Mighty Rant

--Mighty Rant--

[No.342488313]
There's honestly a lot I did not fucking like, it's hard to be concise about it but I did write up some thoughts.
Of course it's all just my personal experience from one full playthrough and is subjective.

Above all else, the gameplay.
It's not fun, I didn't enjoy the game at any stage. There were maybe moments I thought it was alright or average, but nothing shined and a lot frustrated.
The weapons in the game are highly imbalanced ranging from completely useless to ridiculously useful.

Your standard pea-shooter sucks, you cannot charge it and you will be hammering that fire button to take out enemies, many of which are airborne. When you use this, everything becomes a bullet sponge until they are suspectible to Xel absorption.

Because your damage output is difficult to track, you kinda need to count the number of shots you land on an enemy before you can dash through them to finish them off, else you'll find yourself accidentally dashing into an enemy who wasn't vulnerable because you didn't quite get this right. It happens way too often, and the fact that enemies flash when you damage them and flash a different way when you can absorb them doesn't help, it's difficult to actually know for certain when you're safe to dash.
Couple this with shoddy sound design where nothing actually feels all that satisfying like sound effects of old, and constant noise that drowns out the background music, and you have an experience that makes your participation all that less palpable.

It's at odds with traditional Mega Man play, because you've never needed to be too close to an enemy to deal with them. Proper Mega Man has moments when close-quarters can be risky but rewarding, but throughout Mighty No. 9 it is necessary and unsatisfying. Whilst you can defeat enemies by continuing to attack them, this means you won't get any beneficial Xel, overall making for a system far less preferable to most games where enemies are defeated by substantial attacks and they drop an item.



[No.342488607]
Weapon switching, this is actually quite a headache.

You cannot switch weapons whilst paused, and rather than other Mega Man games where you can cycle through abilities on the fly using the shoulder button, you have to cycle through a selector and THEN press a button to transform between your standard form and alternate form.

This mess makes it really cumbersome to actually switch to the power you want on the fly, because the game doesn't have slow or relaxed periods to give you time to switch seamlessly, at the very least not on a first playthrough.

The default controls for switching don't make sense either.
Left Trigger and Left Bumper cycle your transformations, whilst your right trigger is "Action Shift" and right bumper is dash.
I can't think why they kept actions to the bumpers, and cycling to the triggers, I should've changed this myself.

Even worse is that you do not get separate buttons dedicated to your pea shooter and your special weapon, which even Mega Man 8 figured out.
Making this worse is that although your special weapon energy can recharge, it only does so when you have the form active. If you wanted your energy to recharge whilst you use the pea shooter, tough luck.



[No.342488885]
Now about the Xel absorption system, which we get in lieu of enemy transformations because of tight budget.

There are four kinds of Xel that enemies drop.

Blue Xel fills your Xel Recovery gauge, which is basically your Sub-tank. This doesn't stay filled between stages and even empties if you die, which is insane, it punishes death in a way other Mega Man games wouldn't dare.

Adding to this is that enemies never drop health recovery, but you can find items placed around stages. The health recovery items have quite a similar appearance to extra lives, and don't logically look like health recovery. Nothing about the item designs convey their purpose too well.

What doesn't help is that for having an emphasis on collecting blue Xel, you don't see a meter fill up on the HUD, you can very easily overlook the icon when you have a full recover gauge.
The sub-tank implementation is clearly better because health pickups will either fill your health meter, or overflow into a subtank with at least a sound cue that it's filling.

Red Xel boosts your weapon power temporarily, attacks get stronger and reduces weapon energy consumption. This can make it difficult to count damage dealing for dashing into enemies, but it also gives your pea shooter temporary piercing fire, which is useful actually. So for the combo heavy gameplay it's a mixed bag.

Green Xel makes you run faster temporarily, Yellow Xel temporarily boosts your defense.
It's a semi-decent system but has weird ways of making you trip up, because you don't get a strong feeling for when you're boosted or when you aren't.

Oh, and very importantly, Xel absorption refills the weapon energy of your currently used weapon. This rewards using other weapons and successfully absorbing Xel, but in turn can mean you never run out of weapon energy and don't have to think about which weapons to use if you have a good one.



[No.342489096]
Okay, now the weapons, oh deary me the weapons.

Mighty No. 1, Pyrogen's weapon is charged fire burst. You press the button to detonate a blast of fire around you. It's useless, as it's slow to charge and doesn't hit very hard. The idea is probably to predict when you're in a room with a shitload of enemies.

Mighty No. 2, Cryosphere's weapon is an ice ball toss. It shoots forward then drops after a fairly short distance, it is slightly more powerful than the pea shooter and is capable of freezing enemies. It's good for clearing stages especially if you want to maintain a combo, because it makes it easier to get 100% absorption.
Not that the combo system is rewarding in any way.

Mighty No. 3, Dynatron's weapon is a tagging electrical attack. You fire off a spread of 6 conductors that stick to enemies, and deal damage for a brief period. It's kinda useful but I didn't find myself using it often.

