Mighty No. 9

Surprise, surprise, Mighty No. 9 is the garbage fire that gives garbage fires a bad name. That isn't exactly a new or refreshing take on the game; it was, in a way, D.O.A. thanks to the increasingly negative word-of-mouth surrounding it up to its release. Keiji Inafune's newest game to hold him up as the "father" had increasingly poor reception ever since the Kickstarter, and perhaps it wasn't entirely unjustified. Hell, even looking at the incredibly maligned trailer, you can see from the dislike bar just how little hope people had in this action platformer, or at least how much they enjoyed trashing it. This isn't entirely a case like the as-of-this-review upcoming Ghostbusters movie, where much of the dislike feels undeserved. The trailer is incredibly tone deaf, dated, and overall just seems like an advertisement for an incredibly poor product that you'd expect to see cost about five dollars from an independent studio, or at least one guy sitting at his computer programming a game (which is an unintentional insult to one-man game designers like the dude who did Axiom Verge.)

I'm spinning my wheels for so long, talking about the lead-up to the game, because that's fundamentally inseparable from the final product. This game, after all, was one of the biggest crowdfunded games, making nearly four million dollars, all on the promise of something like a Mega Man game. There are going to be comparisons to Mega Man in this review because Mighty No. 9 doesn't even pretend to not be heavily, heavily influenced by Capcom's franchise. In the interest of full disclosure, I backed Mighty No. 9. I'm Mighty No. 1553. You can find me in the credits as "A Generous Backer." Also in the interest of full disclosure, I backed this game despite not really liking the Mega Man series. hey, it was late 2013. It was a wild time. It had been about a year since we re-elected Obama, people were still pissed at Capcom for canceling Mega Man Legends 3, and we all trusted Keiji Inafune with our money. They were innocent, foolish times of our youth.

Despite not really liking Mega Man, I've always recognized it's more of just my particular taste in games. I'd much rather take a action-platformer with the language of Cave Story over Mega Man, and even take the stylings of the Donkey Kong Country games (Retro Studios entries included) over all others. It's not my taste, but there's a certain grace to the Mega Man franchise; that first stage with your, powerless and without upgrades, must overcome a stage and an overwhelmingly powerful robot master at the very end, is oh so satisfying to finally overcome. You slowly gain more and more powers, becoming stronger as you wipe away each threat and eventually take down the final boss with all the abilities you've gained through your journeys. That sense of progression, in which your initial struggle pays off into not a breeze, but a handle through the later levels, is a fundamental part of what made Mega Man such a success on the NES.

That sense of progression is absolutely absent in Mighty No. 9, from the level design to how checkpoints work to the bosses themselves. It does do some things right, which I'll list here:

1) The dash mechanic can be neat

2) Lives matter

That's it. Aside from those two points, there is very little in Mighty No. 9 which can be construed as "fun" or "enjoyable," and even then these only two good qualities are royally screwed up in the game. In order to defeat enemies, you must weaken them with a pitiful shot that you can't charge. When the enemies suddenly turn a certain color and have pixels float around them, you can dash through them and destroy them if they're in-level mooks, or deal "heavy" damage if they're bosses. Do note that, for a good chunk of bosses, you have to dash them or they'll restore whatever damage you just dealt. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; it's a switch of focus to charging up shots at a distance to taking risks and getting in the enemy's face so you can dash them into oblivion and get a slight, if poorly communicated, temporary boost to your abilities. Getting consecutive dashes through enemies flat-out feels good, which makes it such a shame when such an opportunity is rare at best outside of the tutorial. I'm sure there are methods where you can do such liberating combo-dashes, but in order to find them the base game has to be enjoyable to begin with. I can handle a long training period to get to something good; I'm eagerly awaiting the release of the next Monster Hunter game, but moving from Point A to Point B is too much of a chore in Mighty No. 9 to warrant such a time investment. Not to mention sometimes the game is just plain bullshit.

