Mighty No. 9

About

Mighty No. 9 is a 2.5D action-platform video game developed by Comcept^[1] under the direction of Keiji Inafune^[16], a Japanese video game producer best known for classic titles such as Onimusha, Dead Rising and the Mega Man series. In October 2013, the project was successfully funded on Kickstarter and initially slated for digital and console release in 2015, though after several obstacles in development, the game was released on June 21st, 2016.

Gameplay

Inspired by Mega Man games, Mighty No. 9 is set in the future, where the creation of highly advanced robots has become possible. The most advanced and powerful of those are a set of nine robots called the Mighty Numbers. After a computer virus of unknown origin begins to attack machines around the world, the Numbers are affected, making them evil. The player assumes control of Beck, the titular Mighty No. 9 who was the only Number unaffected by the virus. The game follows his journey to destroy his rogue “siblings” and discover the evil mastermind behind the crisis. Mighty No. 9 is set to be powered by the Unreal Engine, and rough tests using placeholder animations (shown below) have been shared on the game’s official YouTube account.^[26]

History

Announcement

Mighty No. 9 was announced on August 31st, 2013, during a panel at the 2013 PAX Prime convention held by Inafune and his team from Comcept. At the end of the panel, they played a video (shown below) revealing the game would be crowdfunded through a Kickstarter campaign^[2], which launched the same day. Immediately, a number of game sites covered the announcement, including IGN^[17], Polygon^[18], Screw Attack^[19], Gematsu^[20], Complex^[21] and GameFront.^[22]

Fundraising

In just over 24 hours, the Kickstarter campaign reached its funding goal of $900,000.^[23] A number of stretch goals to create physical and console versions of the game were added, and by September 16th, the game had hit $2.2 million dollars, securing console releases for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Wii U.^[24] On October 1st, the pledges surpassed $4 million, adding releases for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS.^[25] In addition to all this, stretch goals broken include a new playable character with an extra stage and boss, two online modes, and a making-of commentary on the development of Mighty No. 9. On June 10th, 2014, the last e-mail detailing on the making-of documentary was sent out to backers, and has never been mentioned again since. A YouTube link of a teaser to the pilot episode of the documentary was included in the e-mail, which has not been produced to this day.

English Dub Fundraiser

At Anime Expo 2014 in the month of July, Inafune announced a new crowdfunding campaign to bring an English dub to the game, with the goal of $100,000. Concerns about the voice-acting crowdfunder arose on August 30th, when footage of the beta was revealed. To the confusion of the backers, the beta was structured in a way that it would suffer from not having a proper language dub, when the Kickstarter campaign didn’t even have such a stretch goal reached. This has made the voice-acting goal all the more urgent, as the game would suffer from poor design without it. The goal was announced to be reached by Comcept on October 6th, however at some point, they raised the goal to $200 thousand to include a Japanese dub with the additional $100 thousand. Later, Comcept compromised and brought the goal back to $100 thousand again, leaving it up to the backers to choose between an English or a Japanese dub. A week later, it was announced that the game will have English voice acting. On October 30th, Comcept announces potential Ray DLC for Mighty No. 9, needing $190 thousand to produce. Backers who funded the DLC would get a free code to download it, if they can secure the fund by the end of 2014.

Development

On January 2015, Comcept released a new video celebrating the new year, with Inafune saying that development on Mighty No. 9 has pretty much wrapped up, and now they’re moving on to promoting and porting the game. On April 2015, the release date of the game was delayed to September 2015 due to the new partnership with Deep Silver. Comcept assures this will only improve the game for everyone because everyone can now have the Ray DLC, Japanese and French voice-acting, and multi-language subtitles. On May 20th, Mighty No. 9’s beta was taken down. Comcept explains that the takedown was made to do further debugging and ROM testing. The news never got e-mailed to backers and was on the site without any notifications. On July 4th, two months before the game was supposed to be released, Inafune announces a new Kickstarter called Red Ash, a successor to the Mega Man Legends series. In the promotional video, he states that development on Mighty No. 9 has finished and Comcept is moving on. On July 31st, however, rumors of another Mighty delay surfaced from GameInformer, from GameStop retailers. Moderators of the Mighty No. 9 forum denied the rumor. Not even a week after the denial, Mighty No. 9 was announced to be delayed again on August 5th. Comcept said they wanted to tell fans about the rumor before Gamescom started, but Gamescom had already started by the time this news dropped. A moderator at the Mighty No. 9 forums, Josh, said he was too busy with Red Ash’s Kickstarter to clear up the confusion over the rumors of the delay before they even announced it and another mod states that the delay was caused by a problem with the network code for the 2 online modes. On August 28th, Comcept announced they will give backers a trial version of the game on September that contains four levels from the main game and six challenges complete with all the voice acting and language options that will be included in the final game.

Online Presence

On August 31st, 2013, Comcept launched a number of social media sites for Mighty No. 9 including a YouTube channel^[28] Facebook fan^[29] page, subreddit^[30] and a Twitter^[31] account, which has since gained nearly 15,000 followers. Additional, fans have created a wiki^[32] for the game. On September 26th, Keiji Inafune participated in an Ask Me Anything thread on the /r/Gaming^[33] subreddit, which received more than 4,800 upvotes, 2,400 points overall and 850 comments. In the thread, Inafune noted that he went to Kickstarter because he knew this was the kind of game fans wanted. In November that year, an official website^[34] for the project was launched.