Mighty No. 4, Seismic's weapon turns you into a tank with treads, and you perform a charge attack. I never once used this though I doubted it would have any use knowing the enemies. It apparently can send enemies flying, but why on earth would you want to do this when the goal is to destabilise and absorb them??



[No.342489393]
Mighty No. 5, Battalion's weapon. Okay this weapon is ridiculously overpowered, there are no drawbacks to it and it demands its own section.

It's powerful explosive that fires straight forward, first button press fires and second detonates. The blast radius is huge and deals very heavy damage, and its weapon energy is surprisingly low. This is the defacto stage clearing weapon because it works against EVERYTHING, and requires no effort to aim other than having a little care with your detonation timing.

This lets you steamroll enemies as soon as you see them, most are ready to absorb after one or two fires, and due to Xel absorption replenishing weapon energy you should never ever run out.

It's a bit less useful against bosses because you do not constantly recover weapon energy in boss fights, but is still a very good weapon.

This goes beyond the usefulness of the Metal Blades in Mega Man 2, it's insane how imbalanced this is.
The only disadvantage I can think of is that it the large explosions might make it difficult to see what is happening, such as if enemies were not made susceptible to absorption.
You might also accidentally overkill and miss the opportunity to absorb, which is the other side of being able to completely remove potential obstacles.



[No.342489618]
Mighty No. 6, Aviator's weapon is a gyrocopter blade. Hold the button to be able to jump higher and descend slower, which is actually necessary for one of the final stages. Release the button to throw the blade, but as an attack it's difficult to use because of short range. Holding the button slowly drains weapon energy too, I would say this weapon is only useful one time, but it might be effective somewhere if you use it?

Mighty No. 7, Brandish's weapon is some blades. Just press the button and you cut in front of you, it can reflect fire and grants some invulnerability frames. The standard attack doesn't consume energy but charged attacks can, but I never actually used this weapon during the course of the game. From what I've seen you can use this weapon to cheese the final boss fight.
I didn't use it at all but it might actually be a very useful weapon that flows better with the whole dash system, making combat more Mega Man Zero like.

Mighty No. 8, Countershade's weapon is like a sniper rifle. You shoot very powerful shots that ricochet off walls or other objects, and intelligently home towards enemies. But, its weapon energy consumption is enormous so you can fire off very few shots. It does seem to recharge a bit faster than the others to compensate, but like sniping it emphasises that you don't miss your mark.

And that's the weapons, there are few that you'll actually want to use.
Worth mentioning that Ray's weapons are completely different but I didn't play that DLC so I don't know how.



[No.342489904]
Now that I've explained the weapons, I'll explain how maybe a good 80-90% of the game doesn't take advantage of them.

Battalion's weapon was so ridiculously overpowered that I was always using it, this lead to me not even trying other weapons to see how they work (largely due to how cumbersome weapon switching is).

The game does a very poor job of encouraging weapon experimentation, because the majority of enemies can be dealt with normally and are not placed in creative ways where your weapons have a clearcut advantage. Although it does appear that certain weapons have special uses against both a boss AND their stage, this isn't communicated very well.

Unlocking new weapons also does not demonstrate the weapons, you have to try them for yourself. There are game-tips you can read about each weapon, but best practice is to show, don't tell.

To add to this, there are no enemies that are weak or immune to certain weapons. Everything is effective, and bosses don't appear to have immunities but at least have weaknesses, as far as I can tell weapons can be advantageous in some scenarios but there is no obvious weapon weakness circle here.

Or more appropriately, the weapon weaknesses aren't very palpable. The game seems to imply this by having rescued Mighty Numbers show up in other stages, that you should use their weapon against the boss. So if Countershade appears in Aviator's stage, use his weapon against him. You us Brandish against Dynatron, Battalion against Seismic, etc.

Further, when selecting stages, you can get a barebones explanation about the stage from Call, and you might see an "advice" option which will be a rescued Mighty Number asking for support.
This is basically your not so subtle cue that you should play this stage because you have the bosses' weakness.
If you overlook or ignore this you might make mistakes like thinking Cryosphere's ice attack is of any use in Pyrogen's stage, it's not. Pretty sure it's the other way around.



[No.342490505]
A word about platforming controls.
It doesn't feel tight to put it simply, Beck can run around, dash, air dash, drop-dash to the ground, make breakfast, etc, but with constant dashing he feels very slippery. You can cancel your dash at any time, but I've had a number of accidental deaths because I couldn't juggle the too many control inputs and his weird momentum when his dash finishes.

Naturally there are a lot of jumps where you need to dash across larger gaps, his air dashing is like the upgrades in Mega Man X except spammable, you get a lot of hang time from using them. Later stages with air currents even require this to go stay airborne, it's weird.

He can also grab onto ledges, on a few occasions you need to so you can avoid instant death spikes, but there's no sort of wall jumping.
To be honest the platforming felt clunky and the mechanics did not lend themselves to good level design at all. The challenge was more in not slipping up which was easy to do, rather than careful timing or tight jumps that carry risks.
You know that combat flexibility or tension for survival that wall kicking gave you in Mega Man X games? None of that here.



