Mighty No. 9 is a solid 9

King of Posters
1

…in suffering and shouldn’t exist, it is an abomination.

I streamed it all so you can suffer with me: https://www.twitch.tv/personasama/v/73852041

An hour or two in, I mix the sound better so the game isn’t as loud and my dumb mic is louder.

Anyway, the summary is: the levels are bad, the colors/lighting is bad so you can’t see where to go in the bad levels, the dash-to-absorb-power mechanic is a good idea but implemented absolutely stupidly for the bosses, and the bosses have really bad patterns where they’re just invincible half the time and you have to wait to hit them and you have to wait even longer to do permanent damage because they recover health if you don’t dash into them when it’s mandatory to.

It’s awful, don’t play it, it shouldn’t exist. Playing any other Megaman game, even 8, is a better time than this. I don’t recommend it to anyone unless you want to suffer, and even then, there’s all the X games after X4 to play if you want that kind of suffering.

9 Likes
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I hope we’ll get a post mortem of this game at one point

Was Gunvolt any good?

3

Kind of. Pretty cool combat systems, boring level design. Boss fights are like some Megaman ZX sort of thing. I got maybe about a third of the way through the game before I just sorta stopped caring. Maybe the sequel will be better? Kind of amazing this game was developed, released, and had a sequel announced in the time it just took for Mighty No. 9 to even be released.

4

Really? Everything I’ve seen of it looks just mediocre. Like a slightly better PS1 MMX game.

Was everyone expecting this to be a Second Coming? Idk why people are having such intensely negative responses.

5

I went into it expecting to be disappointed and ended up even more upset.

I think part of it is that there’s a lot there that could be good but then it falls short and then turns into utter frustration and poor design.

For example, Beck’s movement feels pretty good. His dashing around feels nice and responsive. But then they also give you a ducking dash that they never tell you about and require you to use at like 5 or so points in the game, two of them being “do it EXACTLY right or die” moments. Why have that? Taking it out doesn’t take away anything from that level and having it there is just a pointless barrier.

Actually, that’s what a lot of the game feels like - pointless barriers to waste your time. For example, the bosses have patterns that leave them invincible for half the time, and you just have to wait your turn to hit them. Then if you take off enough damage, you have to hit them with your dash to actually permanently remove that damage, otherwise they recover it and you’re left with nothing. Mix this with how they’re unhitable half the time and you’re just stuck with frustration.

The analogy I gave at the end of my playthrough was: remember how in the first DS Castlevania game, you had to draw a sigil on the touch screen when the boss was weak to actually defeat them? If you didn’t get it right, they would gain 10% of their health back and you’d have to fight it again until you could draw the symbol again. They only showed you how to draw the sigil once before the boss fight, so if you forgot the motion when it came time to draw it, you were shit out of luck and had to defeat the boss over and over and over, not actually capable of defeating it despite actually beating it. Adding that feature did nothing but fulfill the mandatory Nintendo requirement that all early DS titles had to use gimmicks of the system, and all later DS Castlevania games immediately took it out.

That gimmick is basically Beck’s boss energy-draining dashing mechanic except you have to do it every quarter of their life, and the possibility of fucking up is really high because they’ll be moving around and they’ll regain that life immediately, AND ON THE FINAL BOSS YOU CAN’T EVEN TELL WHEN YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO USE IT BECAUSE THEIR “WEAK, ABSORB ME NOW” COLOR IS FUCKING EXACTLY THE SAME AS THEIR REGULAR COLOR DID ANYONE EVEN PLAYTEST THIS HOLY SH

This game really could’ve benefited from having thousands of playtests where feedback was actually incorporated.

Related to this: in the first few minutes of the “making of” documentary of MN9, Inafune curses because he tries and tries but can’t get through one part of a level. The camera turns to the CEO of Inti Creates and he laughs and says, “we’ll adjust this.” That part of the level is exactly the same in the final game.

Anyway, Megaman 9 Shovel Knight is a way better game than this so play that instead.

4 Likes
6

still seemed like you were done with its bullshit about 3 hours in

Honestly from watching it, I was mostly annoyed at the art design. Like, it’s very My First 3D Game in a way that’s pretty bad for platformers; they really could have stood to not use a global illumination model for all objects on the scene, and maybe have some depth of field so that the bg/foreground wasn’t so distracting.

It seems like a serviceable enough game if you are into Megaman stuff and don’t mind a lot of parts of the game just being instant death that you didn’t know about until too late.

7

So the bosses are boring/bad? Sounds like a proper Mega Man game to me!

Yeah. Even without having played it I feel like it’d be 50% funner if the back-/foregrounds weren’t so dull. Something along the lines of MM7’s or 8’s environments – colorful and full of chunky little details – would’ve been great.

8

But proper Megamen bosses actually take damage when you shoot them

9

I feel weirdly dirty that I kickstarted this. I mean, it never looked fantastic, I wasn’t frothing about it or anything, I just kicked in 10$ because why not, new megaman game. Now I feel like I voted for Trump.

2 Likes
10

It might have been the French dub, but all the robots seemed really cute (seriously wanted to give Cryo’s “pewpewpew” a big hug) despite aggressively mediocre art design. Maybe they should have just started with the anime?

1 Like
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Really

13

It’s totally the French dub. I watched my friend play a bit in English and I immediately wanted to turn it off.

14

I implicitly trust Persona’s MM opinions, because he’s a fellow peashooter. Will never give a second thought.

15

This game is somehow uglier than Battleborn.

2 Likes
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This has unlockable characters, does it not? Do they play differently?
Shame it turned out like this. Wonder if Inti is stretched too thin.

Not remotely an excuse but I feel like Dawn of Sorrow had some obfuscated way of reviewing seals. I think you could see them again by looking in the glossaryor/mini-encyclopedia or something like that?

17

It was probably a mistake to try to develop it for Windows, OS X, Linux, PS3/4, Xbox 360/One, Wii U, Vita, 3DS, and Shield Portable. That’s just a ton of work that’d be better applied to game design if you cut your platforms in half.

18

it wouldn’t have been too much of a problem if they were using UE4 instead of UE3

3DS was a bad call no matter what tho

3 Likes
19

like, the rap is wild enough but can i just say that the sheer monotony of this four hour credits sequence with “A Generous Backer” scrolling by tens of thousands of times to the same 10 second music loop is a thing of genuine and true beauty

7 Likes
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I just can’t understand why all these kickstarters are casually making commitments to port to 3ds just to raise an extra 1000$ or some pittance. It is extremely obvious to me that this is a horrible idea, being someone who has never developed for the 3DS but who has worked at a dedicated game porting shop as my first job years ago and therefore have a pretty good idea of what amount of work different sorts of ports entail.

  • PS4 <-> Xbone <-> 360 <-> PS3 <-> Wii U = modest amount of work, assuming you are a normal Unity game – the hard part is conforming to testing and app store policies, i.e. pure red tape.
  • Console -> PC = annoying, because of hardware variety and controller differences
  • Real console -> Ouya = annoying, because of low specs and general shittiness
  • Real console -> original Wii = painful, because not much RAM and ancient GPU
  • Console -> 3DS = I WOULD JUST AS SOON PORT TO A VAX MAINFRAME

I mean, it’s fucked. The 3DS is like a late 90s console, it doesn’t really have a GPU at all. Even Nintendo has made public statements saying they think 3ds is way too difficult to port to and they’re planning to fix this in the next generation.

1 Like
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Gotta admit the “I am mighty” voice clips from the backers are a cool touch.
It would probably be amazing if they were at the end of a memorable game instead