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"The Jet Gamer" Game Review: Mighty No. 9 (wiiu)
9 years ago
The controversial game.
Mighty No. 9
I’m sure most gamers have heard of this game over the last year or two and all the controversy that has come along with it as well. The fussing and other things that have all come from this Kickstarter funded game. Well, it is time for me to let you all know about it as well from my own point of view. I picked this up on sale and it is time to see if Mighty No. 9 really deserves the hate it is getting or if people aren’t giving it a fair shot. Let us take a closer look and find out shall we?
Gameplay
Mighty No. 9 is your 2.5 platformer that is obviously supposed to be in the same format as the Megaman series. You play as a robot going from area to area attacking eight other robots where you then take their powers to go after other robots. Sounds familiar right I’m sure. Well, this game does that same exact format as Megaman, and I mean almost exactly like it. If you liked the Megaman game format, this might be right up your alley. It’s not entirely original, but it is in that same ballpark. You run. You jump. You shoot, and defeat enemies and bosses. When you start getting boss weapons, you can set three of them to quick switch buttons to let you use them at will, while the others have to be slowly switched to when needed. Usually you can tell what weapons you are going to need on a mission, and also you are going to quickly learn which weapons are best for you. For example, the ice and sword weapons are so easy to use and at times a bit broken in how effective they are against average enemies. I had them bound to certain buttons at all times. Others are almost completely useless, such as the fire and tank weapons. You just have to find what ones work for you though of course, and for the given situation. Unlike the Megaman games though, the game sort of does give you a hint at which boss weapons are good against other bosses. There is usually a section before the level begins that has a previously defeated boss heading to another bosses area to help you in the background. That previous boss is usually the weakness to the current boss’ level that you are about to enter. That helps that area at least, but the levels at times are just downright brutal in some areas. The difficulty is quite high, even on normal difficulty. I couldn’t imagine this game on higher difficulties, or even the insane one hit mode. Maybe it’s just me, as I did see times where you get better with practice, but this game is pretty hard. This is one of those games, as I just said, that wants you to keep at it and replay over and over again until you master the levels to get through them. You wouldn’t believe how many tries it took me to beat the final level. I just hope you have some time to commit to this game, as this is a hard game at times. On top of that, there is another character to play as, if you happen to get this new and got the codes for it. Ray, is even harder than the main character you play as in this game. The biggest reasons are first, you are using melee weapons instead of range weapons against all the same bosses as the main game, and second, your health is constantly decreasing as you are playing. To increase it you have to be defeating enemies or getting health pick-ups. Otherwise, your health will constantly go down to nothing on its own. Yeah, if you thought those levels were hard before, now give them a try when your health is constantly decreasing. This is basically challenge mode or speed run mode. Either way, it is descriptive of what you are doing in this mode. Pretty much only play this mode if you really really want a challenge. I know I’m harping on the difficulty a bit, but it is what people are going to notice about this game after a bit I feel. Younger players are likely to be turned away because of it. Older players are likely more used to this because of the similarities to Megaman, but that can also be a turn away as well. There is nothing original about the gameplay in any way really. Almost everything is just copied right off of Megaman. This isn’t bad of course, but if you have played those games before, you have played something like this. But yeah, the difficulty I do feel is going to be a bit stopping point for many players, unless they want to spend some time with the game. Just get ready for it when you go to running, jumping and shooting the robots of this game. It’s nothing impressive, but other than the severe difficulty in certain areas, there is nothing really broken about the gameplay either.
Story
The story isn’t that had, though as I said in the gameplay section, there are many similarities to Mega man if you didn’t already figure that out. You play as Beck, aka Mighty No. 9, as you work with Professor White as you try and wonder what has gotten all the robots in America to suddenly go wild and start attacking everything in sight. You must work to stop your brothers, the other eight mighty numbers, to see if you can help the professor figure out what has gotten the other robots to go nuts. This sounds very similar yes, though one big difference in this story is that instead of destroying the enemy robots, you are first, absorbing the low level enemies to build up your health healing power, and second, the boss enemies you are actually trying to heal to make them work with you again. That’s quite different than in Megaman, where you are just destroying the bosses. In this game, you heal them of the malfunction, and they turn into good guys that help you in the missions and in the story of the game. The progress of the story then revolves around the professor, with the help of a fellow scaredy cat associate of the professor’s and female robot, named call, to figure out the cause of the troubles as you defeat the mighty numbers one at a time. I do have to give the game some small credit for doing something different when it comes to the characters in the game. Since you are saving the mighty numbers instead of destroying them, you get to see the relationship between them and Beck as you are progressing the through the story. They have some unique personalities, with several of them being jokesters that enjoy puns, with also some being on the serious side. Yeah, speaking of puns, if you don’t like puns and they make your head hurt, you might want to mute the bosses in this game. Several of them quite enjoy them. There is an overall mysterious boss of this game, but I don’t want to give that away of course, but at least this game doesn’t seem to go the route of the evil professor attacking the city. I will say though that the ending is a bit disappointing and basically just ends the game without much else. So overall, the story is average with some nice little elements to it, but there is nothing super impressive about it that you haven’t already seen before.
