inafune-san's time is best spent focused on taking this IP in new directions. Again, as I said, to be an independent studio and get a chance to own your IP, it just doesn't happen. It does bring in other opportunities, which is great. I guarantee you [that] you want your independent creators and developers to have their IP, you want them to be able to take them in different directions. It gives you more choices as gamers. I 100 per cent stand by this sentiment.
​

Meanwhile, some have hit back at Sonic's sick burn, pointing out that it's a little rich for Sega to criticise a game when the Sonic franchise hasn't seen a decent game release in years. I mean, the less said about Sonic Boom the better.

 

[Hobo Elf]

In this case, it was do the base game and do all the ports all at the same time. And it ended up being a huge amount of work, more than they actually estimated. Definitely, when they looked at the project, they were wrong about a lot of things. They underestimated how much work, time and money was going to be necessary. All of those things create a huge amount of pressure.

So Inafune is a shitty producer.

 

[Talby]

 

[Great Deceiver]

Played for a bit, it's not awful. Pretty difficult too.

 

[aweigh]

sonic is a cold bitchhh

 

[Ivan]

As I said on steam, it's not a bad title, just mediocre. The dash system is conducive to speedrunning and makes the game more fun if that's how you decide to play it. The final boss is still kicking my ass, though, it is a tedious affair of whittling down a huge life bar.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.pcgamer.com/mighty-no-9-review/

MIGHTY NO. 9 REVIEW
I haven’t rage quit a game in a very long time. That is to say, I hadn’t until I played Mighty No. 9. Touching the imprecise hitbox of a boss’ insta-death attack to take my last life and send me all the way back to the start of the course (for the third time) is about as mad as I’ve ever been at a game. It’s not that I couldn’t “git gud,” it’s that even when you are gud, Mighty No. 9 makes playing it more frustrating than fun. And though there’s a nugget of pure joy at its core, that only serves as a reminder of the game this could have been.

Mighty No. 9 is Mega Man producer Keiji Inafune’s spiritual successor to the series that made him famous, meant to evoke the spirit of those classic Mega Man games but evolved and adapted for the modern era. You run to the right, shooting lemon-shaped bullets at your enemies while traversing platforms and obstacles. But the main character, Beck, has an ability Mega Man never had: shooting enemies weakens them, but you have to dash through them to finish the job, absorbing their “Xel” energy in the process.

While that mechanic is a relatively large departure from Inafune’s other games, it’s a very fun twist on the Mega Man formula. Mighty No. 9 becomes a game of learning exactly how many hits each enemy can take before I can dash through them, and flowing through a level at high speed is satisfying. While the jumping and the dash didn’t feel as precise as I would like, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed learning enemy patterns, level layouts, and boss attacks and then using the tools I’ve been given to best them all as efficiently as possible.

Fear the pink
Unfortunately the environments you use those tools in are, for the most part, frustrating and ill-conceived. The level design in Mighty No. 9 is boring at the best of times and an absolute sin against video games at the worst. They are filled with a relatively small cast of enemies for the entirety of the game’s roughly four-hour duration. Glowing pink objects (usually spikes) that would instantly kill me are plentiful and frustrating. Hidden or divergent paths are scant, and the ones I did find would usually just skip whatever obstacle its entrance was hiding before. And occasionally I was presented with a design choice so flabbergasting I couldn’t believe it made it into the final game.

In the Power Planet level, I fought my way through the course until I reached a spot with no clear way to proceed, my path blocked by a large pink insta-death turbine with only a small gap below it. Confused, I hesitated for a few seconds before a message popped up on my screen: “use the Crouch Dash.”

It was at this moment I realized Mighty No. 9 was the Mega Man game Egoraptor so eloquently tore apart in his fantastic Sequelitis video five years ago. The game presented me with level design so poor that developer Comcept knew ahead of time I wouldn’t understand what to do. Then Comcept decided the right way to fix this glaring error in the course’s layout was a pop-up message handing me the answer. This moment of Mighty No. 9 should be immortalized in the level designer’s bible, simply labeled “DO NOT DO THIS.”

