Long-form, hyper-specific video game analysis videos are my favorite videos.

"He's a businessman, not a creator." ~ Hideki "Do you eat shit?" Kamiya

26:03 Did you forget about the Remote Cannon, the thing that can one-shot almost any enemy and has an AOE the size of Australia? Speedruns of the game use it almost exclusively because of how astronomically broken it is vs. mobs.

My biggest complaint about the game is the graphics. Not just because the game is ugly, but because the screen is always so cluttered with small, brightly-colored moving objects that I can't see what I'm doing half the time.

falling elevator done right idea: have the elevator begin to shake, and have it fall piece-by-piece starting from the left going towards the right to encourage the player to quickly find a way out.

It failed to make the bad guys cry like an anime fan on prom night. That's what went wrong.

If you think about it, the bosses helping Beck in stages is kinda neat. It's actually heartwarming! But ture, they could've handled it in a way that didn't blow the boss' weakness.

i didn't even know we had an alt-fire

It's funny because mighty no. 9 does exactly what ego raptor said not do do in terms of telling the player what to do (or lack there of rather). It's even more ironic because they plastered a drawing of him in one of the levels too lol.

"Gah, if only I could see the future! I wouldn't have played this game..." Are we not going to discuss the genius that is that line?

jumping jumping barrier

i think my favorite part of this is you can clearly see this man's strife about discussing this game for so long, in the sense that around the 4th video he's begun adding more goofs and memes and jokes but started out very serious and insightful. I love it.

"Here's a hint: It's broken as fAnyway,"

i'll have two number 9's a number 9 large a number 6 with extra dip,a number 7 two number 45 one with cheese and a large soda

I can still go back to the campaign page for MN9 and get excited by it. Then I remember the game came out and I've played it. The campaign made the game seem like it would have more of a strategic element to it with stuff like how absorbed energy could be unleashed at will, and transformations would have more utility than being just another weapon. Somewhere along the way, it feels like they completely changed the design philosophy and tried to make the game more score-oriented with a focus on speed - completing a level faster gets you a higher score; quickly absorbing an enemy gets you a higher percentage, which gets you a higher score; getting multiple 100% absorptions gets you a higher combo, which gets you a higher score; you can get Quick Clear and Sprinter score bonuses for quickly getting through enemy gauntlets and platforming sections. It even extends to the gameplay - absorbed energy activates automatically, save for the sub tanks, and even they can be activated with the press of a button without going into a menu; weapons are selected in realtime without going into a menu (although you still have to press a button to activate it which is slower than it was in Mega Man X, but it's probably to account for the animation and model change during transformations since it's not as easy as a simple palette swap); the level select tells you if you have the weapon needed for that stage's boss so you don't have to deal with figuring it out for yourself; only one weapon is of significance in each stage (like Bat's weapon in the Mine stage - Mic is weak against it, rocks can be blown up by it, Bat shows up in the middle of the stage to assist - compare to Morph Moth's stage in MMX2 where Morph Moth is weak to Flame Stag's weapon, but you can find a secret upgrade using Wheel Gator's weapon); revisiting stages is pointless because lives and sub tanks get reset after each stage. I still want that game concept they showed in the campaign. Let me turn into a tank to cross spikes and get an upgrade. Let me decide on my own when I want to activate my blaster upgrade. Let me move blocks into position to access an alternate path. Let me have a double jump. Let me grab and remove enemy shields. Let me use an attack that blasts an entire screen of enemies at once. That all sounds fun.

Can you skip the 4 HOUR credits?

Fun Fact: Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus has sold more on Steam than Mighty No. 9

*Massive No. 2

I guess we know why Capcom doesnt deal with him anymore

Superbly deconstructed! I love when a creative solution is offered!

I hate the dash mechanic to kill enemies. That ruined the game for me. It's supposed to be run and gun. Not gun then stop before you accidentally kill the guy, the dash before it's too late. Just a bad gameplay feature imo

should have been a different boss to appear in the stage than the bosses weakness. that would tell you the boss ISNT weak to that weapon, but thats a much smaller hint

It's like giving your dog a treat then punishing him when he eats it.

