Mighty No. 9 - Keiji Inafune / comcept kicksarter project

[Gunstar Green]

So I ripped through the backer demo in about an hour. Here are my impressions which I posted on the game's official site:

+ The art design is adorable but we already knew that.
+ The music. Not as catchy as I would have liked, but it's pretty nice.
+ The dashing mechanic is really excellent. Once you start getting a level down it feels good to zip through it absorbing enemies. It gives the game a good dose of Mega Man X. I do however think the air dash needs to be limited as it's stupid broken in its current infinite form.
+ Great boss mechanics, feels like good old Mega Man boss fights though their patterns may be a bit too easy to avoid.
+ Character graphics. Enemies and allies all look attractive and suitably cartoony.
+ Voice acting... for the most part anyway. It's at least as good as I expected.
+ Some nice effects. I love Beck's death animation and when he absorbs the bosses.

- Mouths not moving with the speech. It's really jarring to see this in a game in 2015.
- Level graphics. Very bland for the most part and explosions especially look horrid.
- Difficulty. This will have platforming veterans yawning. Very generic and uninspired stage design so far. The fact that I was able to breeze through the levels and bosses without the ability to transform worries me quite a bit.
- Stage enemy variety. There's really not a lot of it and the enemies are mostly very unthreatening. It's not like we had cartridge space limitations to worry about or anything. This doesn't help the already bland levels feel any less bland.
- A lot of the animations are so bad they look like placeholders.
- The wall clinging can feel a little sketchy at times. It makes me wonder why not just go with a wall jump instead?
- Overall cheap feeling interface and design. It really feels more like a lower budget indie game than one with several million dollars to spend. It has all the polish of a digital release game from the late 2000's. I'm one of the people who defended the delayed release but I'm not really seeing what that extra time went into.

I know I sound pretty harsh but overall I do like the game so far, I'm just not blown away nor did I expect to be. I'm hoping they're saving some surprises for the later levels especially in regards to platforming challenges (or else I'll be blowing through it in less than an afternoon). I would have liked to be able to transform since that's a large part of the game I was unable to judge. I guess they can't give away everything though.

It's Mega Man, but it's not, it's what I signed up for though it's not as polished as I had hoped it would be (not even close actually).

[Ghegs]

My biggest issue was the firing - in Mega Man games, the bosses have an invulnerability period after getting hit, so it's pointless to keep rapid firing at them. But here they have no such period (or it's much, much shorter) so it's beneficial to stick close to bosses (to overcome the "3 shots on screen at a time" -limit) and keep hitting that button. That's dumb, and only serves to aggravate hand pain and controller degradation.

[TEKTORO]

Thanks for the feedback Gunstar, hopefully those are just the very early stages of negatives, usually demos are no where near the final product nor meant to be more than a quick view of what's in the woks. I'm confident we will have a fully improved game by release, at least I'm hoping some of the things you mentioned would worry me if so.

[Gunstar Green]

My biggest issue was the firing - in Mega Man games, the bosses have an invulnerability period after getting hit, so it's pointless to keep rapid firing at them. But here they have no such period (or it's much, much shorter) so it's beneficial to stick close to bosses (to overcome the "3 shots on screen at a time" -limit) and keep hitting that button. That's dumb, and only serves to aggravate hand pain and controller degradation.

Agreed. It also made defeating the bosses trivial since you could just rapid fire them down. It really felt off.

So far I'd have to say I'm disappointed. Hopefully some polishing and adjustments are still being made and things will at least be more mechanically solid in February if not visually.

[Tanooki]

Given the months between I'd imagine you're into a moderate earlier beta with a good bit of temporary placeholder stuff from interfaces to the various bits of art. Things like the gun vs bosses could be fixed with a basic implementation so if it stays that way it's a choice, but if they're taking backer input and given most are mega man fanboy types they'll howl their dislike and it should get addressed.

If you feel the bones of it at this rate are in the right place, unless they just say screw it and quit I think more of your negatives will slide into the other box by next year.

[Gunstar Green]

If you feel the bones of it at this rate are in the right place, unless they just say screw it and quit I think more of your negatives will slide into the other box by next year.

I do hope so but I have to admit my optimism has been stretched pretty thin by this project and I'm someone who completely ignored all of the community drama.

Comcept stating that, except for the online components, the game is basically done isn't really encouraging.

As I said it's fun, I like it, but beyond the lack of polish the amateurish level design is not what I expected from folks who have decades of experience working in this genre.

[Tanooki]

Well I've ignored it too seeing that I pass most of it off as fanboys with entitlement complexes who whine at the drop of a hat if they don't get their cheeks kissed over every little detail (crowd sourced games or not.) But if they did say it was more or less done, that isn't very good unless the 'less' in that is placement art and choosing to tweak the things you brought up which would be easily done (especially the non-art stuff.)

I intend to buy the game on 3dS when it's a real game not a download, but if it rates badly because they cut corners, so be it. I can either ignore it, or wait until a bunch of angry nerd betrayal/rage puts a lot of used copies out there and it can be picked up for $10 to see how lazily they wrecked it for myself.

[Reprise]

I intend to buy the game on 3dS when it's a real game not a download, but if it rates badly because they cut corners, so be it.

It is a "real" 3DS game...

Or is that just here in Europe?

[Tanooki]

It's coming out here next year too on physical media. I'll just see if they iron out the complaints to see if I spend $30 or like $15 on the after market, or if it's really bad just ignore it.

[Reprise]

Erm, so this just got delayed AGAIN? Holy shit... They're still citing problems with the network mode. I'm sorry, but fuck the network mode. Who even backed/pre-ordered this for the network mode? The old fans who this game was pitched/aimed at probably don't even care about the multiplayer.

Ah well, these things happen. It's pretty bad though.