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Mighty No. 9

Zidiane said:
There were a large number of terrible and unfun games back in the NES days. Making statements like "things in my generation were great, but things today are terrible" is silly. Its something everyone says about their generation.

Jokes on you, It wasn't my generation! I'm 23 and I play all this shit on emulators or buy them off ebay. That, and my brothers old stash.

And yeah, we all know about sturgeon's law. But nowerdays a lot of design trends tip the scales from being "90% shit" to "95% shit". It's a subtle difference, but one can feel it.

There are a lot of things I care about which are either not relevant to modern design trends or completely opposed to them. Oh well. There are thankfully still some developers keeping the torch alive though.

Zidiane said:
The man playing is obviously not 6.

I didn't watch the video, but if he's one of those guys who sells faux-frustration in a youtube video, I imagine he'd sound like it.

We're also talking about literally one segment in one stage. That segment might be a little bit tough, but its honestly nothing in the big scheme of the game. And it's not hard at all for anyone well versed in action games (I don't want to say the game is easy, but...compared to some mainstream titles that came out one console later, it definitely is).




Ps: I fucking hate Gunvolt, will give you that
 
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Squire Grooktook said:
I also want to like MM8, but the slow move speed kinda bugs me a lot everytime I play it. Both are fine games though.
Yeah, I loved MM8 when it first came out, but it lost its luster for me a lot as the years went on. I just didn't find it as much fun to go back and play, except to watch the cheesy boss intros.

On topic though, I did finally have some time to finish the game last night. My overall feelings were just an extension of the demo, 6/10, but I honestly feel like a highlight of the game is the Challenge Mode. Some of those challenges force you to use the weapons in interesting ways that the game never requires. I almost get the impression that they had more fun making those.
 
Zidiane, it's important to have your own opinion and I'm glad you enjoyed yourself. Hell, I'm glad anybody can dig it if they can.

But *literally* the only reason people funded it was for "New Mega Man". It's exactly what the campaign video and page were alluding to.

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I noticed that we keep comparing voice acting from previous MM games to MN9 saying MM just had bad as voice acting. The problem with that statement, most of the bad voice acting games came out in the 90's. Back then, voice acting hadn't reached a standard for most things.

It is now 2016, voice acting like in MN9 is unacceptable.
 
Squire Grooktook said:
Jokes on you, It wasn't my generation! I'm 23 and I play all this shit on emulators or buy them off ebay. That, and my brothers old stash.
I'm 24. NES/SNES/N64/GC were my generation. idk when you started playing games, but I consider them my generation.

I didn't watch the video, but if he's one of those guys who sells faux-frustration in a youtube video, I imagine he'd sound like it.
He wasn't. He genuinely was having a hard time with it cause it's a genuinely frustrating segment.

We're also talking about literally one segment in one stage.
It was an example. Do I need to pull up every frustrating segment for my point to matter?

And it's not hard at all for anyone well versed in action games.
"If you're good at platformers it isn't hard." The same is true of MN9.

Ps: I fucking hate Gunvolt, will give you that
I found enjoyment in it, but it wasn't a highlight of any sort for me, yeah

@J-Boogie said:
*literally* the only reason people funded it was for "New Mega Man". It's exactly what the campaign video and page were alluding to.
/shrug/
People funded a game with no gameplay available to see. People funded someone else's vision for a game with a similar feel to MM. MN9 did that well enough, IMO.

Kit Ballard said:
..I loved MML...
So did I! The game was fun enough for it's faults to not interfere with what it offered. And, to me, so did MN9.

BrandX+ said:
It is now 2016, voice acting like in MN9 is unacceptable.
To me it's like complaining about story in a fighting game.
 
@J-Boogie said:
Zidiane, it's important to have your own opinion and I'm glad you enjoyed yourself. Hell, I'm glad anybody can dig it if they can.

But *literally* the only reason people funded it was for "New Mega Man". It's exactly what the campaign video and page were alluding to.

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Wrong.

I funded a project to help make a worthy concurrent to mega man, to show there's market to it and incentive capcom to action.

And I got most of it. Lots of side scrolling projects got started and developed on the vacuum of MN9, including shovel knight

It also inspired other good projects, like bloodstained and Yoka Laylee to try to create the game they wanted away from the company.

The only related company still stuck up in their own ass is Capcom.

