note: holy stuff this game is uglymighty no 9
disclaimer i have not played a megaman game in a decade or so so i wont be comparing this to megaman or anything
mighty number 9 is a shooty platformer where you play as beck and try to revive an alt rock band that has been dead for decades. by shooty platformer i mean like megaman because this game is only relevant due to being a spiritual successor to megaman after it was repeatedly spurned by capcom. the hype around this game raised
$3,845,170(1) for development via kickstarter. for comparison shovel knight got $311,502(2) and undertale got $51,124(3) so we are talking stuffloads of money. this is also the only reason anyone cares for this game as it has proven to be another kickstarter stuff pile. the game lacks any sort of production value in anything and i do mean anything from animations to menus to the music to anything and the gameplay does not cover anything up, the most you can expect is mediocre at best. the only reason anyone cares for this game is the massive pile of money that was apparently burned or spent on blow and the large expectations from veteran game dev keiji inafune who led the project.
normally i dont start with the graphics and stuff for this but god damn look at it. everything about this games style is hideous and uninspired. the graphics look like they were done by a single guy majoring in game design who liberally took default assets and the animations awkwardly jerk when swapping from one to another. this is most notable in the abhorrent run cycle to standing swap that stuff instantly goes from full on sprint to standstill with no buffer animations in between to smooth it up. when cutscenes happen, and they do truly a megaman successor, there is a startling lack of animation everywhere as mouths dont move when people speak and all movements are robotically jerky. all of the textures look like ass or are nonexistent. the loving menus have xbox controller button prompts that left me struggling to find out why the exit button switches between escape and backspace and what the actual forget rb and lb are on a keyboard. i dont think you can even change the options unless you exit to the start menu but i might be wrong because of how bad the menus are. the music is just
bland as hell. particles and stuff arent anything special either. blockland looks better than this game. the forgettable dungeon looks better than this game.
the only thing left to carry these aborted assets to "i can deal with them because i like the game" status is the gameplay but it doesnt obviously. first off the tutorial explains jack stuff so i dont know if i beat the game missing a few crucial mechanics because you learn how to dash and how to move and thats about it. reading through other reviews there is apparently some stuff like a loving backflip that i never discovered which is telling of how the game uses and explains its mechanics. outside of the tutorial level the game doesnt guide you into learning anything else and almost all levels barring the end ones can be completed solely by dash and shoot very easily despite there being 9 megaman style powerups that nobody ever uses or has the desire to use unless cheesing a boss. honestly i dont know what a few of them do still. the point is the game thoroughly fails to teach or utilize its mechanics.
even if anyone bothers to go look up the what and how of the controls its not like any of it matters due to the dash which is for real easily the most op thing in the game. the dash is an infinite no cooldown horizontal dash that propels you rapidly and can be used to float in the air for a long time as it cancels gravity when used. the levels are not designed for such a powerful movement tool and as such large portions of quite a few levels are skippable simply by dashing in the air over every obstacle. the fastest way to traverse levels is alternate between dashing and firing repeatedly which sounds nice but actually means the game is just spamming left and right click in succession as this method takes no finesse whatsoever and playing the game for longer than needed is a chore. i guess the dash was pandering to speedrunners and people who gotta go fast and i am definitely a gotta go fast person but clearly the level design does not accommodate.
the dash is also essential for killing enemies in any reasonable amount of time. when you shoot an enemy enough times eventually they change color and you can pick between dashing through them or shooting them like 20 more times to kill them. the average enemy swaps colors in 1-3 hits so dashing is clearly the superior option and it further contributes to the dash and shoot pattern. problems arise when your projectiles dont loving pierce enemies behind the one you just shot meaning you can accidentally overdash into an enemy behind the enemy you dashed into because forget me. sometimes the enemies are placed to prevent this but also sometimes not heugh.
the whole dash into people stuff also functions as the games points mechanic thing wherein if you dash into things in succession you begin to build a combo which i didnt really give a stuff about but its pretty badly done. you get points exclusively for dashing into stuff so to actually game the system for max points you need to figure out the location of like every enemy on the map and how many shots are required to change its color into dashable which i dont think anyone gives a stuff about but it feels awkward when you can fly over most of the level avoiding a bunch of boring encounters instead of tediously finding and dashing into everything. additionally the total points you gain for dashing an enemy decreases rapidly as soon as they swap colors so to get max points knowing how many shots enemies take is even more essential because you have to dash very quickly after they swap. overall its dumb system and they should have at least added some sort of time based scoring as well but i doubt the game left testing before being released.
you would think that having an infinite air dash like this would significantly reduce the effort required in platforming and you would be right except the game makes up for this sometimes by having the most bullstuff obstacles of all time. every single platforming obstacle thing ie spikes or whatever
loving instakills. all of the stuff that
loving instakills looks like stuff that would knock you back and deal some damage in any other platformer but instead it
loving instakills in some grotesque parody of how the original megaman games handled platforming probably i dont really know. the entire game is easy as piss until you get into an instakill platforming stuff part where it turns the bullstuff meter up to 22. these segments have to be figured out in 1-3 tries depending on how many lives you have and if you forget up you are loving dead and i will go over the life situation next paragraph. additionally hitboxes are not clearly conveyed and sometimes the spike and spike equivalents are placed in seats worthy of the bullstuff king ie falls that should not have lethal spikes at the bottom and sometimes they have whack hitboxes and require some chuckleforgetery with an unexplained mechanic that you have to now learn on the fly or die. there is an entire level where you are hopping from cars and the ground kills you forget that level. additionally when any sort of precision platforming is required it is a complete mess because the game does not teach how to use the dash in any conservative way that seems to be required for this dumb stuff and instead substitutes this with a ledge grab which works out i guess.