"It's almost as if mechanics and game design were done by two different teams"......but.....they were done by two different teams.

You guys seriously know your shit. When I first played it, Although I went into it wanting to hate it, I thought it was good, though not Jesus Christ walking on the water like everyone originally hyped it up to be. All the criticisms toward the game itself I heard were "it's average" and "it's mediocre". You guys, however, really went above and beyond in your analysis of this game. I would love it if you did more videos like these. Your let's plays are fun, but it'd be a lot cooler if you'd go into the nitty gritty like this one.

Watching this made me realize that even I wanna be the guy, a game meant to be a big joke played on the player, is in theory less frustrating than this. In games like IWBTG, 1001 spikes and Super Meat Boy (listed in order on how refined their game design is) the game is very good at telling you 3 simple rules right away 1.-You die in one hit 2.-Shit happens, never get complacent, ever. The whole game is filled with nasty, hard to avoid deaths you must constantly be on your guard for.. 3.-Keep moving,dont hesitate too much once you got the pattern down Not to mention the two details that make all the difference: infinite lives(or clever tricks to get infinite lives), and quick respawns on the level or the section of the level you died in, so you can pretty much try over and over and get good at it, rather than going all the way back once you run out of lives and having to sit through dialog and cutscenes all over again in the process. The sooner the player can retry a difficult , the less frustrating it can be. Instant death is frustrating when the game in question doesnt set it up as a basic rule of the game and makes it its most common hazard, you have a life bar but you feel like it doesnt even matter. This is why a game like Contra has good game design and a game like this has bad game design when it comes to instant-death.

When topspin is more useful than half the weapons on your game you know you did something wrong

its like they didnt spent any of the money they got on play testing.

Wow, I had heard about the Kickstarter debacle for this game but I didn't know just how straight up *bad* the game actually is from a design perspective. It's not just the left hand not talking to the right, it's like the hands literally had a vendetta with each other and were trying to sabotage one another.

Awesome content! I subscribed in the Analysis channel and will watch all the previous videos! Thank you!

One game with fun alternate weapons is Specter of Torment. The Chronos Coin slows hazards and enemies, the Barrier Lantern absorbs projectiles, the Dread Talon bypasses armor, and so on.

Just found this video in my Recommends, and immediately got sucked in. I respect how much effort you put into breaking down each element of gameplay, and I enjoyed watching it. I look forward to exploring more of your channel's content now that I've come across it

There should be an entire video dedicated to why Cryo's 'Batman and Robin' ice puns were a bad flipping idea to include.

'with all due caution'

Very enlightening and fun video, this taught me quite a few things to look out for when designing a game as well as common sense. Good video!

Thumbs up for that opening statement! I love humor, and you, sir, got me with it. Also enjoyed your analysis and critique, as always. All the best!

Let's say this together: I HATE DR. WHITE FROM MIGHTY NO. NINE.

I'd improve the dash mechanic by auto-dashing to the nearest mob with the lowest health in an area and damaging it after dashing trough the first mob. If the hit would weaken the mob, the player would instead destroy/assimilate it and chain to another mob nearby. This dash is biased toward the direction the player was going with the initial dash. This provides an alternate way to transverse trough the stage if there are enough weak mobs in the path.

Um, your game theory is amazing. Subscribed!

You spot very tiny little details across the game. I learned a lot from these. Thank you!

What the hell went wrong? EVERYTHING! And because you did not see this, this game should: BURN TO THE GROUUUUND! BURN TO THE BURN TO THE! BURN! BURN BURN! BURN TO THE BUUUURN! BUUUUURN! BURN TO THE GR! BURN! BURN! BURN! BURN THE GRO...BURN!

for me the every normal Enemy in the level was no challenge at all once i got Battalion's Weapon wich was one of the first Weapon i got in the game. It does so much damage that most enemy's were Dashable after at least 2 hits, the blast range is huge and the fact that dashing into the enemy means that i get Ammo back means that it never runs out for me... I miss the part where you have to be careful with your Ammo like in Megaman...

