Mighty No. 9 - Retro-Held (DLC)

My first impression of Mighty No. 9 was that it genuinely wants to be a good game. The core loop has real bones: you weaken robotic enemies with your cannon, wait for them to flash as a sign they're disabled, then dash through them to absorb their Xel and trigger temporary boosts to power or speed. On paper that dash-absorb rhythm rewards aggression and keeps the pace snappy. In motion, for brief stretches, it does exactly that. Chaining runs through a corridor full of softened enemies feels close to what the marketing promised. The problem is that almost everything surrounding that one mechanic is rough enough to sand paint off a wall. The eight main stages can be tackled in any order, a classic Mega Man structure that should feel liberating. In practice the level design ranges from serviceable to actively hostile, leaning hard on instant-death spikes, cramped enemy swarms, and a lives system that sends you back to the beginning of a full stage when you run out. Hitboxes on boss attacks are notoriously unclear, a real issue when fire-type boss Pyrogen fires explosive waves with edges that are nearly impossible to read visually. The 2.5D art style, built on an aging engine, makes interactive objects blend into backgrounds and leaves explosion effects looking more like abstract smears than actual fire. The game also has a baffling relationship with its own tutorial: basic movement gets over-explained in unskippable pop-ups, while actually important mechanics like weapon alt-functions, the AcXel Recover system, and Beck's stored healing items are buried in pause menus or never mentioned at all. Beck can air-dash as many times as you can press the button in sequence, which is genuinely fun to exploit once you discover it, but the game barely hints it exists. There are pockets of enjoyment for players willing to grind past the friction. The optional Maniac mode strips all health and turns any hit into a death, a legitimate hardcore challenge for old-school action-platformer fans. Co-op challenge stages let a second player take control of Call, whose shield play adds a defensive dimension to Beck's offense-first kit. The Ray DLC character, a claw-focused alternative to Beck, is by most accounts more satisfying to control than the main protagonist. A switchable chiptune soundtrack is a small but welcome touch for anyone who wants the full retro feel. None of it fixes the structural problems, but it does suggest the people who made this game had taste even when execution fell short. The context matters here. Mighty No. 9 raised close to four million dollars on Kickstarter from backers expecting something close to a modern Mega Man. What arrived after years of delays was a game that Metacritic scores at 52 and Steam users rate at 50 percent positive, numbers that tell a consistent story across critics and players alike. The disappointment is not really that the game is broken or unplayable. It is that it arrived feeling unfinished and uncertain, copying the formula it was supposed to improve on while quietly dropping features from Mega Man X like wall jumps and the charged buster shot. Games like Shovel Knight had already demonstrated that retro-inspired platformers could feel both faithful and genuinely new at the same time. Mighty No. 9 never figures out which side of that line it wants to stand on. If you go in with low expectations and genuine affection for the sub-genre, you will find something functional and occasionally enjoyable in short bursts. If you are looking for a platformer that earns its difficulty through smart design rather than unclear hitboxes and an archaic lives system, this is not that game. It is a curio worth knowing about, not a priority worth paying full price for.

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