Pictures And Text About... Mighty No. 9

Thanks to Olli for the heartbreakingly honest analysis of Mighty No. 9. I found it very interesting and inspiring to read, and since you asked for my opinion, here goes!

Like Olli, I also invested a decent amount of money into the promise of MN9 with the idea that I'm supporting a classic game developer to create yet another classic game in the genre of action platformers. I recall that in his Kickstarter video Keiji Inafune was walking around somewhere in Japan and lamenting the fact that he's let his fans down by not being able to create any more Mega Man games. After leaving his long-time company Capcom he no longer has the rights to the Mega Man franchise. So, of course I had to help the poor man out :-).

Inafune on Kickstarter about Mega Man Legends 3 which was cancelled in 2011.

The funny thing is that up until a week ago I hadn't installed or played the final version of Mighty No. 9. I recall that at some point maybe last year I got to download a demo version of the game. The demo was dated on 2015-09-24. Later when I learned that the game had actually been released, I somehow thought that the demo version I had was actually the final version. Feeling a bit disappointed by the unfinished feel of the demo/final release of the game I didn't touch it since. Now, to get a more thorough opinion of the game for this write-up, I took a look back. After an hour of confusion and a diligent search through old e-mails I found out that MN9 had been released also on PS4, and that I had a code for downloading it for free from Playstation Store. Yuppee!

As a side note, the confusion I'm describing above is testament to the poor communication from the developer to backers (or "Beckers" as we are sometimes called, because the main character in the game is named Beck). I got most of my MN9 news from Olli who was somehow always better informed about what was happening with development. As another side note, with my crowdfunding contribution I'm also entitled to a physical game box with a retro style manual, something that I've yet to see. A quick e-mail inquiry to the company that's handling the physical goods revealed that the developer hasn't yet delivered the necessary materials to start producing and delivering the items. Judging by the poor reception the game has had, my guess is that those items will never arrive because there isn't enough revenue to make it happen. Crowdfunding is a lottery :-/

Since installing Mighty No. 9 on PS4 I've been playing the game on multiple days, getting a more thorough feel for it and trying to complete the storyline on Normal difficulty. Overall I totally agree with Olli in that the game feels eerily void at least in the visual department. Some of the graphics is outright appalling and represents the state of 3D graphics from two decades ago. The few hand-drawn 2D screens do look pretty nice but the game is mainly built of 3D models. I don't know who was responsible for the graphics but I'm guessing they had experience mostly in 2D graphics.

An in-game cutscene from the first level, featuring lack of details, repetitive 3D geometry, inability to draw focus to important things, and a deprived palette.

3D models in MN9 are crudely made. They are textured mainly with flat colors. Lighting is mostly ambient, there are no shadows and very little shading. Everything is glaring in bright colors and large surfaces. All scenes have an unnatural backlight(?) that produces a white glowing outline to all 3D models and highlights their low polygon count. Oftentimes large portions of the screen are filled with an empty-looking flat texture that's full of nothing important. As characters talk in cutscenes, their textured mouths don't move. Sometimes a character's mouth stays open when he speaks his line but other times a mouth might be closed while the character is talking. It's one of many details but indicates in its part the huge lack of polish in the game. Talking face textures on 3D character models was done much better for example in Deus Ex already 16 years ago, or how about this similar example from Ultima VII's prerendered intro sequence in 1992:

An early story sequence with a friendly doctor. His mouth was fixed open like this through the whole line!

Another thing that strikes me as hideously unfinished is the run-time performance of the code. There is not much going on on the screen at any given time during MN9 gameplay. Still, certain things cause the game to drop frames like my chili plant drops leaves in wintertime. The worst case so far is when shooting the Battalion gun at a proto-xel-block in the final level. The game seems unable to muster even 10 FPS for the duration of the blast. As a programmer I find that embarrassing. I bet it'd be quite a simple bug to fix (put a frequency limit to whatever damage calculation the blast is making the blocks do), so the fact that it's in the final game tells of either lack of testing or lack of time to fix minor things.