MN9 created a lot of inadverted moves in the industry. The game itself bombed, but what was created surrounding it was intresting.
 
Zidiane said:
It was an example. Do I need to pull up every frustrating segment for my point to matter?

Yes, because you're arguing that the game was consistently clunky. There are other areas that are annoying in MM1, but there are also annoying and stupid areas in (everyones darling) MM2 as well. MM1 just isn't particularly clunky in general, regardless of a few flaws. Most games have a few flaws. But in general, MM1 is a nicely paced, variety high, competent action experience. In some aspects, I actually prefer it to its two proceeding installments.

Zidiane said:
"If you're good at platformers it isn't hard." The same is true of MN9.

Yes, but I'm not really seeing a problem with MN9's challenge level. Watching a playthrough, there are a lot of other things that make my game design sense tingle (in a bad way).

But hey, subjective opinions. Whatever floats your boat. I don't think MN9 looks terrible (mediocre at its worst moments). It's just that, like I said, I'm not a huge fan of classic Mega Man anyway, but talking smack about them is all kinds of whack.

I'll also hear none of this "they were good for their time" malarkey. Flooding them with a million side quests and qte's (or whatever else counts as modern game design wisdom*) wouldn't have made them better games. They weren't good for their time, they were good for what they set out to do. And what they set out to do was create a game based on a number of perfectly reasonable action game design goals.


*
Of course, I don't want to say that many of the games made today, evne if they're not my style, aren't competently made and thought out. But we're talking about two different styles of gameplay. It makes no more sense to say that Mega Man is "not good" by the standards of modern games like Uncharted than it does to say that Uncharted sucks compared to the standards of games like Mega Man. They're different styles of play. One may be more niche (today) but both are equally valid and no less necessary to satisfy some peoples tastes.

There is also a lot of fucking crap though.
 
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I-I have to step in here. After hearing voice acting in MM8 and MMX4, voice acting in Legends 1 was a GODSEND.
 
Well, say what you will, i think it deserves a chance with a sequel!

WITHOUT crowdfunding
WITHOUT dub of any kind
WITHOUT struggling with an engine the studio never used before
WITHOUT online components that the studio never implemented before
and with 2 SKUs at most.


He already went on the first wave of a new age for side scrollings, and suffered on every possible way for trying to things different. If comcept/Inti dial back a little on the macro decisions, they can make a good game with 10% of the backlash.

Franchises can have a rough start and recover. Just like they can pass through dark times and rise again.
 
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Squire Grooktook said:
It's just that, like I said, I'm not a huge fan of classic Mega Man anyway, but talking smack about them is all kinds of whack.
I wasn't talking smack about anything. I said the classics had flaws, and on my scale of "megaman games" they ranks around the same as/a bit below MN9. And I'm saying I enjoyed MN9.
 
What I really want to smack about MN9 is the Pyrogen fight (that motherfucker and his one-hit kill attack) and the Call's prison stage, because it can be tedious, long, and near the final segment, there is an -horribly placed- instant death floor where I lost at least 20 lives, and I'm still stuck in there, and if you lose, guess what? YOU GOTTA DO THE WHOLE LEVEL AGAIN. What the fuck, Comcept?
 
DukeMagus said:
Franchises can have a rough start and recover. Just like they can pass through dark times and rise again.
I'll agree with this. If they fix the stupid, I'm game for more.
 
I wasn't really bothered by the Call level. I think it had one of the more clever bosses in the game, and was one of the few stages where enemy placement felt like it mattered. I was glad that they didn't randomize item placement either, so the first sections went by pretty fast whenever I had to start over. Yeah, that last part was annoying, but most spike tunnels in the game were, no thanks to that camera. Call having the hover jump actually helped a lot compared to some of the sections with Beck, where you just had to YOLO your spacing at times.

And honestly, I didn't hate the voice acting either. The way it was directed and used was bad, and the poor script botched many opportunities for better character development, but I felt the performances themselves were still in a much higher league than MM8/MMX4. Actors could actually pronounce the characters' names properly, for starters.
 
DukeMagus said:
Wrong.

I funded a project to help make a worthy concurrent to mega man, to show there's market to it and incentive capcom to action.

So you funded it to make something like Mega Man and to spur Capcom to make new ones again.

So pretty much what I said? People funded it to get a "New Mega Man". There's more to those quotes than just getting something of an exact copy of the original.