5:42 - "Put another way, those developers trust their game enough to let it speak for itself." I had this overwhelming feeling the whole time I was playing Mighty Number 9 that it wasn't made for us MegaMan fans, but rather it was made for new people who have no idea what MegaMan is or what it's like.

A tiny problem with the idea of not explicitly tutorializing basic gameplay, and I do entirely agree with you on it, is that I have seen plenty of people who just cannot manage to press all the controller buttons to find out what works. We've become far too used to having every single button taught to us, and now a lot of people just never experiment. They'll come to a gap, not know how to dash, not think to LEARN how to dash, throw down the controller and blame the game.

That ninja gaiden clip with the girl made me laugh a bit.

I think that the dash and chain system would work better for 2D/side scrolling beat 'em ups. Staying close to enemies is already a part of genre, so why not dashing dashing at enemies, but there are some things to improve on it: Dashing through multiple enemies; again, chaining combos is a staple of beat 'em ups so chain dashing multiple enemies wouldn't seem out of place. Varied dashes; instead of only having one type of dash, why not multiple types of dashing, like a shoulder, a punch dash, a kick dash and a knee dash just to name a few, it would prevent things from getting tedious, and it can give more combo. Invulnerability: As you dash, you're invulnerable to damage, it's mainly to get you out of a tight spot in boss battles.

Funnily enough, the idea of bouncing back on each dash mentioned in the first part of the video is exactly what Yacht Club did for Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment and it turned out fantastic because enemies were placed well enough to capitalize on it. Specter Knight was highly mobile and capable of dodging things easily because the design stayed consistent and thus, allowed you to know exactly how you would move at a given time.

Loved the video!

What do you think about megaman 11?

I'll have 2 mighty number 9's...

Duck dash! Whoo-ooh! Unclear hitbox? Instant death? Just duck dash! Whoo-ooh!

Getting back to this video, at 45:10, to be fair, it is partly telegraphed, but they could have done better by adding shadows also on the ground to indicate the falling blocks so that you have two things telegraphing, with one of them also not pulling away from the main action below. Another thing they can do is, since he doesn't move while the attack is happening, the shockwave could be visualized going upward to help clue the player to look up for the telegraph.

The worst part is that there’s a game called Fallen Knight which is basically mighty number nine but good

Donald Duck dash.

this is unbelievable professional work. wow.

and the final slap in the face, in the form of the boxes and booklets has just been delivered

MN9 was such a disappointment. I grew up addicted to the NES Mega Man games and I've followed the series and spinoffs ever since. I was so excited to have Inafune return to the Mega Man formula with an interesting twist. The Azure Striker Gunvolt series is so much better - it's quite a worthy spiritual successor to the Zero games.

And you didn't even have to spend time on graphics quality or voice-acting. Impressive.

BTW, at around the 27 minute mark you say the charge slide is from Megaman 6, but it's from 5. The rest of the video was very well done! Good job! :)

Brandishes weapon also deflects projectiles and can turn off the hit boxes of the final bosses attacks

26:30 Um... Charge Kick is Megaman 5, not 6. ^^;

Let's be real, hell itself went wrong when Mighty No. 9 was released.

Great work.

I've played MN9 all the way through twice now, and I had no idea Alt Attack even existed. So... how do you do the jump back and shoot thingy, exactly? Also, I had no idea that absorbing certain enemies (ones that glow red, I'm guessing?) gave you the piercing shot. It was just something I had sometimes, far as I could tell.

"I've seen this already." *checks description * "Oh."

I backed this game and absolutely hated it. It felt like every mechanic in the game was meant to frustrate and annoy me. Nothing made sense. The dash-absorb mechanic was the worst of it. I just wanted to blow things up.

I love the bit where the clearly-not-getting-enough-director-input voice actor read the name Mic (as in Microphone) as "Mick".

The pseudo E-tank thing is what really gets me. I honestly had no idea the game had a version of e-tanks until I got to the last stage, since the game doesn't make acquisition notable. I mean, Megaman games had a big tank with an E on them that made all the hurts go away when used, and the X games had easily identifiable artwork for the sub-tanks. I had the feeling that whoever made the call on that one really hated E/sub-tanks or something. Or made their existence obscure for the purpose of making the game "harder". And agreed, they were implemented horribly.