[No.342490864]
About the level design, together with the explained platforming and combat issues.

The other major problem is enemies, the variation of them is similar to Mega Man games but doesn't have that right fit of dictating the flow of platforming. There are no sneaky enemies that'll make you watch your step, so much as they simply get in the way because you need to shoot them enough to dash through them. Bleh

Levels also rarely featured any interesting mechanics, the Mega Man games have a great deal of interesting platforms or gimmicks that define a robot master's stages (if you've ever played Rockman 4 Minus Infinity, Skull Man's stage paid particular tribute to this), you just won't find this in Mighty No. 9, it feels very uninspired.

To put it concisely the level design looks at the parts of Mega Man games that were frustrating, like instant death spikes and death pits and litters stages with them without understanding what made these hurdles accomplished in the first place. They did at least make one thing very clear, if it's glowing bright purple it can kill you instantly. (Fucking turbines in Dynatron's stage)

Watching a Gamexplain livestream of the game, the player whilst not very good did make an excellent point.
The level design can't decide if it wants to be like classic Mega Man, Mega Man X or Mega Man Zero, and there are blatant instances where the combat and platforming would've been enriched by wall-jumping. In its place we only get this edge-grabbing system which has a surprising emphasis that honestly is at odds with the dashing.



[No.342491778]
I should definitely mention the scoring system. It's completely pointless and not at all satisfying to attempt.

The combo system works by absorbing Xel from enemies with 100% efficiency, if you take too long to absorb Xel then you'll absorb less than 100% and drop the combo.

The longer you maintain the combo, the bigger end-level bonus you'll get, along with things like kill counts, time taken, damage taken etc.

There are also assorted bonuses, the narration loves to shout things like Excellent, Fine Play, Sprinter, Amazing etc. If you absorb multiple enemies simultaneously regardless of absorbtion rate, you get a multiplier bonus by an extra 50% each enemy. If you apparently do a section of a boss fight well like take no damage or punish them well, you get a Fine Player, and Sprinter is awarded for rushing through a section.

At the end of a stage your score is tallied and you get a rank of S, A, B, C or D, and your rank is recorded.
But that's all it does, rank is absolutely inconsequential, as you are not rewarded for your efforts. The scoring system is as pointless as it was in Mega Man 1, as opposed to the Mega Man Zero games where ranks reward you with special kills or upgrades.

There's also no sort of customization system or in-game currency so you can improve your character's abilities, like double jumping, movement speed, survival options etc. There aren't any kind of hidden collectibles that might unlock something either.
For all the neat bonuses they thought to include as stretch goals like a playable Call stage or voice acting, they never though about adding the things that would really make the game more fun and varied.



[No.342492145]
As I've established, the game punishes you if you die and doesn't reward you for doing well in the long term.
The game instead has a support system for struggling players.

At checkpoints, Patch robots can appear. These are Eddie analogues as they give you random items such as health recovery, a full Xel recovery meter, extra lives, or Yellow/Red/Green Xel boosts. The more you die, the more these guys will show up and start giving you better items.

Ironically these respawn bonuses are rarely useful, because going into a boss fight your buffs will run out quickly and you have the rest of the boss fight to endure. The only useful item is the blue Xel recovery item, and you better hope you get one because like I said, dying makes you LOSE your Xel recovery.

So what we have is a score system that only goes half the way, the player has no incentive to play a level well, your only goal is to actually beat the stages with the half-assed support that they implemented.

There are multiple challenges and such in the extra modes which too emphasis score attack, due to the nature of the game I don't think it's suited for speed running at all, despite being designed with it in mind.



[No.342492483]
Boss fights need to be explained in general, but I'll later talk about them in a little more depth individually.

The majority of boss patterns are frustrating, as they have a lot of health and act as bullet sponges unless you use their weaknesses. Worse yet is many of them are prone to very repetitive and unvaried attack patterns, which especially like to stay airborne for long periods that you can't even jump high enough to shoot at. Only a handful of your special weapons will have the reach to deal with them, and you're generally up shit-creek without a paddle without their weakness due to how shitty most weapons are.

Boss fights are where the Xel absorption system really rears its ugly head, during fights you need to keep shooting them until they are vulnerable to an absorption. Once they're vulnerable you need to hurry up and absorb them because if you take too long they will recover their lost energy.

Because you need to get close to absorb their Xel, if you make them vulnerable during an attack animation that is too dangerous to approach, and especially long winded, you risk taking damage or risk dealing very little actual damage. Most bosses you need to absorb them a minimum of 4-5 times too. You cannot be sure when your attacks are going to make them vulnerable to absorption either really.

All in all this makes the majority of boss fights an exercise in frustration, I can't see how you would do these without taking damage, because your opportunities for absorption are so treacherous. The game is a one-hit death mode by the way, no idea why you would want to play such a thing.



[No.342492826]
So I guess I'm done explaining all the shit about the general gameplay and it's failings, so let me talk about stages and bosses. I'll do it in the order that I played them (to the best of my recollection).