Don't get me wrong. I'll always be thankful for who they inspired because Bloodstained wouldn't exist without it. And I'm interested in what they'll take away from this for a sequel. But just like with MN9, people (and myself) jumped on Bloodstained because they wanted more Castlevania.


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And to people talking about voice acting: the blonde company president is voiced by the same guy that voiced Dio Brando in the recent jojo games/anine
 
E!Damnation said:
What I really want to smack about MN9 is the Pyrogen fight (that motherfucker and his one-hit kill attack)
Which one is insta kill? Also, pretty sure he calls out his attacks before he does them, so unless you're playing with Japanese voices it shouldn't be hard.

Also, I played with Japanese voices and handled him just find. You can option select his attacks. Dash at him, then dash away. If he jumps then dash under him, if he blows up then dash away, if he does neither then jump and dash over him.

Call's prison stage
Was the most interesting stage in the game. If you have an issue dying, you can bump up your lives (up to 9 max). I played with 2 and reduced support (not sure if that effected her stage), it was fine. Dying near the end was frustrating (I lost at the end once), mostly cause the stage was long, but it's literally her only stage, I was happy with the length (though I wanted more than one).

KaboomKid said:
Call having the hover jump actually helped a lot compared to some of the sections with Beck, where you just had to YOLO your spacing at times.
You could use helicopter weapon to get the same effect on spiked areas with Beck. That's almost exclusively what that weapon was for.
 
Zidiane said:
You could use helicopter weapon to get the same effect on spiked areas with Beck.
That's if you have it, which thankfully you do in that near to last stage. Call's hover is still better though, because you can do it on-command whenever you want during the jump, and you don't have to worry about her throwing her shoes off if you let the button go at the wrong time. If they had a stage in the game that was filled with those types of sections, I'd want to switch to Call in a heartbeat.
 
Avi's stage is the easiest of the game! It should be the first weapon you'd get
 
I think fighting Avi Buster-only is really annoying though. I personally found Shade's to be the easiest, including the Boss Fight, followed by Pyro's. Pyro's Stage is really only hard if you go for Sprinter, so you have to keep your eye on the RNG fireballs in that last section that can mess you up.
 
KaboomKid said:
That's if you have it, which thankfully you do in that near to last stage. Call's hover is still better though, because you can do it on-command whenever you want during the jump, and you don't have to worry about her throwing her shoes off if you let the button go at the wrong time. If they had a stage in the game that was filled with those types of sections, I'd want to switch to Call in a heartbeat.
Oh, yeah, Call's is hands down better than Helicopter. Honestly, I'm still really upset I didn't get to play Call more often. She deserved her own campaign if you weren't going to be able to swap her in mid stage.
 
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Jutsei said:
Whatever happened to that co-op mode where one person was Call and one was Beck
Did that get canned too?
That's still in, I think. But I don't like Co-Op like that. I just wanna be Roll Call and sneak around and beat bosses.
 
Finished the game with Beck. The final boss was a good challenge, reminded me a little of the Yellow Devil, at least the first stage. For some reason, I still find Call's level annoying, but she as a playable character is really good, so I'd like to see more of her in the future. Now I'm playing the Ray campaign. At first I didn't really like her style, but after beating one of the bosses (Seismic), I found myself enjoying the game a little more than I did with Beck.

To be honest, I think Seismic is the easiest boss, if you know how to dodge his drill arms. Pyrogen is the one who gave me the most trouble.
 
I feel like Ray is too hard without a boss weapon. I also want to be able to heal myself by eating Xel, not just regain drained health.
 
Typos
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Zidiane said:
I feel like Ray is too hard without a boss weapon. I also want to be able to heal myself by eating Xel, not just regain drained health.
Yeah, I know what you mean. This can lead to many cheap deaths, especially when you're under a freaking wooden box. As for the boss weapon part, I'd recommend trying to beat Seismic or Battalion first: for Seismic, avoid his first drill attack by jumping to the nearest ledge, then air dash all the way to the opposite wall before he throws his second drill punch. His other attacks are really easy to dodge. For Battalion, just jump over him, avoiding his machine-gun fire and the semi-homing rockets. His one-hit kill is absurdly easy to dodge, just make sure to be as far as possible from the bomb before he detonates it.
 