Not all of the levels are this offensive in their design, but when they’re not frustrating they’re usually uninteresting and repetitive. In the Capitol Building level I chased a sniper robot named Countershade back and forth through a series of long hallways. I was forced to run through the same parts of the level multiple times, each less fun than the last, and for some reason this was the only course with no checkpoints. When I finally caught up to the boss, he was protected by pink insta-death electrical wires stretching from floor to ceiling that would turn on and off. Tap one on the final leg of the level? Start over from the beginning. In the Mega Man games, deaths like this always felt like they were my fault, like there was something I could have done better. But in Mighty No. 9, they feel like cheap shots caused by overuse and forced repetition.

And I could only look at Mighty No. 9’s bland visuals so many times over. The game looks dated in the worst way. Everything is polygonal and low detail, cutscenes are barely animated with voice acting that will make your eyes roll back in your head, and it all ends up feeling like this is some early draft of the game that was shipped by mistake. The fire and smoke particles are the worst of the bunch, with explosions looking impotent and unthreatening. An early cutscene shows an overview of the city on fire, and it’s hard not to notice that the dozen or so pillars of smoke coming from different buildings are all identical animations copy and pasted across the landscape. And while the character designs of Beck and the bosses were interesting as concept art, their translation to 3D models mostly feels lifeless and flat.

Hit and (mostly) miss
It’s possible to ignore a game’s graphics if they don’t get in the way, but Mighty No. 9’s 2.5D animation and ugly particles have gameplay implications too. These muddy visuals mean hitboxes can be incredibly unclear. The first boss in the lineup (although, like Mega Man, they can be attempted in any order) is a fire robot named Pyrogen. He has an explosive attack that’s easy to see coming, but surprisingly hard to avoid because the edge of the ability is so obscure. It was nearly impossible for me to tell where the flame effects would stop, and that lack of clarity meant I took more cheap shots than I care to remember. Pyrogen was also one of a couple bosses whose second form has an insta kill move. Because that’s also fun.

The frustrating part about Mighty No. 9 is that its bosses and enemies did remind me of Mega Man, but Comcept’s poor design choices mean it resembles a fan project more than a spiritual successor. The final boss of the game (no spoilers) was challenging but understandable, and I could feel myself getting better each time I fought it, just like classic Mega Man. But the wonky hitboxes and imprecise graphics made that challenge aggravating instead of motivating. This isn’t a fun sort of challenge where losing is part of the experience, it’s an enraging one.

As for performance, the PC version of Mighty No. 9 ran well enough for me, only occasionally dropping frames when I rarely dashed into groups of four or more enemies at once. I did have an issue with the game’s borderless windowed option, which didn’t function correctly on any of the rigs I tried it on. The worst problem on PC is the controls, as the game clearly wasn’t made for a mouse and keyboard whatsoever. Even if you don’t have a gamepad plugged in, all the tutorial messages and button indicators use the icons for an Xbox controller, so I had to check the keybindings menu to even learn how to play—and by default, shoot and dash are awkwardly mapped to left and right click. I ended up using an Xbox 360 controller for nearly the entire time I played.

What we’re left with is a whole lot of missed potential. Mighty No. 9 presents an interesting evolution on the mechanics of one of the most beloved series in video games, but then completely stumbles on building a quality game around those mechanics. There are surely moments to be enjoyed here, but they’re hidden in the nooks and crannies of downright infuriating level designs and unappealing art. The Mega Man fan inside me revelled in those fleeting moments, while mourning the game we all hoped this would be.

THE VERDICT
54

MIGHTY NO. 9
Mighty No. 9’s dash mechanic is a lot of fun, but bad art, imprecise hitboxes, and awful level design make the experience extremely frustrating.

 

[Hobo Elf]

The mighty no. 54/100.

 

[Caim]

The mighty no. 54/100.

Should be Mighty No. 5.9

 

[Chamezero]