Mighty No. 9 Screen

As the weeks and months drift by we get closer to the release of Mighty No. 9, so close that certain Kickstarter backers will be receiving playable beta builds on PC right about now. The title seems to be making solid progress ahead of its arrival next year, which is sure to have action platformer — and Mega Man — fans with a Wii U or 3DS on alert.

That comparison to Mega Man has been made a great deal, for obvious reasons, though Mighty No. 9 will go its own way in various ways. One key move is a dash that allows you to absorb the energy of weakened enemies; as Keiji Inafune has explained to Polygon at PAX, that move is one aspect that demonstrates this title's shift towards modern trends. It's all about the pacing, it seems.

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If you look at some of the older games from the 1980s, the original 8-bit and 16-bit games, they moved a bit slower. With modern games, everything is sped up quite a bit, whether it's frequent save points or the actual game speed itself. So we wanted to focus on making the actual core gameplay loops a lot faster.

That's [retro Mega Man] actually a very toned-down, slow pace compared to modern games. And now, even modern games and modern society, everything has sped up to the point where a game that moves along that slowly ... is probably too slow for what modern gameplay styles are.

So for every enemy, you're asking yourself: Do I dash? Do I shoot? That timing, that rock, paper, scissors element is always there. That core system has helped us develop a game that feels classic on one hand, but also moves at a much faster pace than old school games.

Let us know what you think of these comments, while below you can see this gameplay for yourself in the latest PAX trailer. This video is notable for showing more weapons in action, along with environments and stages that are clearly relatively far into development.

[source polygon.com]