Mighty No. 9 review thread

"You know Mighty No.9 is pretty shit. But it's still not as bad as God Hand." - IGN

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I kinda wanna buy this to see how bad it is first hand, but I don't wanna give Inafune a cent. The obvious would be buying it second hand but in PC that's not an option, and I don't wanna pirate it either. What store takes the most % off the sale?
 
What is it about Kickstarter games that makes people completely dive off the rational and logical thought spectrum? It's just a crowdfunding site, it isn't a publisher or a developer where you can attach them to the resulting product's quality.
Well, if it isn't the platform's fault then maybe it is their fault for deciding to back the project. That might be uncomfortable.
 
It was bad enough when people were conflating other Kickstarted projects with MN9's failings, but now they're actually attributing completely different KS games with Inafune.

What is it about Kickstarter games that makes people completely dive off the rational and logical thought spectrum? It's just a crowdfunding site, it isn't a publisher or a developer where you can attach them to the resulting product's quality.

I'm not sure. I mean...I don't back many games. Not many games that, for me personally, I'd want to back, but, like I said earlier...of the 4 I've backed (just remembered Indivisible), this is the only one that's been a clusterfuck. The others have regular updates and great communication. I don't see why this particular one is being used as a poster child. It seems like some are just looking for confirmation bias with this game because it was popular.
 
It is. If they had announced a 3DS port of Bloodstained I'd probably have pulled my pledge. I also agree that it's better to have an external, separate porting project than handling a huge number of platforms in house.

My point was simply that the idea of additional ports -- most crucially, additional ports to relatively limited platforms -- seems to be viewed with a far more balanced perspective in this thread than back during that other discussion. And maybe we can learn something from that for future discussions.


They did announced a Vita version of Bloodstained though. Truth is, MN9 3DS and Vita will likely be based on a different engine with different assets. Same for Bloodstained except for the engine part. The thing is, they had a poor direction and cheaped out on the graphics department regardless of a platform choice. As for Vita/3DS difference, it's significantly closer than what some people think, because of Vita low clockspeeds.
 
I'll always love what Infaune contributed to my personal gaming history from Mega Man to Resident Evil to Dead Rising, but ever since he's left Capcom, he's been a mess. Comcept has yet to produce a single good game and I've lost hope for anything he's attached to in the future.

The only good game they made so far is Soul Sacrifice and technically the credit goes to Marvelous and Japan Studio. ReCore is looking divisive but promising since it's mostly being made by the Metroid team.
 
Well, if it isn't the platform's fault then maybe it is their fault for deciding to back the project. That might be uncomfortable.

I'm not even going to point out what's wrong with this thinking because it's so blatantly obvious.

Come on Durante. You're better than that.
 
I have backed Shovel Knight (loved it, one of my favorite games that year), Broken Age (it was alright, probably would have waited for a Steam sale), Mighty No. 9 (eh), Bloodstained (we'll see), Battle Chef (seems to be shaping up well), Shantae (seems like it will deliver), and Hyper Light Drifter (haven't played it but responses were good).

Only one I can say has been a bad experience is MN9 and it's honestly kind of worth it for the industry drama. I might have had more fun with that than I would have with the game.
 
IGN is infamous for rating a cult classic game poorly because it was ugly and too hard for them.

Not just poorly. 4 or 5 is usually the lowest end of the scale for IGN, even for shovelware garbage. To give a 3.0 to God Hand is to have an agenda. It certainly does seem to invalidate their criticism, but truthfully it's just one reviewer and shouldn't represent everyone on the site.
 
The only good game they made so far is Soul Sacrifice and technically the credit goes to Marvelous and Japan Studio. ReCore is looking divisive but promising since it's mostly being made by the Metroid team.
That studio also made the horrible Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate...

Yeah.
 
I don't think putting it on 3DS made it a worse game. I think it made it an uglier game.

I did not, and do not, care if Bloodstained is pared down to Wii U and Vita. I did not care that MN9 was pared down to 3DS graphically. It's just a bad game and would have been whether it was PS4 exclusive or not.

Having to port to almost every platform out there with that budget, surely hurt the game in more than graphics.

We also don't know what kind of concessions they hade to make in level design to fit the game to the 3DS. It's not uncommon, several games had memory problems in history, just look how team ICO was struggling to get TLG vision on PS3.
 
Well, if it isn't the platform's fault then maybe it is their fault for deciding to back the project. That might be uncomfortable.
Mm. That's a possibility, but there seems to be an influx of "holier than thou" I-Told-You-So-ers decrying Kickstarter without actually applying proper logic to the situation. Kickstarter, and the money raised with it, was not what made MN9 like this.