Graphics
This is the section that I honestly have to hit the game the hardest on overall. While the main part of the game looks alright for a 2.5D game in this day and age, there are several problems that come along with this. At first glance, there doesn’t appear to be much wrong with the graphics of this game. The characters look bright and cartoony, and the environment is nicely designed as well. When you first look at everything, nothing really appears to be wrong. It is when you get a little more into the game that you start noticing problems or issues that shouldn’t be in games of this era. The first thing is that in all the cut scenes, the characters mouths don’t move at all. All the voices are just acted over the characters reactions, but on top of that, they don’t even react that much, and what little they do react is very little and also very stiff. That’s another thing. The character models are pretty stiff in this game. While there is some good movement during gameplay, the cut scenes really do look like they were done on an animation budget. Why couldn’t you make them move more believable and not make them look like they are stiff or just staring into space half the time huh? On top of that, some levels even have lag in them and in some cases, very bad lag. LAG!? In a 2.5D game on a modern console such as the WiiU? How in the world could something happen on a game like this? That just seems like something that should have been noticed and fixed long ago. It wasn’t like it even happened in just one or two spots. There is one level that is just lag ridden, especially when you are using the explosion weapon. That level was a nightmare to play with the lag spikes that were happening in it. I was just not expecting these kind of graphical problems on a modern day system at all. These are the kind of problems you ran into on older consoles back in the day or during the early 3D era. While the game does have that bright and colorful look to it that I do enjoy and have to give some points to the game, I do have to hit it pretty hard in these other areas. If it wasn’t for the rest of the game looking pretty nice, this would be even lower than it is. I’m just not impressed with what good there was in this game after those other graphical glitches.
Sound
The sound of this game is alright, as the music is decent and does a good job of being decent level music while you are concentrating on playing the levels. The voice acting is actually very well done overall. Even if the story is only above average, and the characters mouths don’t even move, I do have to give props to the voice actors. They do a good job of relaying the emotion of these characters and making them all sound very believable, even if their models don’t exactly portray that same emotion back to the player. I guess they put a lot of the budget into the voice actors and the music and not into the graphics of this game overall. I do have to say the ending game music isn’t very good either for being one of the main themes in this game. I don’t think gangster music exactly fits with this type of game at all. So really, the sound and voice acting overall is good, there are just a few picky things that are wrong, such as the ending game music. The only other thing is that once again the rest of the games music isn’t just that memorable. As you have seen with me, your music has to be somewhat memorable to me to get a high score in this area. While the music is good, it just doesn’t do enough to hit that memorable mark. I’m just glad the acting seems good is all.
Control
The controls are pretty good in this game, and actually pretty responsive when you need them to be. This is one area I don’t have many complaints, but there are still a few I have to bring up. The first is the method of changing weapons when they aren’t one of your three quick switch weapons. Having to slowly cycle to the other weapons and having to press multiple buttons to do so just seems overly complicated when it could be a one button switch sort of thing where you cycle through the various weapons, besides the quick switch items. Those items work fine, but when you need to be using something other than those three weapons, it can slow the action down. It isn’t something you do when you are in the heat of battle. You will take damage if you try it. Also, one big thing that threw me off at first, and still sort of did is that, why in the world in the menus did they swap the A and B buttons? Everyone in America is used to A being confirm and B being cancel. However, just like you see in some Konami games, the buttons have been swapped to the reverse. I know it is a small nitpick, but it really is going to throw people off at first when it asks you to start confirming things and you keep canceling out of menus. I’m just glad it doesn’t affect gameplay that much, as the button format works better for the basic gameplay overall.