at the beginning of a level you get i think 3 lives i dont know or care enough to fact check that. if you lose all your lives the level loving restarts. anyone having a eureka moment on how much of a stuffshow platforming is in this game congratulations. once again the game takes from megaman for no reason other than its megaman and this is the spiritual successor. there was also one particularly bad instance of terrible checkpoints, which normally were fine. during the shade level you have to hunt down this sniper guy who is shooting you from across the level and shoot at him for a little before he tps to somewhere else. this is both time consuming and obnoxious and if you die you have to restart the search which was loving awful and i felt i had to mention it. restarting is not made better by how much of a slog it is to progress through everything which is thankfully helped by the dash. skipping large parts of the game being preferable to interacting with it is not a good thing though.
the platforming sections, while easily the worst parts of the game, are thankfully uncommon. instead the meat of these boring levels is provided by the boring enemy encounters and how boring they are if not dashed past. they exist merely to slow down players as all of them are dispatched in the same shoot until dash way and either are stationary and shoot at you or mobile and try to crash into you. all of them take at most 5 hits for the larger enemies and 1-2 for most others and you spew bullets like a motherforgeter. the damage they do is almost negligible. there are no variants to the enemy formula, only how the enemies are applied barring one level where you play as a different character that you never play as again but that level sucked anyway so forget it. they are so loving boring and none of them require any mechanical knowledge to defeat other than spam pellets and dash. forget it.
the bosses are also boring and all of them are like 3 patterns over and over again with some sort of dumbass powerup move they do when they are at half health. this is seriously all the bosses i am not joking. this is the reward for the end of the level you just went through assuming you didnt get assforgeted by the platforming and had to restart. same deal with the lives and the bosses by the way if you run out youre kicked back to the level select. additionally some bosses can be ez cheesed with their countering powerup which results in me killing the ice boss in 3 seconds with the fire powerup. even more additionally beating the bosses enables cheese mode on some levels where portions of it are cut out because the boss you beat helps you and you cant actually turn this off to see what it was like before because this game.
outside of the main story mode thing there are a series of vr challenges i didnt play because forget this game and an online mode that i think is dead since i searched for a game once and didnt find stuff. steamspy shows about 100 people playing this concurrently as of july 1st so its no surprise. the amount of content outside the main story also seems to be limited with 28 vr missions and the one i did lasted like 2 minutes. a lot of them seem to be time trials of normal levels. so yeah there aint stuff there and the main story lasts about 6 hours give or take how many times you have to restart because of platforming. there is easily not enough content for the $20 price tag.
a special mention for how atrocious some characters in the game is. all of them have barely any personality but due to an unholy cross between bad voice acting and atrocious writing there were some in particular that made me want to die. instead of real characterization all characters have one "trait" which usually is a personality quirk or speech gimmick. this means there is one character that does puns and it is the ice character and i am not joking
every line is a pun. every single time this character talks there is a pun and im not exaggerating. you can bet your ass they were all scraped from the bottom of the pun barrel too i hope you enjoy a billion loving ice puns jesus lord. there are a few other pun characters and one fat scientist guy who is really obnoxious because he is written to be funny but isnt. other than that the plot was barebones and i dont really give a stuff.
now i know by now everyone is thinking the game is the worst stuff in the world but its actually not and is only stuff on so hard by everyone else because of the 3.8 million dollar fiasco. the game is at least playable from start to finish and is ok in moderation. the dash thing is a decent base that the devs failed to capitalize on spectacularly. it certainly is no megaman but it isnt complete scum of the earth like off or wadanohara. if i rate games on a development cost to fun or price to fun ratio this would probably be a lot lower than it is but it isnt. dont buy it anyway. additionally ill have to do some review tier restructuring
also
he warned you
(1)
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mightyno9/mighty-no-9 (2)
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/yachtclubgames/shovel-knight(3)
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1002143342/undertaletier list
essential games
bad tier
yume nikki
unessential games
good tier
profit motive
decent tier
chrono trigger
station 37
skelemania
the witch's house
out there somewhere
warhammer 40k dark nexus arena
sluggish morss
space funeral
planetside 2
mediocre tier
mighty no 9 mimicry man
ib
space funeral: the legend of earth birth
hylics
mogeko castle
extremely unessential games
boring tier
soma
presentable liberty
imscared (a pixelated nightmare?)
stray cat crossing
spookys house of jump scares
lieat
ananke
super columbine massacre rpg
crypt worlds
ao oni
suits: a business rpg
inflation quest
stellar 2d
actually uses boredom as a game mechanic tier
middens
physically revolting tier
major/minor
gender bender dna twister extreme
space funeral 4
hell
worse than Riddler tier
the gray garden
off tier
off
worse than off tier
wadanohara and the great blue sea
Poll