I don't really understand why some people (especially on Twitter, because people are so desperate to put their hot take out there) are making fun of MN9 backers in light of all this. It's only really in hindsight that backing the game appears to have been a really bad idea. The backers are ultimately the victims, but hey, they know not to trust Inafune again. Lesson learned. I don't see why people are eager to pour salt in that wound.

I'm not sure. I mean...I don't back many games. Not many games that, for me personally, I'd want to back, but, like I said earlier...of the 4 I've backed (just remembered Indivisible), this is the only one that's been a clusterfuck. The others have regular updates and great communication. I don't see why this particular one is being used as a poster child. It seems like some are just looking for confirmation bias with this game because it was popular.
I would agree with your statement. A lot of the railing against Kickstarter is poorly rationalised. It's very clear that KS is not a preorder service, and they have no oversight over any of the projects on their site. Putting blame on a publisher or a developer is more rational, because they've had direct input and control over the product, but why the ire over a crowdfunding site? I feel some people are just being willfully ignorant, and weirdly combative against a new form of funding video games that circumvents conservative publishers.
 
I like how it's now a foregone conclusion in this thread that the platform stretch goals (and especially the 3DS goal) are at least partly to blame for this falling short of expectations. Not that I disagree, I fully agree.

But when I posted about not really being all that excited for the Bloodstained Vita stretch goal to be reached quite a few posters were very angry -- and seemed to assume it's because I hate their platform (the only handheld I bought at launch!) and not because I want the best possible game to be made.
I remember getting quite a bit of shit when voicing my concerns regarding all those platforms in the Bloodstained thread. M
 
I won Mighty No. 9 in a giveaway from Shadownet in July 2014.
Since he's banned now, I guess I'll never get the key he promised me, MIGHTY-IOWE-YOU --
 
So what's the lesson here? Besides "Inafune is a business man lol".

I mean can we learn anything from this that's more broadly applicable to future Kickstarters?

To the people saying that the initial proposal was unrealistic from day 1, what were your red flags? And how did projects like Bloodstained and Yooka Layley present themselves differently in those areas?

Interested in hearing more opinions.
 
They did announced a Vita version of Bloodstained though. Truth is, MN9 3DS and Vita will likely be based on a different engine with different assets. Same for Bloodstained except for the engine part. The thing is, they had a poor direction and cheaped out on the graphics department regardless of a platform choice. As for Vita/3DS difference, it's significantly closer than what some people think, because of Vita low clockspeeds.
Just CPU-wise, the original 3DS' dual-core ARM11 is still at least at least 5 times slower than the Vita's quad core Cortex-A9 at its low default frequency (A9 IPC is significantly higher). It's just not 15 times slower as it might have been with more aggressive Vita clocks.

I'm not even going to point out what's wrong with this thinking because it's so blatantly obvious.
What is wrong with it? I mean sure, some fault lies with the developers, but what Kickstarter does is move the responsibility and risk of financially supporting a project to the backers. That's not a "fault", that's what it's designed to do. And as such, the ones ultimately responsible for how we spent our money are us, the backers.

Blaming the funding platform is just silly. Blaming the developers exclusively is comforting, but not really accurate.
 
Not just poorly. 4 or 5 is usually the lowest end of the scale for IGN, even for shovelware garbage. To give a 3.0 to God Hand is to have an agenda. It certainly does seem to invalidate their criticism, but truthfully it's just one reviewer and shouldn't represent everyone on the site.

I mean the guy in the review flat out lied saying it's a button masher.
 
Not sure why people keeping bringing up the 3DS game when it has no bearing on the versions of the game being reviewed.
 
Inticreates has a good resume of 2D sidescrollers.
Inafune has been a producer in this industry for 20+ years, he should have an idea of manage a project like this.

This wasn't 2 guys in a garage making their first game.

Sure the poor decision of make the game for 8 platforms with that budget and other stratch goals could have raised a few flags. But very far from laughing at ppl.
 
This game always looked off somehow. Can't say I'm surprised by the reviews, but I am worried that Capcom will look at this and immediately shelf their secret Mega Man reboot for NX :(
:'(
 
So what's the lesson here? Besides "Inafune is a business man lol".

I mean can we learn anything from this that's more broadly applicable to future Kickstarters?

To the people saying that the initial proposal was unrealistic from day 1, what were your red flags? And how did projects like Bloodstained and Yooka Layley present themselves differently in those areas?

Interested in hearing more opinions.

Yooka Laylee had a very impressive trailer set up and more to show for itself than just unrepresentative concept art. Bloodstained is a similar situation to MN9 to me where it is a successor to a dead franchise by the man most attached to it that launched with no real footage. If Bloodstained went up today, I think people would be a lot more wary of it.
 