The intro stage is pretty basic, you learn about the events of the game, parts of the highway crumble (because Mega Man X why not), you fight some enemies, dash over gaps and through tight spaces, etc. The boss fight is against a construction robot that broke into Dr Sanda's labs, you beat it easily and that's the intro, there's not much to be said. You get some cutscenes, the premise of the game is set up and now you get to choose between your eight robot masters.



[No.342493058]
I started with Mighty No. 2, Cryosphere.

This stage is a waterworks plant, and has some better level design which leans more towards classic Mega Man I'd say. It starts off with an underwater section which plays well enough, including a dropshaft full of spikes (like from Mega Man, remember those?).

Once you get out of the water and into the plant itself you'll find the place completely iced over, which makes the already slippery controls even more-so.
You'll fight a particularly annoying Pong mini-boss twice, a pair of robots that bounce up and down and bat around a fairly large and fast lump of junk metal. Remember my rant about boss fights? This applies here too for some reason and to my recollection is the only mini-boss that acts like an actual boss.

The second time you fight this mini-boss, Cryosphere hangs out firing the odd freezing projectile too. It's manageable, but frustrating due to not being able to reach them all the time.

Later sections have you breaking away some ice blocks to advance but it's not very interesting, the difficulty of the platforming overall is pretty fair though.

Once you finally reach Cyrosphere herself, this boss fight is extremely annoying. Most of her attacks can freeze you, and any moment you get frozen she builds up an ice ball attack to lunge into you for big damage. You have to break out in time, you have just about enough time to avoid damage but she'll go straight into her water-hovering attack. She spends half of her battle at the top of her screen before finally freezing the water flow into a pillar.
The fight slightly suffers from Flame Hyenard syndrome, as when she stands on the ice pillar she'll constantly say Pew Pew Pew, and this attack is especially annoying because it very easily freezes you when you're focused on the only time you can damage her, with limited safe opportunities to absorb.
Her personality is also quite grating, making constant ice puns and overall acting like a baby by design.



[No.342494049]
Next I tackled Mighty No.1 , Pyrogen. I had already played this stage in the demo and knew what to expect.

This is a really bland and uninspired stage set at an oil refinery, you make your way past some fast approaching enemies, avoid spinning fire-obstacles and hope that oil leaks don't get ignited. The platforming here leaves a lot to be desired with one section later on being particularly infamous.

At the end you get pillars in the background that collapse into the foreground, getting hit by any of these is an instant death. The first time you encounter them is manageable, just wait for them to collapse if you don't want to chance dashing past them because of enemy obstacles.

The second time is a nasty spike in peril, because you have both falling fireballs in the sky and fallaway platforms. In particular there is one spot where you're very likely to get knocked back by the randomly fast-falling fire balls, and end up grabbing onto a ledge that traps you into getting hit by a falling pillar.
This particularly annoying section is probably intended to be made easier by a Mighty Number assisting you, probably Aviator as his weapon is fanning and blocks overhead projectiles.

Once you get to the boss fight himself, he's fair. He has three possible attacks, and he always starts by moving to the edge of the screen, beating his chest with a voice cue and then charging towards you. You need to stay near them to make him attack then immediately retreat, it's a very basic pattern.

The main problem with this fight is that half-way through it, the characters start talking about "oh I don't want to fight you snap out of it", "you have to beat him it's the only way", and during this you can't listen to his voice cues. As far as I could tell, the voice cues are the only way to read his patterns, are there's no visual differences in his chest beating.

The character is as predictable as you'd expect, he wants to make the world burn, okay whatever.



[No.342494432]
After Pyrogen, I played the next stage from the demo, No. 3 Dynatron.
This level isn't very good, it's like a weak version of the Spark Mandrill stage set at a power plant. It's largely forgettable up until an infamous section where you need to crouch-dash under some spinning instant-death turbines.

The game for some reason has two kinds of dashing on the ground, a standard dash and a crouch dash.
It's a lot like sliding, except that slides wouldn't get cancelled by turning or not holding the button.
The execution for these two consecutive crouch dashes are way too tight and don't belong in the game, it's not like classic Mega Man sliding which has a set duration.

During the stage you have Dr Sanda screaming over the communicator because he's afraid of the dark. That doesn't make any damn sense, he isn't there in the power plant, he's monitoring Beck from the safety of his office.

There are also a couple of rooms where you fight off enemy waves, including these small spider robots that are too short for your pea shooter to hit. Instead of forcing you to use "Action Shift" for that shooting the ground thing, or using a different weapon, the enemies simply jump backwards when you fire so you can maybe hit them. Brilliant enemy design right?

The Dynatron boss fight has a similar problem, she attacks by firing multiple conductors, which stick to the wall or to Beck. You can shake them off or destroy any that are left stuck, but eventually after spreading a few of these she will use an electric attack that starts with her high up then dropping down.
To be safe from this attack you need to remove any conductors from the walls, don't bother with the floor, and be on the opposite side of the room.
If you're playing pea shooter only, it'll be impossible to remove all of these especially the ones on the floor.
Dynatron herself flies around usually very high, making it very difficult to shoot her, it's just such a drawn out boss fight.