Reception

During the Kickstarter campaign, Mighty No. 9 was discussed on many video game sites such as Polygon^[7]^[8], Blistered Thumbs^[5]^[6] and GameSpot^[9]^[10], as well as message boards like NeoGAF^[4]. Additionally, several gaming-focused YouTubers including Angry Joe] (shown below, left), Gaijin Goombah^[13] (shown below, right) and Happy Console Gamer^[14] among others have expressed their support for the game.

As time went on, however, due to all the troubled development and history that has surrounded Mighty No. 9, it has been getting more and more backlash from fans and backers alike, as well as those who originally supported it.

Upon its release^[36] on June 21st, 2016, Mighty No. 9 received mixed to negative reviews from critics, getting a 57 overall in OpenCritic.^[43]IGN rated it a 5.6 out of 10, stating that “despite its pedigree, Mighty No. 9 doesn’t seem to have a good sense of what was fun about Mega Man, or 2D action-platformers in general.”^[44] GameInformer gave the game a 6.0 out of 10, stating that it is “the kind of nostalgic gaming that makes you want to play the original Mega Man games instead.” Gamespot gave it a 5 out of 10, saying “Mighty No. 9 is occasionally fun and inventive, but it fails to leave a lasting impression.”^[45] The Jimquisition gave it a 4.0 out of 10.0, saying that “much like an anime fan on prom night, I would rather be at home playing Mega Man than here.”^[46]

Controversies

Due to the numerous delays, many have voiced their complaints about Comcept overpromising and failing to deliver.^[37]

Dina Karam controversy

Dina Abou Karam has been met with a lot of criticism regarding her job as a community manager for the game. Fans were getting increasingly skeptical about the legitimacy of Dina, with such things like her Twitter being full of ludicrous feminist posts, her trying to push making Beck a girl, and her having never played a Mega Man game before. The latter fact especially makes backers wary, and wouldn’t give Dina the benefit of the doubt and want answers. Things get even more suspicious when Dina introduced herself on the forums, and claimed that Mega Man X is the best Mega Man, despite saying on her Twitter that she never played a Mega Man game before, giving off the impression that she’s lying to everyone, leading to more concerns and backlash from backers. As a response, Dina locked her Twitter account, and in those few hours that the account was locked, it was unlocked again with all the questionable tweets deleted.^[35] Despite her best efforts to hide any discriminating evidence against her, people picking apart the archived tweets she deleted realized that she was supporting the game because her friends and boyfriend were working on it, which means she got her job because of nepotism, and Dina confirmed it on the forums. Dina eventually stepped down from the position and left Comcept.

Red Ash controversy

On July 2015, Comcept released two Kickstarter campaigns for a new project called Red Ash: The Indelible Legend, a spiritual successor to Mega Man Legends, one for a game and one for an anime. Fans were skeptical over the shadiness of the Kickstarter campaigns, and bitter over the basic fact that Mighty No. 9 wasn’t out yet at the time and were underwhelmed by its art style change when it was shown at E3 2015. Furthermore, Comcept was being incredibly vague with the product they were trying to sell to their backers, with even less promising concept art and steeper donation goals than what the Mighty No. 9 campaign had, and a prototype that didn’t sell anyone into funding the game. In its last few days before the deadline was reached, and it was clear that the game’s Kickstarter would not reach the goal with little more than half of the target amount, Comcept announced that the game would be fully funded by a Chinese company named FUZE, and the money donated to the campaign, if reached, will solely be used for the stretch goals. This created another backlash as fans took back thousands of dollars they donated to the Kickstarter. While the anime Kickstarter was successfully funded, the game’s campaign ultimately failed to meet its goal.

Masterclass Trailer controversy

On May 25, 2016, publisher Deep Silver released a trailer for Mighty No. 9 called Masterclass. The video has gotten negative reception for its overall presentation: the phrase “make the bad guys cry like an anime fan on prom night”, the “Pizzasplosion” that puts the game’s graphics into question, and the narrator trying too hard to make the trailer sound epic.^[38] The backlash has gotten to the point where Sonic The Hedgehog and Inti Creates’ official Twitter account criticized the trailer.^[39]^[40] This has also raised questions whether they should still invest in the game,^[41] while others say that they should abandon the “hype train”.^[42] The trailer garnered over 38,000 dislikes on YouTube.

“It’s Better Than Nothing” controversy

When the game was launched, Comcept held a special Livestream hosted by representative Ben Judd to celebrate. During the stream, Inafune respectfully answered questions to fans that participated. However, one answer drew in ire. While translating Inafune’s answers for the stream, Judd claimed that the version of Mighty No. 9 that customers have now is “better than nothing”.^[47] Fans were angered at Inafune for saying such a thing, but closer inspection of Inafune’s dialogue revealed that Judd poorly translated Inafune’s answer.

Fan Art

Despite the postponement of the game’s release, fan artworks based on the concept art shared on Kickstarter can be found on deviantART^[3], pixiv^[11] and Tumblr.^[27]