BrandX+ said:
I noticed that we keep comparing voice acting from previous MM games to MN9 saying MM just had bad as voice acting. The problem with that statement, most of the bad voice acting games came out in the 90's.
Oh yeah. This was the latest MM game to come out with VO's, it came out 9 years ago.
"whet for booty"

We've still progressed since then, yeah, but I can't think of a MM game that has had good VO's (other than grunts and 'hiyaaa's).
 
...X8's Voice Acting was pretty passable. At least imo it was good...It and X Command Mission at least...
 
lol, the only two MM games I haven't played at all. But yeah, those sound like they did actually have decent VO's for MM games.
 
So I finally finished my playthrough with Ray yesterday. Like with Beck, I tried to beat it using subweapons as little as possible. Seriously, why did they even bother adding Maniac Mode when they had this on deck?

Overall, I had a serious love-hate relationship with this DLC. On one hand, it further highlighted a lot of major issues with the game (Ray herself even has the worst VO job, imo), but on the other hand, I think it did some things a lot better than Beck's campaign, and probably provided my most satisfying moments from playing this game. She didn't bring nearly as much new to the table as a character like Plague Knight did for SK, or even Zero in the X series, but playing her still felt more distinctly "MN9" than I was expecting. All of the Dashing and Aborbing that felt somewhat tacked on with Beck, felt crucial for Ray, and while that didn't necessarily make the game better, it did help it feel more honest.

I also liked how her campaign was more "show-don't-tell" than the core game. Even without all of the extraneous dialogue and cutscenes in stages, that simple tug-of-war between hyper-aggressive and hyper-cautious gameplay helped me empathize with her struggle much better than any other character in the story. The health drain, frustrating as it was, also brought a greater significance, and satisfaction, to killing enemies than you got with Beck. For better or worse, it was just nice to know that the gameplay really meant something for this character.

So, even though I'd dread playing a sequel that was held to this exact same standard, I'll admit that Ray's character has made me far more interested in the potential of a MN9:2. I really wouldn't mind seeing how her side of the story could evolve from here.
 
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Yeah, at first I only thought of Ray as the unholy fusion of Zero and Shadow the Hedgehog, but actually, she's a really interesting character (but she has the hammiest voice in the whole game). However, if we ever see MN9:2, I think Comcept will focus on Trinity, who apparently was modified to resemble a more human-looking bot like Beck or Call at the end of the game.
 
Zidiane said:
TLDR; it could use polish, but it's literally a fine game.
No, man. Just no.

Here are some questions I wrote myself while playing:
Why don't the shoot or dash buttons count for shaking out of ice?
Why can't you dash off of ladders, but you can jump and immediately dash, which does the same thing?
Why do falling blocks that were on top of other blocks you blew up hurt you? (Some Megaman games do this but it still sucks.)
Why do shots have a maximum time to live rather than going all the way offscreen? If this is to allow another shot, then make it allow another shot at that time but still not get rid of my existing one!
Why don't powered-up shots disappear as soon as they go off the screen? The three-shot limit means even with enemies at the edge of the screen you are forced to wait for your shots to disappear.
Why can't you mantle on anything in the ice level? (Why doesn't he just have wall-jump, for crying out loud? Missing a ledge and being able to airdash forever above your now-certain doom is no fun.)
Why doesn't being invincible also protect you from instant-death hazards? This is INSANE. This ALONE makes it a terrible platform game, let alone even calling it a Megaman clone.
Why can't you shake out of Pyro's instant-kill attack?
Why do bosses even have instant-kill attacks?
Why does it show the beginning tutorial again after the checkpoint if you die in the tutorial level?
Who thought it was fun to make a platform game where people are talking all the time?
Why does he have slowish or ANY acceleration on regular ground? Zero-to-top-speed-in-one-frame is the rule here.
Why does touching deactivated enemies hurt you, instead of you absorbing them?
Why don't your shots go through deactivated enemies?
Why do you have multiple air dashes?
You have to shoot bosses a bunch and then dash into them to seal that health off. Why does time when they can't be hit count toward time when they will get their health back?
Why are either Beck's vulnerable boxes or projectiles' hitboxes bigger than they should be by around 1.25x?
Why can't you switch weapons from the pause menu?
Why can't you switch weapons while hanging from a ledge or ring? For cryin' out loud!

[edit]
I mentally was comparing this game to Megaman X3, my favorite of the series. I had to go back and play that again just to make sure I wasn't crazy, that it really is that much better. And...it is.
 