Also gameplay-wise there are things that make me wonder. At least in one level you can play the alternate robot character, Call. (Incoming pun: Beck and Call are at the professor's beck and call.) Her basic attack is to shoot a large bullet. The game only lets her shoot when the previous shot has disappeared from the screen. So, if I shoot at a distant enemy that happens to block the shot, I have to wait for my shot to travel across the screen, then deflect and travel diagonally across the screen again. It's a frustratingly long time to wait and messes up the game's pace for me. I know that old games on old platforms had a limit on how many sprites they could use. That was a natural limit for the number of shots that the game would allow in air at a time. But no modern platform has these limitations. The natural way to limit shooting frequency is to define the time it takes to reload the gun. Why wasn't Call's weapon designed so? Was it blind belief in The Old Way, or lack of design iterations, or missing quality control?

Call waiting on the right while a lone yellow shot travels diagonally, deflected from a table-lamp-shaped enemy.

I didn't really understand how Call is supposed to be played anyway. Her attacks seem weak. She makes enemies go into the same ready-to-be-assimilated state where Beck is able to wipe them out with his "Xel slurp dash". Call just doesn't have the slurp dash. She has to keep shooting at the disabled enemy until it dissolves. One particular table-lamp-shaped enemy takes about five shots to die, except that if you keep shooting at it the dying animation is reset, so if you don't stop shooting, the enemy will never die. I did spend a few minutes shooting at those enemies wondering how hard can they be to kill until I noticed this mechanism. Again a lack of game design iterations, that's what I think this is.

Actually the game's own documentation suggests that Call is more of a stealth character. As far as I have found out, she can only be played in one level, and at least on Normal difficulty there was no real penalty in being spotted. So, it didn't make a difference if I blasted my way through with the awkward gun, or if I tried to avoid getting spotted by enemies, or if I just ran through levels, jumping over enemies. Sounds like the game design document said "Call supports stealth play" but the idea never crystallised and therefore the gameplay feels directionless in this respect.

After playing MN9 over a week I feel that despite all its numerous issues it does have multiple good ideas behind it. The problem is that the ideas are just executed badly. I also can't help thinking that if players could overlook the fact that the execution is quite lousy in many places, they would notice also the good parts in the game: It poses some challenge, it doesn't drag on for too long, there's variety in enemies, weapons, and levels, there's a familiarly cheesy plot to follow, there are achievements to fulfill, and there's some hidden stuff that's nice to discover. Comparing to old games like Mega Man 1, 2, and 3, Mighty No. 9 has the disadvantage of having been released almost 30 years later when the expectation of content quality and finesse in gameplay mechanics is an order of magnitude higher. I'd argue that the original Mega Mans didn't have that much in them either, but because they were groundbreaking in their time, they are respected and their qualities (or sometimes lack of them!) are appreciated even nowadays as they are and are not compared to modern standards. For example, Mega Man has frame rate problems and is pretty much void of in-game graphical content, just like Mighty No. 9.

One can argue that also Mega Man lacks graphical detail in some places.

I took a video of me beating the final boss of Mighty No. 9. It took me some 6 hours total to complete the game (challenge to Olli? :-). The boss room itself demonstrates the governing visual style of MN9 where 3D models are textured with oversaturated plain colours. The screen looks like the designer had bought a truckload of self-luminous blue and purple colours and decided to use it all up in this room. In the latter half of the video there's also some of the stiffly animated 3D characters I mentioned. Also note how the sound volume is very low. I played the game so that I turned sound effects and voice down to something like 20 % and kept the music at 100 %. That was the only way to hear the music properly. I had to keep my TV volume pretty high to hear anything :-D.

Finally, I want to mention that despite the failure of MN9 to fulfill the promise built up by the legendary Mega Man series, I cannot help but feel sympathy for Keiji Inafune. Based on this article he seems to be standing behind the game and admitting fairly that it's not what people expected:

http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2016/06/mighty_no_9_problems_totally_my_fault_admits_creator_keiji_inafune

A lesser person might try to hide behind excuses and throw blame around. I still respect Keiji and think he could make really good games. My guess is that Mighty No. 9 failed because its development team didn't have all the necessary kinds of people. Keiji was originally an illustrator, so perhaps the development of MN9 focused too much on the characters, their concept art, and not enough attention was put to gameplay and 3D art. No one man can make a serious game alone, and being led by an influential person that has a strong bias towards certain aspects of game development can throw an entire team off balance. At least I think so :-).

-Ville