You can also dash in the air, which is the best way to move around and skip through huge chunks of levels, but it's the absolute worst for platforming. You dedicate yourself to a set distance where even a single button input can throw off your whole trajectory, which leads itself to frustrating deaths when so often the punishment for not pulling off the exact perfect jump is death. Yes, this game makes your life counter matter in a way Mario hasn't for years, but its a result of cheap challenges. Imagine if Super Meat Boy had a hard limit of 3 lives the entire time and sparse checkpoints. You'd get an exaggerated version of what it feels like to slog through the incredibly cold, soulless, and cheaply punishing levels of Mighty No. 9.

On paper, each stage in Mighty No. 9 is designed according to logical game design rules; you're often presented with one obstacle, then another, then two at the same time. It's appreciated, but often the steps in between feel cut short, and there's no point where the game takes a moment to be, I don't know, fun? The best parts of my beloved Donkey Kong Country series are where the designers just decide to put a section in where you just hold right and you bounce off three enemies in succession. Yes, it's stupid, yes, it's pandering, but it was put there because the designers thought it'd be fun. Such things are absent in Mighty No. 9, where it feels like all the levels were designed by a computer with an algorithm to create playable levels.

The boss battles are similarly pathetic and soulless, sharing the form and concept of a Mega Man battle but not actually understanding what made them work. You can shoot the boss with either your basic buster (that can't charge) or an elemental weapon that they're hopefully weak to, but you'll usually end up just using the Sword ability, considering it is by the far the absolute best in the game. It makes sense for the game design that, eventually, the bosses will change in color and be surrounded with pixels, just like the basic enemies when they're dash-able, and you can dash the bosses to deal damage. The fun part, and I use that term sarcastically, is that you have to dash the bosses to deal damage to them. This actually works in a kind of clever way for some bosses, but some are so rarely on the actual field that dashing into them would cause your demise, and before you get your chance to actually progress in the battle the effect wears off and you have to pelt the boss all over again. It's an incredibly frustrating and tedious process that is saved by neither the enormous variety of just three attacks (two if it's the final boss' first phase) or by the poorly conveyed health bar.

It may seem a minor thing to complain about, but the health bar in Mighty No. 9 doesn't have "ticks" the way the Mega Man health bar did, where an attack would lop off a certain amount of little Pez. The health is a simple bar, the kind you've seen before in several other games. The problem comes that it's now harder to visualize how much damage a boss' attack does. Often, there's a minor difference between the two, but you can take three of one and four of the other. I recognize it seems petty, but more than once I found myself near death after two attacks from the boss' janky and disjointed hitbox. It's punishing, yes, but you're given little wiggle room and frequently the damage you take doesn't feel like you deserved. Though, it might just be the shockingly awful Wii U port causing that. Either take this paragraph as cheap difficulty or a condemnation of the version of the game I played.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's a problem for everyone, though, because Mighty No. 9's problems can really come down to a severe lack of polish. It's ugly, touchy, still feels exactly like the demo despite the several delays, and nowhere is this lack of polish more clear than in the cutscenes, which heavily feature voice acting which is both unnecessary and not done well. We don't need unskippable dialogue (unless you want to skip the entire scene) that's voiced, but if you're going to give us that, make it good. The voice acting in the game is simply not good, and neither are the totally unmoving mouths that go along with them. It's shocking to see a game with a budget this high come out in this day and age and not even have the character's mouth, or even a texture, flap open and closed. It's yet another thing that this game does that would be an interesting or organic progression from the classic Mega Man franchise, but simply doesn't do it well.

Which comes back to whether or not Mighty No. 9 is disappointing. From the very concept alone, there was a promise of a Mega Man game, with the tried-and-true side-scrolling jumping and shooting action, but now you have this cool mechanic where you can zip forward. That still sounds great! Movement is vastly underrated in games, and the ability to move faster through Mega Man 2, is, well, fucking awesome. What was delivered, however, was that with a whole bunch of other stuff tacked on, like voice acting and full cutscenes and a rap song over the credits and online play which nobody really wanted, and it's not longer recognizably a Mega Man game. It's something else entirely, and what that is just isn't very good.