Review #629: Mighty No.9

 Well.... It IS better than nothing, I guess...

 I tried to defend this game, I really did. While I always felt that having more than one kickstarter for Mighty No. 9 was very shady, I respected that the end result looked like exactly what they had promised: A Megaman clone. I don't know why people chose to believe that it'd have 2-D graphics when they said day 1 that it was only concept art. Regardless, after firmly defending the product I finally got my hands on it... and it's not very good...

 The story follows Mighty No. 9, William White's creation, as he set outs to stop the other Mighty Numbers suffering from a bug. In typical Megaman fashion, you're free to tackle any of the 8 initial stages in any order, 9 stages if you have the Ray DLC. The plot itself is TERRIBLE. It's cheesy in all the bad ways, to the point of cringy, as a matter of fact, the story is so bad that it made me dislike the game... usually I can separate plot from gameplay and, if it's too horrid, ignore it. But I couldn't here, it is as if it was constantly trying to get you to hate it. The dialogue itself feels as if it was written by the Irate Gamer, it's THAT bad. The icing on the cake is that you can't skip the text and read it at your own pace, you have to wait for the voice actors to finish their lines. Besides the 12(13 with the DLC) stages there are VR missions, which are pretty much glorified tutorial challenges, and a few unnecessary co-op online missions. The game actually suffered a delay due to the online mode nobody cared for. But, hey, for the first time in Megaman(and its clones) history... the Boss Rush is not mandatory. Praise the gods. As a whole, the 13 basic stages took me less than 3 hours to complete, and there's a trophy for beating the game in less than 60 minutes, so... yeah, it's kinda short.

The voice acting itself is mediocre, and even at its best the script is so BAD that appreciating the better acting is impossible. On another note, the ending consists of four hand-drawn images with no text or dialogue. Alright.... Let's talk graphics, I think that, for a low-budget game, they are good enough. Yes, the game raked over 8 Million dollars in kickstarter money. But you also have to keep in mind that kickstarter keeps a percentage of the money and that making games isn't cheap. I think the graphics, as a whole, get the job done. On the other hand, Beck doesn't look as good in 3-D as he does in concept art, and I think I know why, y'see, the 3-D proportions are all outta whack. Beck's 3-D model has a huge head, and short stubby arms that start out very thin and get thicker as they get closer to his hands. He looks quite different from his concept art, and in turn, looks rather lame. He is also sporting this weird blue codpiece for no reason whatsoever.

 The gameplay... has some interesting ideas, but it has a few shortcomings. Beck, our main character, can jump and shoot, as you'd expect, but he can also absorb enemies by dashing into them. You can dash by pressing R1(Or by double tapping left or right, if you toggle the option on) and you can use it pretty much indefinitely, so you could try dashing your way to safety out of a miscalculated jump. If your dash into an enemy you will just hurt, but if you shoot an enemy a few times they will get incapacitated, turning green, blue, red or yellow and then you can dash into them to absorb them. Each color is a different buff, for instance, Blue fills a Health Refill option while Red makes your shots go through enemies and deal more damage... for a short while. The different effects of each color aren't explained in game, instead, you must go into the hints sub-menu on the stage select screen. Thanks for nothing! Dashing makes the game feel like a faster take on Megaman, and it can be quite fun once you get the hang of it. You don't need to absorb enemies, however, if you try to destroy an enemy just by shooting at it, it wouldd take about double the amount of shots than it would have taken you if had you just incapacitated and absorbed them. On the other hand, absorbing makes bosses a chore. You have to damage them until they grow purple, at which point they will stop taking damage, and then dash into them. Fail to do so and they will recover their health. It's an unnecessary mechanic that makes bosses less fun than they could've been. On the flipside, landing a dash on a boss will restore your sub-weapon gauge, so in a way it's also rewarding. There's also a 'hidden' move, an emergency escape, holding R2 and pressing the shoot button will make Beck jump backwards while shooting. This is never told in the tutorials and seems to have no practical use whatsoever.