Holy shit 1 hour of content yet you guys don't talk about how they never put out the 3DS/Vita version and how backers still haven't gotten physical rewards?

Kenji Inafune. You have disappointed me

I'm almost two years late coming into this but I wanna say I loved the analysis of the game. Towards the beginning you mentioned INTI creates and the Azure Striker Gunvolt series, another MegaMan spiritual successor. I'm not sure if you know but they released a game called Mighty Gunvolt Burst that has Beck as one of the main characters in a game design that I think does almost everything right that Mighty No.9 did wrong. No idea if you ever played it before but I'd love to see thoughts on how these mechanics and Beck are used in a game made by a different team and generally much better that exists in the same genre. No idea if you'll see this or not but thought I'd at the very least mention it just in case

From 5-5:49, you're right about this. You figure out how people will experiment with things and find it so that after a bit of thinking they could solve issues they previously had problems on

You want to know my experience with it? I had next to no problems with it. Sure, the controls were kind of difficult to get a handle on, the graphics weren't that great, some things I hardly ever used unless I had to use them, but... it wasn't any harder than playing any of the Mega Man games I've played. I died about just as many times, there's some Spark Mandrill Syndrome thrown in for good measure, and I had about as much fun playing X, X2, X3, or X4. Maybe not as much fun as playing Z, but that's besides the point. I don't really understand the complaint behind "taking a player out of the game". I just read the tips, did the challenges, and felt no overall change in regards to how I approached the game. It's a game, after all, so learning the rules of it isn't something that seems too jarring to me, even if it's something that "flows" wrong. I didn't have much of a problem with AcXelerating, either. I just figured "Okay, so dashing into enemies makes me more powerful because Mighty No. 9 has the ability to absorb Xels from weakened enemies by doing so. Seems practical in a future with 52 States", and I never had a problem with it outside of dashing normally, only to hit a monster, get massive knockback, and accidentally fall into a pit or malfunctioning purification equipment (read as: spikes). As for crate-carrying robots coming from the foreground and get hit? I adapt and I dodge them the next time. As for the boss weapons that I'll never have to use? Cryosphere and Dynatron were pretty useful, the former for being able to freeze most enemies in place and provide a longer window of time to dash into them, and the latter for being able to absorb enemies without having to dash into them. I didn't really have a problem with the bosses' weaknesses being splayed out, either. I actually found it extremely helpful, where instead of going through a bunch of pain and suffering, only to find out you can do almost nothing to a boss, you are instead given the answer to save you the relief. I mean, let's be honest with ourselves, even with Seismic, was Brandish really that much easier? In my experience, though, this is what I do against him: Hit him with Seismic when he's prone to damage (jump if and when you can) until he loses his swords. Then, use Cryosphere. Done deal. The + is indicative of a reticle, and while I'm not sure what the three lines mean, if I had to take a wild guess on the air weapon, I'd imagine that the H, which is a symbol used to denote helipads, represents the helicopter blades you shoot out, which comes from the Boss that is designed like a helicopter... how was that hard to follow? There are two other things that Seismic can do. It can turn around and jump. Uh... Call having no personality was on purpose. It's explained in-game that the Mighty Numbers (and other robots created by Dr. White) are created with the purpose of giving them "hearts". So having next to no personality and talking like what a robot typically sounds like makes sense. And the person who "designed" that elevator was Trinity. That entire level is basically designed to kill Beck at every opportunity, so whether he dies along the way or he dies at her hands (in which he'll be assimilated in both circumstances) is her doing. About that "unavoidable damage" you're talking about. Since Beck can dash ad infinitum, and there's a space just big enough for him to pass through, do you know how to easily avoid getting hit again? Go right. I've never had to use the power up to get passed the barrels. I just used Battalion to destroy it. ... They look different, but do you know what else they look like? Glowing yellow gaps that almost certainly involve hanging off them. As for the other "unavoidable attack", since he isn't attacking you while performing that attack, it stands to reason that you have enough time to look up, see where the blocks aren't gonna fall (denoted by the lack of dust clouds), and go there. And what he said was "shot blanks", not... what it sounded like. *Sigh...* Is it weird that the only reason I played this game was to get the bad taste out of my mouth from reading a bad Mega Man fanfic, and I had a more enjoyable time taking two months to complete it and the Vermillion Destroyer DLC? But I guess this video was pretty in-depth, all things considered.