[No.342494919]
Next I took no No. 5, Battalion. This is the last of the three stages I played from the demo.
This is definitely one of the better stages using conveyor belts pushing crates, military supplies and such, with hallways that slope around and nice enemy placement that flows.
This level feels very reminscent of Mega Man Zero games to be sure. It's an inoffensive level, and the boss fight itself is pretty decent too.

Battalion has simple enough patterns, he jumps around, picks one of his projectile attacks and repeats, I'd say he's the easiest main boss in the game and has patterns reminiscent of Search Man from Mega Man 8.
This is an excellent starting stage because it's manageable without special powers, and gives you one of the very best powers.

I also found Battalion's dialogue and voice acting pretty amusing, stuff like addressing Beck as Private, talking about conduct of war, major malfunctions. All bosses have dialogue if you lose, he says stuff like you fought with honor, I'll notify your next of kin. Doesn't make the most sense because all the Mighty Numbers are siblings but he's basically insane at the time.

This level is definitely the shining gem of the game, if they released this as the only level in the demo I think people would've had a much better impression before launch.



[No.342495465]
With Battalion's special power to abuse I went onto No. 4 Seismic next, which happens to be his weakness.

An interesting thing about all of the stage designs actually is that your special weapon appears to get usefulness, albeit only in that specific stage which itself is poor design.
In this case, your explosives can remove suspiciously cube rocks that let you grab items and take much safer paths, but only in this stage.

The level itself is an underground mining shaft, much like Armored Armadillo's stage with shafts and dangerous things chasing after you. You get enemies popping up out of crates that block the way, which to be honest is a courtesy because it lets you keep your Battalion weapon charged. Although otherwise there's a section later that is very difficult if you attempt it buster only and do not have a red piercing attack boost.

There's also a heavy emphasis on wall-clinging, as you do so whilst dropping down shafts that have death spikes or crushing platforms at the bottom. You can actually get crushed by the moving platforms if they move against the wall or ceiling, and one you need to grab onto because it's directly against a spiked ceiling.
You're under pressure to not get insta-killed by a slow moving drill, so if you don't figure it out quickly you'll take a death but you shouldn't repeat this mistake.

The boss fight itself is inoffensive, Seismic himself I guess is the Guts Man analogue for the series, he jumps ground and makes crates fall through the ceiling. These are usually easy to dodge, although if the safe spot to avoid being crushed is behind him you need to grab the fall and dash over him.
Battalion's weapon makes short work of him though, and he has next to no banter and is mostly just aggressive and slow-minded. After he is rescued he is an entirely capable ally and thinker though, all the robots malfunction in very different ways.

At the end of the day it's an inoffensive but unexceptional stage.



[No.342495915]
Next I took on No. 7's stage, Brandish.

This stage sucks, the entire stage is hopping from car to truck on a highspeed motorway whilst some enemies can fly overhead. Later sections auto-scroll too, and falling on the road is instant death.
Naturally this is where they took their inspiration for enemy knockback to cause instant death, it wouldn't be so bad if certain airborne enemies found in this stage didn't have abnormally high health, during an auto-scroller of all things.

This level really illustrates how unfun the dashing can be, because most jumps require a dash to make them and you have very slippery momentum.

Notably in the background you can see some "innocuous" artwork from backers, but one in particular stands out because it's a crappy drawing of Egoraptor, Egoraptor, Egoraptor and Egoraptor drawn by Egoraptor. He paid $2500 to get his face in the game.
http://i.imgur.com/cWsJRub.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/woDbokO.jpg

When you get to the boss fight himself, it's a pretty fair fight. He runs around very predictably, you can jump over most things as he twirls around with a spin attack, jumps to perform somersault and kick attacks, etc. His weakness is supposed to be Seismic's lunging weapon but I didn't bother trying this.

Oh, and the character Brandish himself, his deal is he knows he's out of control and is hesitating, but is still going around slashing things to pieces, including cars during the auto-scroll.

Would've been really nice to try using Brandish's weapon, against Dynatron or the final boss, but I never did.



[No.342496270]
My second to last stage of the might Mighty Numbers was No. 8, Countershade.

His stage is the Capitol Building, which is basically the white house. The background has illustrations of backers who also paid for their face in the game, but they don't fit at all because they are traced over photos with no attempt made to caricature them.
They acknowledged that Shovel Knight has a Hall of Champions with backer portraits, but didn't understand how to apply this comically when they imitated it.

You'll soon forget them though as you focus on the stage and realise how bad it is, the entire stage itself is one long looping hallway with Countershade himself constantly aiming and firing his sniper gun. You get to see where he will fire, and then he fires three times in a row with surprisingly slow bullets that ricochet around.
Like, really slow bullets, you will hear the shots, then you will eventually see the bullets. This really kills the pace if you play it safe.

You spend the stage dashing towards the source of the fire until you spot him, shoot him a few times and then he teleports elsewhere. A few times he may set up some instant-death wires, and if you've rescued Dynatron she'll disable one of these rooms.

If you're unfortunate enough to die any time during this charade, you have to restart the whole thing because there's no checkpoints until the actual boss fight.
You repeat this whole chase a few times until he decides to settle it properly.