 Besides dashing, another neat twist on the formula is how the sub-weapons earned from bosses work. First of all, each power is not a simple recolor, but actually change how Beck looks. But then there's the fact that each weapon is entirely unique, not simply being a different projectile, like most Megaman games. For instance, the Sword sub-weapon doesn't consume energy from the sub weapon gauge if you use basic attacks, so if you wanted you could play the entire game as a melee-based Beck! The hitbox seemed a bit wonky on a few bosses(Namely the machine-creators from the latter set of stages), but on the whole I had fun playing as Sword beck. You've also got Avi's weapon, which lets you jump higher, hover and attack enemies above you. There's also an electric weapon that shoots spread bullets and then you electrocute whatever was hit by the bullets, land every bullet on a boss and you'll deal massive damage. The way sub-weapons look and play is simply brilliant. Once you beat a boss the game also tells you which enemy is weak to that sub-weapon, something that was criticized... but I think it's a good thing. Don't try to deny it, you've looked online how the weapon weaknesses work in Megaman games, if you say otherwise you are lying, and this simply cuts down on the chase. Defeating a boss also makes segments from the vulnerable boss' stage easier, just like Megaman X.

 So far, I've been mostly positive about the game, because, as I said before, it does have some very good ideas. However, not matter how good those ideas are, they all go down the drain once you actually start playing the game and discover that level design is terrible. There's an almost sick over-reliance on one-hit kills spikes to add challenge to the game, a few times hiding behind some ugly text-boxes due to in-game dialogue nobody wished for, just like Gunvolt, except that you can't turn the portraits off!! Sometimes you'll have to react seconds flat because the pit you needed to fall through had spikes hidden off-camera. Megaman and Megaman X had always had some of these, but those games weren't as focused on speed as Mighty No.9. You are expected to dash through stages, but also be wary of spikes that could turn up at any moment. The Mines stage is particularly bad about all of that, one time I was going through the stage I got so fast I got stuck between a wall and a drill and I couldn't go down below because I ended up on the wrong side of the first drill, forcing me to commit seppuku. The Ice stage is another bad one, with slippery floors and framerate drops. One stage that received some praise, I think, was Shade's looping stage... which was boring at best and annoying at worst, as you play hide and seek with the boss. And dying meant doing the ENTIRE chase again, and his hiding spots never changed. LAME. Another point of contention was Beck's dash. Fun most of the time, but it's too imprecise and MANY times the game required me to dash into tiny platforms, often times ending in my death.

 Let's talk about Call, Beck's sister. She gets an entire level for herself that is pretty much Metal Gear Call. And it SUCKS. She's slow, can't dash and her shots are so weak that killing enemies is pretty much a waste of time. Her stage is all about sneaking about, collecting keys and opening doors. Boring. There's this particular segment in which you have to fly through the infamous one-hit kill spikes that nearly made me quit the game. The entirety of  Call's stage is a detriment to the game. As a whole, the game can be fun, and there are a few fun stages, it's a shame most of them are so poorly designed, which, in turn, makes any fun you could've had with the game's admittedly good ideas be very sparse.

 Let's talk about Ray now. There's absolutely no reason as to why she shouldn't be on the disc from the get-go besides gating used copies. Which is incredibly slimy considering this was a fan-funded game. She has one of the very few fun stages, but she doesn't reward Beck with a weapon, instead, defeating her unlocks her as a playable character. The game doesn't even tell you HOW to play as her, what you must do is press up on the D-Pad when selecting a stage and then the game will allow you to pick Ray as a character. She has her own story, but it's so dumb, she speaks too much and says what amounts to nothing. By the end of the first cutscene I was already tired of hearing her voice. As for her gameplay, she is a melee take on Beck that is constantly losing health, making her constantly a chore to play. That's a bit harsh, she's not that awful, but I had more fun as Sword Beck.

 Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Mighty No.9 is a disappointing successor to Megaman. The worst part about it is how many good ideas it had, and the fact that some stages are actually fun prove that the game had potential, but for whatever reason, the team wasn't inspired or experienced(Which would be surprising, considering Inti-Creates, of Megaman Zero and Gunvolt fame, developed the game) enough to care about the levels. That said, I'd be willing to give a sequel a try, because I know that something really fun could be made from this game's foundations.
4.5 out of 10