And rip 3ds port

I do have to say, even though the bosses helping you in levels is a huge game design flaw, it’s extremely cute from a story perspective. I like the idea that after helping your friends they help you in stages afterwards. Maybe it could have been solved if you could choose which mighty number to help you in the level without knowing what the weakness is? I mean, I’m sure that has flaws in itself, but I think it’s a good compromise.

Megaman must be disappointed passing the torch to him...

best 7 sec into. k bye

Why did the game use chiptune music but modeled graphics? That makes no sense.

so, how does mighty gunvolt burst hold up? I'd never played mighty no. 9 when I played mighty gunvolt burst, so I didn't even realize they were as connected as they are until much later. since then I've heard a lot of people saying "this is basically the game mighty no. 9 should have been", so I'm curious

About duck dash. On the release version of the game, the hint for duck dash wouldn't appear until AFTER you had to duck dash.

This is a fantastic analysis. I just want to point out I don't think using the bubbles on the alien in Mega Man 2 is beyond reason, the alien was a hologram and water>electronics. (There's is a little projector or something floating around the room after you beat the alien so you aren't just attacking a hologram.)

Saw this game at GameStop for 10 bucks today. Still too much, you should be paying me to play this atrocity.

In the defense of the elevator, it wasn't an actual elevator or an elevator shaft. It was constructed by Trinity. The entire area was warped, constructed and controlled by Trinity through Xel's she assimilated from other robots

If you want something similar to the NES Megaman games, you can always give Legend of the Dark Witch a try. It might have some elements of Gradius as well (By some elements, I mean just the upgrade system), but I think it's the closest thing we have to a spiritual successor to Megaman

For a game that tries to be deep with story, it has very few memorable characters.

one of the worst parts of mighty number 9 for me was the confusing art design. with platformers like this, the background should always look duller or darker that the foreground to create contrast. this game throws that straight out the window so the screen is always cluttered and I can't tell what the fuck is going on.

I want more 50 minute long video game reviews.

it is crazy that this is 9 videos compiled to 1 super vid

is this just a compilation of all the MN9 videos or is this something new?

You never even mentioned the graphics and art direction... Which are absolutely awful... Especially disappointing, when you consider that the primary Kickstarter art concepts were actually super good...

Great video.

Game Soup, did you play the Ray DLC? Any thoughts about it? I found it to be a better game than using Beck.

Now People know why Capcom part way with Inafune

16:39 that's an incredibly dumb mechanic. sounds like it was poorly implemented, too. almost seems like inafune was trying too hard to "reinvent" megaman

I love these videos. I feel like this game was designed with a melee based character in mind, and I think that with some different abilities and better level design this game could have been something fresh and interesting.

Does the tutorial have to teach everything in the beginning? Would slowly teaching the players mechanics as they appear throughout the game also be a viable option? I'm simply afraid of front loading information. Thanks

I didn't spend a penny on this game (I just couldn't afford it at the time) and I am still disappointed. :(

Ok I agree with you on everything except one point - it seems pretty arbitrary to me that you would choose to look at the game telling you the boss weaknesses as a bad thing. You complain about trial and error gameplay everywhere else, it seems to me like this would be a modern improvement, no? How is slogging through an entire level on a hunch that MAYBE this newly acquired weapon MIGHT be good against the boss, only to discover you were wrong and potentially Game Over a rewarding experience? While I agree that it can be fun to guess, the very fact that many bosses in past Megaman games had arbitrary or irrational weaknesses is a serious point against both them and the whole trial and error system. Mighty No. 9 is terrible on many many fronts, but for my money the way it handles the weapon rock-paper-scissor system is an improvement on the old Megamans.

What soundtrack was playing during 2:29? Need to know X.x

Can you do Gunvolt, I am curious about how you would feel about that game.