By the time you read this, Comcept’s Mega Man homage Mighty No. 9 will (hopefully) be released for the gaming community to experience. Conceived by Keiji Inafune, this game was billed as a return to the classic platform-shooting action of the Mega Man games he helped to create. After Inafune left Capcom in 2010, Capcom continued to retain ownership of the Mega Man series, and so he was led to create a new game in the spirit of Mega Man but under a different name. This was what eventually became Mighty No. 9, and in late August to early September of 2013 the Kickstarter campaign for Mighty No. 9 was launched and reached its target goal in a matter of days.
The troubled development of Mighty No. 9
After such a successful campaign, the subsequent reactions to developer updates have been… less than positive. People have been asking why it’s taken so long for a 2D platform-shooter to be developed, the Red Ash Kickstarter campaign was launched in the midst of all of this and bombed, concerns were raised about trailers focusing on the poor character design rather than the gameplay, there were the weird controversies over Dina Karam’s female Beck submission…I could go on. Not to mention the fact that Mega Man Legacy Collection was released late last year (reviewed here) and manages to have more appealing aesthetics and design in a series of six games that date back to the late 80s and mid-90s. And yet despite everyone being eager to join the queue of people wanting to throw mud at Mighty No. 9 I’m a big fan of 2D games and platform-shooters, and if Disposable Media had relaunched in 2013 I probably would have wanted to write about the launch with a more positive attitude.
If you think you’ll like Mighty No. 9, why not try…
I have yet to play Mighty No. 9, but a large backlog of other titles means that I won’t be downloading Comcept’s game this week and am happy to wait and see what the general consensus is. If I do want any platform-shooter fun in the meantime, the majority of Legacy Collection is as fun as I remember, and I would still recommend that to anyone looking for some enjoyable 2D gaming that holds up today.