Replay Value
The replay value is alright here, but there are also a few problems with some of the replay value options. There are several difficulties in this game, so if you want a harder time you can do so. Still, you remember how I said how hard this game is already and how this is one of those trial and error games that wants you to learn the game to get better. Imagine doing this stuff on harder difficulties where you take much greater damage. Yeah, you are going to be at these extra modes for quite some time if that is the case. As I said, most new versions of this game come with the Ray expansion which lets you play through the main levels, but as the extra character Ray. These levels are the same levels as I said, it is just they are even more difficult due to the melee weapons and Ray’s health constantly dropping as you are playing. I don’t know whose idea it was about the constantly dropping health, but it makes this mode even more difficult than the main game already is. Then there are the little practice challenges, which are just getting to the goal line in the time limit with some restrictions, or defeat all the targets or enemies with a certain weapon and such like that. These are neat little distractions, but they are just that really. Think of them as the VR missions in Metal Gear. They are neat and when done well that can be good. Otherwise, they are just there to teach you the basics of the game. There are lots of achievements you can earn in this game, yes even in the WiiU version, but these are honestly just for show. There are many tasks it asks you to do if you want to unlock them all, but to be honest, most of them aren’t worth it, and many of them are about creating artificial difficulty for yourself in an already hard game. I know I have harped on the difficulty a lot in this review, and maybe it is just me, but really, with so many areas that include cheap deaths and the old system of going back to the beginning of long levels on game overs is still a hard system in general. That second option isn’t as big of a deal, but many of the levels do have cheap death areas that will frustrate you and just make you want to give up on the game. That is sort of what happened to me in the end. I did beat the game, but my desire to keep going was sort of mellowed out due to the difficulty of the game. For those that can devote the time to master the game, there is a lot here for them. For the rest though, it is just average at best due to the difficulty.
Overall, Mighty No. 9’s WiiU version is alright platformer, but once again, this is another platformer that heads into the average area of the video game spectrum. The gameplay is really just your average Megaman gameplay clone, and the difficulty can really be a hurdle for all but the game that is willing to commit the time to deal with trial and error gameplay. The graphics leave something to be desired as well due to the lag, and the almost lazy cut scene design. I was hoping the disappointment on this game was just people hating on the game, but I can see where some of it comes from. The game isn’t the horrible piece of trash that people are trying to let on that it is, but it is far from being an impressive game that I was still hoping it might could end up being. If you can get this for cheap, or you are just a real fan of Megaman that is craving another game in that style, then I would say pick this up. If you aren’t a Megaman fan though, or someone that can deal with trial and error difficulty gameplay, then I would steer clear of this game. Overall, it is just pretty much around your average platformer.
Overall, in my opinion at least, I give Mighty No. 9 a six point five out of ten.
Gameplay: 6
Story: 7
Graphics: 4
Sound: 8
Control: 8
Replay Value: 6
Overall: 6.5
Mighty No. 9
I’m sure most gamers have heard of this game over the last year or two and all the controversy that has come along with it as well. The fussing and other things that have all come from this Kickstarter funded game. Well, it is time for me to let you all know about it as well from my own point of view. I picked this up on sale and it is time to see if Mighty No. 9 really deserves the hate it is getting or if people aren’t giving it a fair shot. Let us take a closer look and find out shall we?
Gameplay
Mighty No. 9 is your 2.5 platformer that is obviously supposed to be in the same format as the Megaman series. You play as a robot going from area to area attacking eight other robots where you then take their powers to go after other robots. Sounds familiar right I’m sure. Well, this game does that same exact format as Megaman, and I mean almost exactly like it. If you liked the Megaman game format, this might be right up your alley. It’s not entirely original, but it is in that same ballpark. You run. You jump. You shoot, and defeat enemies and bosses. When you start getting boss weapons, you can set three of them to quick switch buttons to let you use them at will, while the others have to be slowly switched to when needed. Usually you can tell what weapons you are going to need on a mission, and also you are going to quickly learn which weapons are best for you. For example, the ice and sword weapons are so easy to use and at times a bit broken in how effective they are against average enemies. I had them bound to certain buttons at all times. Others are almost completely useless, such as the fire and tank weapons. You just have to find what ones work for you though of course, and for the given situation. Unlike the Megaman games though, the game sort of does give you a hint at which boss weapons are good against other bosses. There is usually a section before the level begins that has a previously defeated boss heading to another bosses area to help you in the background. That previous boss is usually the weakness to the current boss’ level that you are about to enter. That helps that area at least, but the levels at times are just downright brutal in some areas. The difficulty is quite high, even on normal difficulty. I couldn’t imagine this game on higher difficulties, or even the insane one hit mode. Maybe it’s just me, as I did see times where you get better with practice, but this game is pretty hard. This is one of those games, as I just said, that wants you to keep at it and replay over and over again until you master the levels to get through them. You wouldn’t believe how many tries it took me to beat the final level. I just hope you have some time to commit to this game, as this is a hard game at times. On top of that, there is another character to play as, if you happen to get this new and got the codes for it. Ray, is even harder than the main character you play as in this game. The biggest reasons are first, you are using melee weapons instead of range weapons against all the same bosses as the main game, and second, your health is constantly decreasing as you are playing. To increase it you have to be defeating enemies or getting health pick-ups. Otherwise, your health will constantly go down to nothing on its own. Yeah, if you thought those levels were hard before, now give them a try when your health is constantly decreasing. This is basically challenge mode or speed run mode. Either way, it is descriptive of what you are doing in this mode. Pretty much only play this mode if you really really want a challenge. I know I’m harping on the difficulty a bit, but it is what people are going to notice about this game after a bit I feel. Younger players are likely to be turned away because of it. Older players are likely more used to this because of the similarities to Megaman, but that can also be a turn away as well. There is nothing original about the gameplay in any way really. Almost everything is just copied right off of Megaman. This isn’t bad of course, but if you have played those games before, you have played something like this. But yeah, the difficulty I do feel is going to be a bit stopping point for many players, unless they want to spend some time with the game. Just get ready for it when you go to running, jumping and shooting the robots of this game. It’s nothing impressive, but other than the severe difficulty in certain areas, there is nothing really broken about the gameplay either.