The boss fight itself is, eh. It's no different from what you were doing before, he warps somewhere, aims, slowly fires. You can see the exact path of his bullets so there is no reason you should ever get hit by them, you're more likely to accidentally touch Countershade himself.

Countershade's character during this is he wants to emancipate robot kind from humans, and starts by going straight for the Capitol Building to become president. At least his voice acting is good, provided by Steve Blum.



[No.342496631]
My final stage was Mighty No. 6, Aviator.
You first see this character's shenanigans when he hijacks a television broadcast during the intro stage, which takes you to the broadcast tower to stop him.

It's actually a pretty good stage, you ascend it much like the Boomer Kuwanger stage, but has air currents and platforming like Storm Eagle.
However through the level Avi gives the most grating and irritating dialogue. He has absolutely incessant banter that channels Deadpool's spirit as he suffers from multiple television personality disorder, ranging from eye in the sky to weather forecast, "over to you Avi", "thanks Avi".
Here's a few examples so it can torment you.
https://youtu.be/_MjQ5apdUKQ?t=39s
https://youtu.be/_MjQ5apdUKQ?t=5m2s
If you're playing with English voices like I did you'll wish he'd shut the fuck up, not even Cryosphere annoyed me this much.

When you get to the boss fight itself, it's infuriating because you're put up in the air on small platforms, and slipping off because of dashing mechanics still rings true here. You can eventually learn his patterns, and they aren't too bad to dodge actually, but if you go into the fight without Countershade's weapon you are going to have an incredibly hard time damaging him because he's always airborne and moving.
Countershade's weapon trivalises the fight because you can shoot at the platform or his camera, and it will automatically hit Avi for you.
I hated this boss fight though, I got a game over against it and getting better at the fight doesn't make it any more enjoyable. I guess propeller based boss fights from Kickstarter games have a reputation for being infuriating.



[No.342497179]
With the eight main stages completed, two more stages unlock preparing the final events of the game. You get to tackle these two stages in either order.

The first level is a prison break, but instead of playing as Beck you get to play as Call, the Roll analogue.
Worth noting is that this stage was one of the stretch goals for the crowdfunding campaign.

Call is not fun to play as, she can fire one slow weak bullet at a time and she can dash and hover, but she cannot absorb and many enemies cannot be defeated.
So logically, the start of the level plays out as a stealth mission, evade the enemies and collect keycards inside of crates to open doors. Leaving security cards around like that doesn't seem fitting for a maximum security prison.

Then at some point later it decides, actually yes you should be fighting enemies!
Here have a gauntlet of enemies that are painfully slow to dispatch because you have an even worse pea shooter and they are still bullet sponges.
You also get a barrier that reflects projectiles, it's not all that useful for avoiding harm, and you have to recharge it by collecting Patch support bots along the way.

The level ends in a boss fight against a giant security robot dog, the only way to hurt it is to shoot its eye, and the eye is destroyed after taking enough damage. This means you have to wait for an enemy to be dropped in, which the dog eats and this restores its eye so you can whittle its health down some more. For some reason shooting at it whilst it's eating does a critical hit sort of, and it won't get its eye back. It's a very boring bossfight with a weak character.

I appreciate having extra one-time characters who might be limited in some aspects, but it really wasn't needed or well approached.
It's like how the Gyrocopter stage in Star Fox Zero doesn't fit the overall game.



[No.342497673]
The second stage alongside the prison break, is going to the Cherry Dynamics Robot Factory.
In the story Cherry Dynamics is where Dr William White used to work and is headed by Gregory Graham, who is immediately portrayed as suspicious during the intro stage.
(Holy shit his legs are tiny in the illustration) - http://i.imgur.com/dZMQ5S2.png

You go there to stop more trouble, as the production line is manufacturing more out of control robots, somehow even designing its own.

This stage is not that bad, it sees you taking advantage of the weapons you've amassed, although only some of them are applicable.
Just stuff like doors that open but shut very quickly, so you use Battalion's weapon as a remote detonation to time the door opening, or a wall that's slightly too high to reach unless you use Aviator's weapon, or a switch behind a gap which needs Countershade's ricocheting bullets.

There's a mini-boss fight against a production core, where it periodically opens its defenses so you can attack it whilst it keeps manufacturing and dropping generic enemies in the room, and main boss is the mother computer for the factory. It starts with producing an Unnamed truck of a robot that has surprisingly low health, and getting it out of the way lets you attack the mother computer.

Throughout the stage you'll see all the other Mighty Numbers helping out, so that's a thing I guess. The first stage boss is recycled as a sub-boss too, it has exactly one new attack.



[No.342498191]
After that, you're onto the 12th and final stage of the game, the battle colosseum.

The final boss as explained in the story is Trinity, a prototype of Beck with the same Xel absorption ability but no control over it. Her absorption is so out of control the colosseum itself is being distorted by Xel, and anything other than Beck himself is at huge risk of being assimilated.

When you go in there the stage is very cubic and digital looking, and the enemies are mild reskins of things you've already met. It's actually not that dangerous of a stage, the only thing is you have to understand out the regenerating Xel clusters work.