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Mike_Z said:
Why doesn't being invincible also protect you from instant-death hazards?

That was in the first Mega Man (As a bug if I remember correctly). It was corrected for, as far as I'm aware, literally every other game in the entire franchise including the Gameboy ones. It's equal parts hilarious and frustrating that it's in MN9.

The entire game feels like they playtested each level maybe once, and didn't bother to even change anything. Like, couldn't you spare half a second in the endless droning voice overs to explain the buildings in the back would fall and, oh yeah, insta-kill me? Couldn't fit that one in, could you? Also, why the hell is every single stage hazard in this game insta-kill? Why does this game even have lives? Why does the low dash even exist? Why is the enemy placement so awful? God, every time I look at this game it gets worse and worse, it's like a Matryoshka doll of bad design. The whole thing could've used a few dozen once overs, but I guess they were to busy porting it to actually make it good.
 
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Not that anyone asked, but if I were going to redesign that game with minimal effort on the developers' part:
- Being invincible after being hit would also make Beck invincible to instant-death hazards and instant-death attacks. Bottomless pits are still death, obviously.
- Reduce the knockback from being hit to about 80% of what it is now.
- Disabled enemies would count as intangible. Touching them would collect them, and all shots would go through them. If you didn't collect them fast enough they would come back alive, just like they do now. That time could even be made shorter.
- Dashing into an enemy that has very little health remaining (1.5-3 lemons' worth, would need testing) would kill them and collect them. Dashing into them otherwise would hurt Beck. This status would be indicated by outlining them in red or making them flash between normal and disabled looks, or something.
- He would be limited to 2 airdashes per jump. (I'd make it 1, but there are sections where at least 2 are required.) Being hit would give you back both, grabbing a ring would give you back both. [removed because of mcpeanuts' valid point that this is an important part of what fun MN9 does have]
- Shorten minimum dash/airdash distance to 1 frame, if you actually release the button that quickly.
- Remove mantling (ledge grab) in favor of the below option. Grabbing rings would still need to be present because levels are designed around that.
- With at least 1 airdash remaining, when next to a wall Beck can walljump upward by pressing Jump, which will use up an airdash. (This could just use his flip animation from ledge grab->Up, and is in lieu of implementing full Megaman-style wall cling and walljump while still preventing you dying.)
- If a boss hit you with what is now an instant-kill attack and you have more than 1HP remaining, it would bring you down to 1HP rather than killing you. (This is closer to the intended spirit than just making those attacks do 50% damage, and probably more fun because those could still one-shot you with 50% health left. Might be worth reducing the damage AND having them not kill you from above 1HP.)
- Shots would travel the full length of the screen, but stop counting toward the bullet limit/allow you to fire another shot after they reached the range where they now disappear.
- Shots that went farther than a little bit offscreen would IMMEDIATELY DISAPPEAR, or at least immediately not count toward the bullet limit.
- Extra energy tanks would use themselves as soon as Beck received fatal damage, like Auto mode Reserve Tanks from Super Metroid, rather than requiring the player to manually use them. They go away when you die, this is the fairest way for them to work with that restriction.
- Switching weapons would be possible at any time, no matter what Beck is doing! I would not even require the addition of weapon switching from the pause menu, since that would be a new UI screen. (Optional - change controls to allow switching by holding the weapon-switch button and pressing left/right. Holding the button would pause the world. Hint, look at MMZA's weapon switching. :^)
- Remove the crouch-dash command and just let him automatically enter crouch-dash state when he reaches a short opening.
- Allow pressing the Dash button while on a ladder to disengage from the ladder and dash without requiring jumping first.
- Allow pressing the Shoot or Jump buttons to cut off the current line of dialogue in a cutscene and advance past it. (Just fake like it finished, in code.) Press-start-to-skip-the-whole-thing is not the only useful feature for cutscenes.
- Mute the in-level voiceover for dialogue that occurs while players are playing, even if the rest of the dialogue is spoken.

Optional - redo some of the boss powers (sword, bulldozer) so they don't just grant you invincibility frames forever if you continue using them / mashing.

That's just the basics, but I think that's enough to vastly improve how it feels, at least to me.
None of this requires level, enemy, or boss redesigns. If this were the Z-Engine, all that is doable in well under a week, so I imagine one of their more-experienced designers and a programmer could do it in about that time.
 
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