Story
The story isn’t that had, though as I said in the gameplay section, there are many similarities to Mega man if you didn’t already figure that out. You play as Beck, aka Mighty No. 9, as you work with Professor White as you try and wonder what has gotten all the robots in America to suddenly go wild and start attacking everything in sight. You must work to stop your brothers, the other eight mighty numbers, to see if you can help the professor figure out what has gotten the other robots to go nuts. This sounds very similar yes, though one big difference in this story is that instead of destroying the enemy robots, you are first, absorbing the low level enemies to build up your health healing power, and second, the boss enemies you are actually trying to heal to make them work with you again. That’s quite different than in Megaman, where you are just destroying the bosses. In this game, you heal them of the malfunction, and they turn into good guys that help you in the missions and in the story of the game. The progress of the story then revolves around the professor, with the help of a fellow scaredy cat associate of the professor’s and female robot, named call, to figure out the cause of the troubles as you defeat the mighty numbers one at a time. I do have to give the game some small credit for doing something different when it comes to the characters in the game. Since you are saving the mighty numbers instead of destroying them, you get to see the relationship between them and Beck as you are progressing the through the story. They have some unique personalities, with several of them being jokesters that enjoy puns, with also some being on the serious side. Yeah, speaking of puns, if you don’t like puns and they make your head hurt, you might want to mute the bosses in this game. Several of them quite enjoy them. There is an overall mysterious boss of this game, but I don’t want to give that away of course, but at least this game doesn’t seem to go the route of the evil professor attacking the city. I will say though that the ending is a bit disappointing and basically just ends the game without much else. So overall, the story is average with some nice little elements to it, but there is nothing super impressive about it that you haven’t already seen before.
Graphics
This is the section that I honestly have to hit the game the hardest on overall. While the main part of the game looks alright for a 2.5D game in this day and age, there are several problems that come along with this. At first glance, there doesn’t appear to be much wrong with the graphics of this game. The characters look bright and cartoony, and the environment is nicely designed as well. When you first look at everything, nothing really appears to be wrong. It is when you get a little more into the game that you start noticing problems or issues that shouldn’t be in games of this era. The first thing is that in all the cut scenes, the characters mouths don’t move at all. All the voices are just acted over the characters reactions, but on top of that, they don’t even react that much, and what little they do react is very little and also very stiff. That’s another thing. The character models are pretty stiff in this game. While there is some good movement during gameplay, the cut scenes really do look like they were done on an animation budget. Why couldn’t you make them move more believable and not make them look like they are stiff or just staring into space half the time huh? On top of that, some levels even have lag in them and in some cases, very bad lag. LAG!? In a 2.5D game on a modern console such as the WiiU? How in the world could something happen on a game like this? That just seems like something that should have been noticed and fixed long ago. It wasn’t like it even happened in just one or two spots. There is one level that is just lag ridden, especially when you are using the explosion weapon. That level was a nightmare to play with the lag spikes that were happening in it. I was just not expecting these kind of graphical problems on a modern day system at all. These are the kind of problems you ran into on older consoles back in the day or during the early 3D era. While the game does have that bright and colorful look to it that I do enjoy and have to give some points to the game, I do have to hit it pretty hard in these other areas. If it wasn’t for the rest of the game looking pretty nice, this would be even lower than it is. I’m just not impressed with what good there was in this game after those other graphical glitches.
