Should you be worried about the delay?
Where is Mighty No. 9? You should be banging your head against its brick wall of difficulty spikes and moaning on Reddit about how it is or isn’t better than how you remember Mega Man by now. But you aren’t, and we weren’t really sure why. So we went straight to the source, to producer Keiji Inafune himself to get a little more info on the delayed platformer.
“The game itself is totally finished, there’s nothing else that we as Comcept would be doing with it,” reveals Inafune through a translator, the duo picking their words carefully in order to best explain the situation. “The reason has really been bugs and final bug-fixing, and it was a hard decision to take but we thought by fixing the bugs we would be able to deliver something really perfect, and that’s what we wanted to do.
“Because Mighty No. 9 is a game we want to release on all eight platforms at one time, it means that even if there is a bug on only one platform, it really affects all of them, and that’s something that’s very specifically behind [the delay] for Mighty No. 9,” adds Inafune, though he stopped short of suggesting which platform was causing the delay and we in turn stopped short of suggesting he should sack the lot of them off and make it an Xbox exclusive, like ReCore, to avoid the issue entirely.
Still, that doesn’t help the legions of fans and Kickstarter backers that had been patiently awaiting Mighty No. 9’s proposed September release with baited breath. For what it’s worth, Inafune assures fans that it wasn’t an easy decision, and one done in service of the gamers that have supported him over the course of its twoyear development.
“Many fans are unhappy that it’s going to be later now. Talking with Deep Silver, we came to the decision to make it not just really good, but really perfect,” he says. “It’s better to wait this [extra] time to really achieve that, because it’s something we did for the fans initially, so we want to have a really perfect game. So there may be considerations on the publisher’s side, more economic considerations, [to ship a title] even if there are bugs, but in this case we don’t want to do it, we want to deliver something splendid.”
The famed developer – noted for his work on Mega Man, Onimusha, Lost Planet, and Dead Rising – looks tired as we speak with him. Perhaps he was exacerbated by the deluge of Mighty No. 9 delay queries he’s received throughout the day, but he didn’t want to change the subject. In fact, he was only eager to talk about the title that’s making him draw fond parallels to the earliest days of a career that spans almost three decades.
“It’s certainly something that really feels nostalgic to me doing development with a small team on a small scale. It means also that it is totally different from developing a major title with a huge team of 300 people or something. It really means that I’m much more involved, I’m much more in a position where I can go deep into the whole development, and have my own ideas and thoughts in there much more than on a big-scale development.”
That involvement is leading towards us getting a solid title with a lot of potential. We last got our hands all over Mighty No. 9 a few months ago and we were pleasantly surprised by what we found: a game that’s heavily inspired by the past, but doesn’t necessarily feel beholden to. That makes Mighty No. 9 feel retro in appeal but modern in its execution, and we’re pretty happy Deep Silver has given Comcept the time to make it as perfect as it possibly can. Inafune has big expectations for his return to indie development, and it sounds like this won’t be the last time we see Beck in action. “The idea would of course be to develop it further… to make it bigger. We would like to do anime, films,” he says, adding with a knowing smile, “if it works!” JOSH WEST