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Mighty No. 9 began with a spectacularly successful Kickstarter campaign, with the project leadership of Keiji Inafune and the sense of it being a spiritual successor to Mega Man being factors in its popularity. Since that period of hype in mid 2013 it's endured some tougher times, though - the final visual style has been criticised by some, while issues with online features have led to multiple delays.

Publisher Deep Silver and Inafune's Comcept confirmed a February release with an announcement in Fall last year, but with that date just a couple of weeks away a further delay has now been announced. The issue appears to be the same, with network problems at the core of the delay; the new target window is Spring, and below are some excerpts from a full explanation and apology published by Keiji Inafune on Kickstarter.

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Unfortunately, we have an announcement that will be very disappointing to all of you. In preparation for the February release of Mighty No. 9 we have been working hard with our partners to resolve any network issues and porting work necessary to publish Mighty No. 9 on the various platforms. However, the issues relating to the network modes were more critical than expected, and it has become apparent that we will need to delay the game from its February 9th release date. We have been working up until the very last moment to resolve these issues in order to make the February release, but it has become clear that we no longer have enough time to fix the issues and have everything prepared for release.

The reason for the delay is rooted in bugs inside the network modes, and specifically problems with matchmaking. There are two large reasons for this problem, one of them being the large number of platforms supported (the solution for each platform is slightly different) and the other stems from the fact that the engine we are using is no longer being updated which means adjustments for matchmaking and online code are being made manually (actually reprogramming parts of the engine by the dev team themselves). Unfortunately, this is all a result of miscalculations on the part of us, the development staff. As a result, our fans who have been looking forward to Mighty No. 9 have been forced to wait for over half a year longer than expected, and for that we are sincerely sorry. I want to take this chance to apologize personally, and on the behalf of the development staff.

...Because we are constantly working on it in cooperation with all our partners, we want to wait and make sure that everything is confirmed to be ready before giving a new specific release date. But we expect it to realistically be in Spring 2016.

For this 3rd delay of the game, we have no excuses for disappointing our fans and especially our backers once more. We want to take this chance to express our sincerest apologies to everyone who has looked forward to the release.

Delays are always disappointing, of course, though as always we hope the end result will be worth the wait. You know the Shigeru Miyamoto quote by now...

Are you still excited about Mighty No. 9 coming to Wii U this Spring (3DS will be later) or has your interest waned? Let us know.

With thanks to RupeeClock for the heads up.

[source kickstarter.com]