Top 10 Video Games of 2022

Mighty No. 9 Review

You may remember years back when the creator of Mega Man, Keiji Inafune left Capcom. Which lead to many Mega Man projects being cancelled such as the long awaited Mega Man Legends 3, Mega Man Universe and a Mega Man first person shooter developed by Retro Studios. So this left many fans deprived of Mega Man. While we did get Mega Man in Super Smash Bros for Wii U and 3DS but we were craving for a new traditional Mega Man game. So Keiji Inafune and developer Comcept started a Kickstarter to help fund a spiritual successor to the Blue Bomber in the form of Mighty No. 9. Which got fully funded within 24 hours. Showing a huge amount of support from fans worldwide. But leading to it's release there were delay after delay. Which got fans wondering if this game is finally gonna get released. But then in 2016, Mighty No. 9 was finally released on all home consoles and PC. There were plans for 3DS and PS Vita versions but they were presumably cancelled. Then when the game came out it was... Very disappointing to say the least. And for whatever reason, Sony gave this out for free in March of 2018 for Playstation Plus subscribers. And recently I completed it so here's my review of Mighty No. 9.

Story

In the year 2099, a scientist named Dr. White created 9 robot siblings known as the “Mighty Numbers”, who were the most popular and powerful team of robots in the government sponsored public robot battle competition known as the Battle Colosseum. But, during one competition there was a sudden act of cyber terror, infecting them with a computer virus causing them to become crazed and rampant. The crazed siblings took control of various key facilities and utilities. The virus continued to spread to all the robots of the world and it is now up to the lone Mighty No.9 “Beck”, who remains unaffected by the virus.  Beck, who had always been the weakest link on the team, was now entrusted with the future of all humanity. So right off the bat the story is recycled straight out of Mega Man and I'll be comparing this to Mega Man throughout this review. I know this supposed to be spiritual successor and all but some originality would've been appreciated. And as you progress through the game the story just feels even more lazy and recycled with very little character development. In fact, the whole robot virus plot with one of the scientists Dr. Blackwell being blamed for the robot attacks is very similiar to Mega Man 9's story. Except here they just changed a few thing in a attempt to make the story feel more "original" but failed miserably.

Gameplay

The game itself plays very similiar to Mega Man. You move around in a 2D perpective, shoot enemies and fight bosses to gain their abilities. However when you shoot an enemy a few times they'll turn a certain colour and dashing into them will let you assimilate them giving you temporary power ups. This may sound good but the difficulty is very unbalanced at times with cheap enemy placements which can lead to many cheap deaths. And while you do get health items known as Xcellerators which you can activate anytime to recover health. But there's two problems with this, you can lose them if you die and they can't be transferred to other levels. Which is complete bullshit because in Mega Man when you get an E-Tank for your inventory it's yours to keep for as long as you want. But here, you can't! Which really dosen't help with all the unexpected difficulty spikes and stuff that the game expects you to do. 

Graphics

While the designs of the characters look neat but they show next to no emotion and usually have the same facial expressions throughout the whole game. Graphically this game looks dull especially on PS4 and the explosion effects look something out of a PS2 game. On PS3 it looks jaggy as fuck and the framerate is even worse. On PS4 it tries to run at 60fps but at points when there's loads of explosions it drops drastically to about 12 frames which is unacceptable for a PS4 game. PS3 version runs at 30fps but I've only played the first stage of that version so I can only imagine how bad the framedrops will be in later levels. And yet this game had $4,000,000 donated to it's kickstarter. Let that sink in, this game had a $4,000,000 budget and this was the finished result. This could've looked FAR better but failed big time.

Sound

Music sounds like very Mega Man-esque and the game has the option to switch over to an 8-Bit rendition of it's soundtrack. However the soundtrack is mostly forgettable and nowhere near as memorable as the tunes from the Mega Man series. Also dosen't help with fact that the audio balance is way off. Even with the music volume up to max the music comes off not as loud compared to the sound effects. The English voice acting is subpar at best as most of the main characters sound bored putting in very little emotion or effort. And Beck is voiced by Yuri Lowenthal! Who has done many great roles in the past. Including Sasuke Uchiha from Naruto. Also Steve Blum voices one the Mighty Numbers and is the one voice actor who put any effort into his role but dosen't get used nearly as much as the others. Haven't checked out the Japanese voices yet but I can only assume they're better than the English ones.

Final Verdict

This game had SO MUCH promise to it. It could've been great. It could've started it's own franchise.  But in the end, came off as a pale imitation of Mega Man. With it's recycled ideas, dull presentation and decent but flawed gameplay, Mighty No. 9 failed to meet expectations and is nothing more than a disappointingly adverage game that tried too hard to be like it's spiritual predecessor. But hey, It's better than nothing! *sighs*...

 ...Just wait for Mega Man 11 to come out.

Final score: 4.5 out of 10

Thank you all for reading and I'll see you all next time!

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