14 DAY TRIAL // Our Incoming 2015 series focuses on the most important game launches of the next 12 months, and next up we talk about Mighty No. 9, Keiji Inafune's long-awaited spiritual successor to Mega Man.
What we know
Mega Man is one of the most iconic and popular franchises of Nintendo's heyday, and many gamers would like to revisit precious memories from a while back with a more contemporary veneer.
Inafune's crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter was one of the great success stories of the surge of independent development, the project managing to amass an impressive $4 / €3.3 million in pledges.
The game has been in the works ever since, due out for almost every platform imaginable, and sparking a lot of interest and hope. Granted, the whole affair was not spared the drama and controversy, but hopefully that is all in the past.
Some backers of the project reported that they were treated poorly and that they were disillusioned by the project's evolution, so the game apparently has a lot more to prove than initially thought.
Mighty No. 9 puts players in the shoes of an android on a quest to battle eight other similar life forms and then take down a big bad boss, promising to offer the same kind of old-school action platforming gameplay that everyone remembers so fondly.
Why it matters
The game has been a long time in the making, and designer Keiji Inafune has recently mentioned that the actual work on the game is done, with all remaining before launch having to do with porting and marketing.
Back when Mega Man was one of the top dogs in gaming, platformers were the equivalent of modern-day third-person action-adventure video games, the go-to genre when making pretty much anything.
Nowadays it's rare to see 2D platformers gain any mainstream traction, and Mighty No. 9 is definitely one of the titles that could pull this off.
Granted, there have been many platformers getting attention lately, but most of them only appeal to a limited, hardcore crowd. Mighty No. 9 has the potential to reach a much wider audience than that.
The game is being made by Comcept and Inti Creates, and both companies are struggling to craft an experience that stays true to the original vision.
The teams' aim is to offer a new generation of gamers the same kind of fond memories they have from their youth, something for today's children to enjoy and appreciate, that at the same time also appeals to older, more dedicated gamers.
Mighty No. 9 is scheduled to come out in April 2015, headed to the PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Windows PC, Mac OS X, Linux, Nintendo 3DS and Nintendo Wii U platforms.