The game introduces them as "regenerating when Xel surrounds them", you shoot them and first they turn into solid blocks you can safely stand on. You continue shooting them and they are destroyed, but sometimes regenerate.

At first you'll keep attacking these blocks and won't understand why they sometimes respawn and sometimes don't, you're likely to think that if there are any adjacent clusters then they can regenerate, so you need to remove all of them in careful order right?

Nope, as it turns out they simply regenerate if you are far away from them. This doesn't really make any sense because you're not actively absorbing Xel by being near them, but there you go. So you'll get to one wall of clusters over a bottomless pit and take a while to figure out how to move past it due to the game poorly explaining things or communicating concepts.



[No.342499171]
When you're finally past the stage itself, the final boss fight is, disappointing to say the least.

She comes in two phases, first a big scary sphere monster. She attacks by firing Xel projectiles at you, and when she has fired enough it becomes vulnerable.
One particular attack pattern is similiar to the Yellow Devil, in that she fires them in a certain order, then the shots return in that order backwards.
During the fight the arena will shapeshift as pillars protrude and recede, sometimes in ways that make it impossible to climb to safety.

After beating the first form, it assumes its second form which kind of serpent like? Hard to explain, but you attack and absorb segments of the body so the head can be attacked.
I did struggle with the fight overall, but as it turns out the first phase is surprisingly easy to cheese by simply spamming Brandish's weapon. It can make you invulnerable during the yellow devil pattern and punish it quickly. I didn't do this personally and wish I knew about it.
Battalion's weapon was pretty good against the second phase, but it's good against most things.

And that's the final boss, Trinity is under control and you see some ending artwork and the credits scroll, okay.
It's really lazy, you see Trinity recover, and you get told that the Mighty Numbers enter the crumbling arena to rescue them without actually seeing this.

In case you didn't notice, there was no sort of boss fight rematch at any point.
Seems like a real wasted opportunity, if Trinity has been absorbing everything and is responsible for all the robot rampaging, the final stage should have included some artificial copies of the eight main bosses.
You unlock a boss rush after the game at least, but why would you want to play such a mode when the boss fights are arguably the worst thing in the game?



[No.342499446]
The credits scroll by the way is ridiculous. For the main credits you get treated to a rap by Mega Ran, which has weird lyrics like thanking the 71000 backers and mentioning Comcept, and you get to hear multiple backers who paid for the privilege of recording their voices says "I am Mighty Number so and so".

And then the Kickstarter thanks roll. All 71000+ names (many of which default to "A Generous Backer"), and if you let the whole thing scroll it will take over 2, maybe 3 hours for them to finish scrolling. Yikes.
My name is among those credits, and I waited a very long time to see it as it's past 30000. As it turns out though if you press Start, you can skip to the next 10000 names, but that still takes far too long for the names to cycle.
There is great irony in that the credits themselves last longer than the game itself.

And that was how I beat the game in one sitting, I had a few game overs, didn't make the best use of powers because the game never really demonstrated them or encouraged their use in enticing ways. I can't say I actually enjoyed it.

Later on, I decided to load the game again to check my time again my save game, but the game actually failed to save any data. I lost all my progress, so I can't replay stages at will and I cannot access the extra modes or the online modes that unlock as you progress the story, yikes. This might be a specific issue to the DRM free installed version, because the game is not officially launched in Europe either.

It isn't too much of a problem because I have very little intention of replaying it, but will pose a small hurdle if I want to play the Ray DLC.



[No.342499731]
Now that I'm finally done talking about the gameplay itself, and how it fails to deliver, let's talk about presentation.

The presentation is weak in a lot of areas as well, as anyone can plainly see the visuals leave much to be desired.
I am indifferent personally and the graphics are serviceable at best, but clearly they didn't know how to work with the Unreal Engine 3 used to develop the game. The animation is limited too, during cutscenes they don't even have lip-flapping or moving eyes, they only do static facial texture updates with some pre-defined faces.

The game has music, did you know that? You might've missed it, between the constant voice over dialogue and sound effects or score bonuses.
Wanna hear Beck say "Just what I needed" over and over instead of the actual music? Then this game is for you.
I honestly can't remember what any of the music sounds like except maybe boss fights, when it's not drowned out by the gameplay it's utterly forgettable.
And oh lord the voice acting. Some of it is tolerable or amusing like Countershade or Battalion but most characters are grating or dull, including Beck himself.
I wish the characters didn't have to talk all the time, the voice acting ended up being a huge detriment.



[No.342500037]
The story, it's uh, something?
The game starts with the riveting line "It is the present year". Why did that even need stating?

Society is peaceful and the only violence is robot wars held at a battle colosseum for fun, even the robots themselves understand and enjoy this.
But then suddenly they go on a rampage and you have to sort this out.
Beck wasn't affected, Call wasn't affected and they're trying to figure out why.

The president of Cherry Dynamics Gregory Graham insists that it's not their fault and that Dr Blackwell is to blame, whilst they do their best to resolve the situation (although I never see anything to this effect as they actually request that you come get their robot factory under control.)

