Although there are innumerable times where AAA has defeated indie games in the rat race, there was one particular time where the failure was so great, it caught the eye of countless among the gaming community. Any retrogamer will tell you about Mega Man, released in 1987, and a great majority will tell you which one is their favorite, whether it be part of the original series of games or part of the Mega Man X series. Both parts of the franchise were legendary among gamers.
Mega Man 2 is very popularly known as the favorite among the original series, while the first Mega Man X is held as the king of the second. Whatever side of the franchise they stand on, both factions will tell you that they were wholly disappointed by the crowd funded passion project known as Mighty No. 9. Keiji Inafune had worked on the original Mega Man, and since Capcom hadn’t released a new Mega Man for several years (due to extreme franchise fatigue), he decided to take it upon himself to create what he called a spiritual successor.
The game was fully funded within just a couple of days and, by the end it had reached around three million dollars, several times more than it was expected to reach. This is where a great deal of mystery enters into the fray. Despite infinitely more money than they could have ever needed, the scene became quite bleak. Though fans were still on the hype train with beautiful gameplay still frames, promising kickstarter prizes and a game mirroring the greatness of the blue bot himself, they curbed their doubts. However, for several reasons unknown to the public, the game was met with numerous delays. Many questioned how they could be losing so much time with all of the budget they could ever want and plenty of time between the start of its production to its intended release. Still! They thundered ahead and readied themselves for the release!
The fans were stomped with absolute disappointment. The graphics were not nearly as good as they initially looked in the original press release, the gameplay had very questionable extra, unneeded content, the voice acting rivalled Mega Man 8 for how terrible and stilted it was, and the story intermixed with constant interrupting character dialog was so very frustrating when you were trying to concentrate on playing the game!
Questions began flying at Inafune at a horribly extensive rate! His gross mismanagement of the game’s content and quality was called into question multiple times and their reaction to these questions boiled down to: At least you got a game. Needless to say, contributors to the funding were not happy, and those old school Mega Man fans were less than impressed with the game’s content. Mighty Number 9 reached the status as one of the Worst Games of 2016 across the internet.
It later came to light that the team who were developing Mighty Number 9 were met with problems of having promised too much during the compaign to raise money. They saw that the ports they promised for the game were getting into ridiculous amounts, as many consoles were available at the time. They promised both a PS3 and PS4 iteration of the game on top of handheld versions. Anyone will tell you that you cannot put PS4 graphics onto the PS3, so you had to go with the lowest common denominator.
So, now your graphics are all shot, and you still have so little time to port the game onto every single system to meet deadlines, what do you do? Give the earlier consoles a raincheck, of course! Everyone loves to hear "we'll do it later" when you've already delayed it so many times. They were forced to release the game on limited amounts of consoles while porting it to the earlier consoles at a later date.
Now, let’s be honest. It really was not a terrible game when you stand back and look at the forest for the trees. It worked, it was challenging, and the level design wasn’t terrible. Sure, some of the bosses were cheap and cringe inducing in their tactics and while the story is abysmal, it still served its purpose for the most part. The reason the game failed in a massive cloud of hatred was because it tried to build itself as a return of a beloved franchise in the form of a fan requested game. It had all of the makings of a great game, but for one reason or another completely missed the mark.
It also did not help that they were already counting this as a success once they saw the millions that they were raking in. Apparently, they found out that they could pocket some of the funds for another project, and someone thought it would be a good idea to start talking about Inafune's other game he's got going. Given that this was in the midst of some rather heated fans waiting for a big title, you can imagine that people were not amused.
AAA titles have had their failures in the past, and many of them failed harder than Mega Man’s would-be successor. The problem is that he built this up entirely too much. With expectations through the roof, too many things were going wrong. This should serve as a lesson on par with Icarus and the burned wings, but let’s face it, if they can build you up to their hype, development companies are going to do it. Inafune could have won big with this title but failed to pull it off in the end.
However, once again, at least we have our silver lining. Evidently Capcom caught onto Mighty Number 9’s kickstarter success and decided that they would release their own game and do it proper this time. Mega Man 11 released late in the year 2018 and it was a fairly decent game that pulled some pretty good numbers. Inafune may have wasted multiple millions of dollars on failure, but at least his failure managed to cause another AAA win.
Wait, what am I saying?