Blaming the funding platform is just silly. Blaming the developers exclusively is comforting, but not really accurate.

Playing the blame game is rather silly and counterproductive in the first place. We should be focusing on understanding what mistakes were made and learning from them.
 
If Bloodstained went up today, I think people would be a lot more wary of it.

Bloodstained started in the middle of people ragging on MN9 for the same things in this thread, and made more money (via KS at least). What difference would it make?
 
What is wrong with it? I mean sure, some fault lies with the developers, but what Kickstarter does is move the responsibility and risk of financially supporting a project to the backers. That's not a "fault", that's what it's designed to do. And as such, the ones ultimately responsible for how we spent our money are us, the backers.

Blaming the funding platform is just silly. Blaming the developers exclusively is comforting, but not really accurate.

Oh ok I think we're a bit more on the same page. Kickstarter doesn't deserve any ire but the developers certainly do.

I'd argue that the backers shouldn't bear *any* of the blame. If anything we should learn to be more cautious in the future but to BLAME us for the game turning out poorly is pretty much complete bullshit. That's solely the developer's fault for mismanaging the project and releasing a bad product.
 
Sucks to see it turn out this way, but I'm not too surprised; gameplay videos just didn't look very good. The game also looks oddly cheap, but that's the art I think. Sucks that this may turn people off of Kickstarter because it can do some great things.

Yooka Laylee had a very impressive trailer set up and more to show for itself than just unrepresentative concept art. Bloodstained is a similar situation to MN9 to me where it is a successor to a dead franchise by the man most attached to it that launched with no real footage. If Bloodstained went up today, I think people would be a lot more wary of it.

Bloodstained had more realistic stretch goals.

I don't disagree that it also rides that nostalgia buck, but it was more transparent about what it wanted to achieve and what that may look like. Plus they didn't lose focus and become overly ambitious with an anime and all that garbage too.

Time will tell if that was all show of course.
 
So what's the lesson here? Besides "Inafune is a business man lol".

I mean can we learn anything from this that's more broadly applicable to future Kickstarters?

To the people saying that the initial proposal was unrealistic from day 1, what were your red flags? And how did projects like Bloodstained and Yooka Layley present themselves differently in those areas?

Interested in hearing more opinions.

That is an interesting question.

For backers, I imagine the lesson is not to trust blindly, but that shouldn't even need to be said, nor should this be the place anyone learns that lesson. There have been worse kickstarters that didn't deliver anything, Mighty No. 9 just failed to be good. I guess a more appropriate lesson might be to know what you're getting into. It could be good, it might not, there's no real way to know when you're backing it. It's like any other game, a series of bad decisions could fuck the entire thing up.

For creators...this could be the death of the hypothetical nostalgia kickstarter. This isn't to say that nostalgia creations can't exist, but I think they will go at it more like Yooka-Laylee and Bloodstained did. Both those kickstarters came right out and said what their new game is and how it is similar to the things you liked. Mighty No. 9 basically said "This is our world, it's like Mega Man but we can't legally say that, just like we can't say fuck Capcom." It didn't promise a game, it promised comeuppance, which Bloodstained and Yooka-Laylee smartly did not do.

Though I am not sure either of these points are ironclad, really. Basically, I have no idea what anyone has or will learn from this and it's still going to be a case-by-case evaluation and people are still going to get surprised by projects that never should have made it or well-founded projects that fell apart.
 
Thank you. People need to get over that review. Game had awesome ideas, terribad execution.

Not to get too off topic but I think that God Hand has a better camera and control scheme than even more recent action games. Action games have always struggled to have good camera and even recent action games like Metal Gear Rising have awful cameras. God Hand's is at least consistent, it just takes a while to get used to. The only better camera solution I've seen is fixed camera angles in DMC.

Bloodstained started in the middle of people ragging on MN9 for the same things in this thread, and made more money (via KS at least). What difference would it make?

While MN9 was getting flack at that point, Red Ash hadn't launched yet and the venom against Inafune and MN9 hadn't reached the levels it has now. I think there would still be a lot of people saying that Iga is more trustworthy than Inafune and Bloodstained would still be funded, but I would hope that people would be more wary of the kind of campaign it ran.
 
Oh ok I think we're a bit more on the same page. Kickstarter doesn't deserve any ire but the developers certainly do.

I'd argue that the backers shouldn't bear *any* of the blame. If anything we should learn to be more cautious in the future but to BLAME us for the game turning out poorly is pretty much complete bullshit. That's solely the developer's fault for mismanaging the project and releasing a bad product.

I think the part about backers isn't meant to say we're accountable for the quality of the product but rather to say we should have known better, although I'm not quite sure why that is the case to be honest.
 
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