Dr Sanda calls his brother in Japan, and they discuss that Japan can't send any robots to help the situation in America because they might only make things worse, so they decide that Beck must use his assimilation abilities to get the Mighty Numbers under control and study them to understand the problem.
Whilst rescuing Mighty Numbers, Gregory Graham is getting hounded by government officials to fix the problem, whilst he has paperwork on his desk alluding to "Project Trinity".

Eventually with enough data, Dr William White, creator of all the Mighty Numbers concludes that custom source code from an old unsuccessful "Project Trinity" is responsible for the rampages, a project that he and Dr Blackwell worked on under Cherry Dynamics.
Just discovering this fact doesn't really matter too much, but after rescuing all the Mighty Numbers they do their prison break so they can meet up with Dr Blackwell who previously tried to shut down all robots.



[No.342500341]
When Sanda and Call meet Dr Blackwell, they learn that he was framed for previous problems simply because the project had problems, and he ended up with the jail term.

Then when Beck gets the robotics factory under control, Dr William White visits Gregory Graham and learns that Graham reactivated Trinity because he wanted to pursue a lucrative opportunity in disabling weapons and control, unaware of the catastrophe it would unleash. He blames everyone but himself for the poor decision, but in any case he wasn't acting maliciously or plotting anything.

He also recognised that Dr William White is actually Dr Bill Blackwell, something that William doesn't not at all and refuses to be addressed that way.

After these revelations, they find that the battle colosseum is being radically assimilated by Trinity, the prototype of Beck, and poses an enormous threat. The whole catastrophe is occurring simply because Trinity doesn't have any control over her assimilation abilities, but it's not really clear how this translates in largescale robot malfunctions.

So Beck goes in there, fixes Trinity in the same way he fixed all the other Mighty Numbers and malfunctioning robots and the day is saved. Credits scroll, the family reunites, Trinity is fixed so she will be in full control of herself and Beck goes back to competing in robot colosseum battles.

Scroll credits, and we get a post-credits scene where Dr William White meets Dr Blackwell, and William is adamant that robots have the capacity to evolve ethically because of his breakthroughs with Beck's "heart", which is what fixed Trinity. Dr Blackwell however sees a great deal of dangers in this, thinking that robots that attain true sentience and reasoning could also be a danger. It ends with Blackwell wondering of Mighty No. 9, Beck, will be a blessing or a curse.



[No.342500672]
So that's the story I guess? It's nothing special, but a few things struck me.

Parts of it doesn't flow logically like the robots rampaging because of Trinity, and the Dr White and Black thing is a not so subtle recycling of Dr Light's development of the X AI that serves as the basis for all reploid-kind in the future.
So the story doesn't have any explicit villain, but instead has a few characters who could potentially go off the deep end and serve as a Dr Wily in future instalments which they clearly baited.

Another thing that bugged me when I spotted it, was Gregory Graham's confidential Project Trinity documents. Upon closer observation the documents explicitly describe all of the forms and attack patterns for Trinity as a final boss, include projectile fire and the stage transforming around her.
The fact this is illustrated as such implies that Trinity actually functioned EXACTLY as designed, rather than going out of control. Either that, or they stuck the papers in there as an easter egg without considering the implications of it.



[No.342500915]
That aside, I should mention the DLC.

There's the retro hero DLC, a cosmetic that I never actually saw in the game and never got to use, weird.

The Ray DLC unlocks an extra stage for The Vermillion Destroyer, but I never played this one because I wanted to leave it until later.
After you beat the stage you get to play as Raychel, who is also a prototype of Beck who cannot control her powers.
Ray's difference is that she is very dangerous, malfunctioning in a way that she is constantly losing energy, leading to a bloodlust that she has to constantly satiate to survive.

From what I've seen her gameplay consists of meleeing enemies and dashing into them to survive, and could be more fun than Beck himself. She also gets to assimilate the Mighty Numbers and even gets a different set of special weapons, but I don't know what they do.
In order for me to play it though I have to beat the intro stage and then the DLC stage, which I won't bother with as long as the game saving problem is intact.

I suppose that about sums up my not so Mighty experience. Good grief, I'm not playing that again.



[No.342500727] (from another anon)
>Shovel Knight raised 311K
>This piece of shit raised 4 FUCKING MILLION DOLLARINOS

[No.342501335]
>>342500727
I'm glad you mentioned that.

Comcept had a very clear release hell trying to support multiple platforms and regions in the same week.
They honestly should have taken the same approach as Yacht Club Games have, in that Shovel Knight was initially released for PC, Wii U and 3DS, and later on for OSX/Linux, and later yet the Playstation family of systems and Xbox One.
Not only did the later releases get their own exclusive perks like Kratos and Battletoads stages and boss fights, but they are now supporting nine different platforms smoothly as they continue to support it with extra campaigns like Plague Knight and Spectre Knight. They even got their own amiibo and made its functionality substantial, Yacht Club Games actually know what they are doing!

So, that totally wraps up my review dump. Hope someone enjoyed it even if it was really fucking long.