Sound
The sound of this game is alright, as the music is decent and does a good job of being decent level music while you are concentrating on playing the levels. The voice acting is actually very well done overall. Even if the story is only above average, and the characters mouths don’t even move, I do have to give props to the voice actors. They do a good job of relaying the emotion of these characters and making them all sound very believable, even if their models don’t exactly portray that same emotion back to the player. I guess they put a lot of the budget into the voice actors and the music and not into the graphics of this game overall. I do have to say the ending game music isn’t very good either for being one of the main themes in this game. I don’t think gangster music exactly fits with this type of game at all. So really, the sound and voice acting overall is good, there are just a few picky things that are wrong, such as the ending game music. The only other thing is that once again the rest of the games music isn’t just that memorable. As you have seen with me, your music has to be somewhat memorable to me to get a high score in this area. While the music is good, it just doesn’t do enough to hit that memorable mark. I’m just glad the acting seems good is all.
Control
The controls are pretty good in this game, and actually pretty responsive when you need them to be. This is one area I don’t have many complaints, but there are still a few I have to bring up. The first is the method of changing weapons when they aren’t one of your three quick switch weapons. Having to slowly cycle to the other weapons and having to press multiple buttons to do so just seems overly complicated when it could be a one button switch sort of thing where you cycle through the various weapons, besides the quick switch items. Those items work fine, but when you need to be using something other than those three weapons, it can slow the action down. It isn’t something you do when you are in the heat of battle. You will take damage if you try it. Also, one big thing that threw me off at first, and still sort of did is that, why in the world in the menus did they swap the A and B buttons? Everyone in America is used to A being confirm and B being cancel. However, just like you see in some Konami games, the buttons have been swapped to the reverse. I know it is a small nitpick, but it really is going to throw people off at first when it asks you to start confirming things and you keep canceling out of menus. I’m just glad it doesn’t affect gameplay that much, as the button format works better for the basic gameplay overall.
Replay Value
The replay value is alright here, but there are also a few problems with some of the replay value options. There are several difficulties in this game, so if you want a harder time you can do so. Still, you remember how I said how hard this game is already and how this is one of those trial and error games that wants you to learn the game to get better. Imagine doing this stuff on harder difficulties where you take much greater damage. Yeah, you are going to be at these extra modes for quite some time if that is the case. As I said, most new versions of this game come with the Ray expansion which lets you play through the main levels, but as the extra character Ray. These levels are the same levels as I said, it is just they are even more difficult due to the melee weapons and Ray’s health constantly dropping as you are playing. I don’t know whose idea it was about the constantly dropping health, but it makes this mode even more difficult than the main game already is. Then there are the little practice challenges, which are just getting to the goal line in the time limit with some restrictions, or defeat all the targets or enemies with a certain weapon and such like that. These are neat little distractions, but they are just that really. Think of them as the VR missions in Metal Gear. They are neat and when done well that can be good. Otherwise, they are just there to teach you the basics of the game. There are lots of achievements you can earn in this game, yes even in the WiiU version, but these are honestly just for show. There are many tasks it asks you to do if you want to unlock them all, but to be honest, most of them aren’t worth it, and many of them are about creating artificial difficulty for yourself in an already hard game. I know I have harped on the difficulty a lot in this review, and maybe it is just me, but really, with so many areas that include cheap deaths and the old system of going back to the beginning of long levels on game overs is still a hard system in general. That second option isn’t as big of a deal, but many of the levels do have cheap death areas that will frustrate you and just make you want to give up on the game. That is sort of what happened to me in the end. I did beat the game, but my desire to keep going was sort of mellowed out due to the difficulty of the game. For those that can devote the time to master the game, there is a lot here for them. For the rest though, it is just average at best due to the difficulty.
Overall, Mighty No. 9’s WiiU version is alright platformer, but once again, this is another platformer that heads into the average area of the video game spectrum. The gameplay is really just your average Megaman gameplay clone, and the difficulty can really be a hurdle for all but the game that is willing to commit the time to deal with trial and error gameplay. The graphics leave something to be desired as well due to the lag, and the almost lazy cut scene design. I was hoping the disappointment on this game was just people hating on the game, but I can see where some of it comes from. The game isn’t the horrible piece of trash that people are trying to let on that it is, but it is far from being an impressive game that I was still hoping it might could end up being. If you can get this for cheap, or you are just a real fan of Megaman that is craving another game in that style, then I would say pick this up. If you aren’t a Megaman fan though, or someone that can deal with trial and error difficulty gameplay, then I would steer clear of this game. Overall, it is just pretty much around your average platformer.
Overall, in my opinion at least, I give Mighty No. 9 a six point five out of ten.
Gameplay: 6
Story: 7
Graphics: 4
Sound: 8
Control: 8
Replay Value: 6
Overall: 6.5
