Let's Deconstruct the Mighty No. 9 Trailer

A bad new Mighty No. 9 trailer exists and you may well have seen it.

The adjective that keeps coming back around is “cringy” and sure enough that “friggin’ cool” voiceover is enough to make you squirm in your seat, but equally as confusing to me is the way the trailer chooses to present the game’s mechanics. It’s worth looking into just as an example of how not to communicate information about your gameplay.

We’re told you can slide along the floor and do dashes, and those may well be exciting things to do in the game, but outside of the spiral dash (which the trailer shows off for maybe 1 full second) all of these are fairly common platformer mechanics. Okay, Mighty No. 9 has dashes, but why do I care about that when so many other games have them as well? And this is the question that keeps coming up, but that the trailer fails to answer: “Why should I care about this mechanic?”.

This is not to say that the concept of a dash is “overplayed”; you can still create a dash that feels distinctive to your game. Surrounding components of the gameplay can also make a simple dash figure into movement and combat in unique ways that help build towards textured play. It must also be admitted a trailer can give us a certain idea of how a dash feels just through appearance, but this trailer isn’t particularly good at that because it can’t sit still for two seconds. Instead it’s wasting time splicing in meaningless jokes and it’s desperately rushing through its list of features like it’s worried it’s left the iron on. Mainly though, how an action an a game feels is better conveyed through discussion from outside parties who’ve played the game. Meanwhile, to communicate how something like a dash benefits a game from a design perspective, the developer needs to talk to their audience semi-formally and at some length. Obviously, that wasn’t going to happen here.

The next shiny gadget this trailer picks up on is the game’s combo system. We’re told we can do “combo moves” and then do “combos on combos to rack up [our] score”. But what is a combo move? As far as I can tell from the trailer the dash is, but that’s not made very clear. It’s also not properly explained what other combo moves are present in the game or what it means to do “combos on combos”. Based on the play and UI, I think what they’re trying to say is that if you are airborne and perform a combo move, you will get a score multiplier. This multiplier will increase as you perform further “combo moves”. So your 2.0x multiplier can be increased to a 2.5x multiplier by performing a combo move. Your 2.5x multiplier can then be increased to 3.0x, and so on. This multiplier disappears as soon as you hit the ground.

I shouldn’t be having to flip back and forth through the same 10 seconds of trailer to decode the narrator‘s explanations of basic mechanics. It’s also here that the explosions, bright lights, and multiple numbers popping out of defeated enemies make the trailer look like a soupy visual mess. I’m sure the game looks fine once you actually sit down and play it, but in this moment it’s hard to clock the demonstrations of the mechanics being talked about and the presumably thrilling robot-busting action is obscured. What’s more, a combo system with a score multiplier is another mercilessly common video game mechanic. Why should I be impressed purely by it existing in your game? Especially when none of the footage shows an on-screen score so there’s no sense of it contributing to anything.

The final mechanic we get to “see” is the “Absorption Boost” which apparently gives us the ability to absorb enemy “powers”, making us “faster and stronger”. So does that mean we get to acquire and use properties of enemies like we do in the Kirby games? The term “powers” would seem to imply something like this, but there’s no clear demonstration of that happening in the trailer, let alone a showcase of what “powers” we can steal. Are these instead increases to character stats like speed and damage? In which case the term “powers” was misleading and these more subtle upgrades deserve an even more specific focus that we never see.

Then that’s it, the end of the trailer. The mechanical argument this video puts forwards for purchasing Mighty No. 9 is that it has a dash mechanic, it has a basic combo system, and some vague waffle about absorbing enemy “powers”. My biggest problem with this trailer is it’s a bad communicator and that’s more worrying than it might otherwise be because what the Mighty No. 9 community need most right now is reliable communication about this game.

When Mighty No. 9 was first announced, transparent access to the reality of the project was one of the strongest promises the development team at Comcept put on the table. A documentary on the game’s development was (and presumably still is) being made by 2 Player Productions, known for their probing and intimate record of office life at Penny Arcade. Keiji Inafune himself expressed open-armed desire to involve the fans in development and give them unprecedented insight into this game’s creation. This all seemed like the behaviour of a group of people aware that they weren’t just making a game for a specific audience, they were making it on that audience’s dollar. What’s more, they knew their specific kind of audience was going to care about every tiny developer move and each little detail of the product. Then it all went wrong.

Not only was the game repeatedly delayed, it was delayed even when release was meant to be right around the corner, it was delayed even when Comcept promised it wouldn’t be, and it was delayed in a way where backers found out about it from retailers before they found out about it from Comcept. Even the demo for the game was delayed. Comcept then announced work on another game while there were still concerns about the state they’d be able to push this current one out of the door in. They misled their audience about that other game and mismanaged controversy surrounding their community manager.

When a wave of abuse found its way to community manager Dina Karam and a flood of accusations were made about her influencing the game with her “feminist agenda”, it became obvious how the official Mighty No. 9 forums were held back by lacking basic tools like thread locking. It was also suggested by one representative that there were was not proper communication and understanding between the devs and Karam about what her role on the project would be. Comcept then failed to stand up to the abuse piled on her, fired her, and were left with conflicting statements with her about how much influence she had had on the game.

Debacles like these set up barriers between creators and communities, and leave those communities starved for earnest and dependable statements about the entertainment under the spotlight. Comcept and publisher Deep Silver need to be giving backers a clear, thorough, factual representation of the game right now, and what a trailer like this represents is the opposite of that. The facts are muddled, the attitude of the trailer feels completely unrepresentative of the game, and instead of talking to backers earnestly and directly, they’re using a hokey, affected mouthpiece. The trailer feels built to address the wider gaming audience, but even if it is, it feels disrespectful to hawk the game to that wider audience before they’ve taken care of the people who were most loyal to the game and helped make it a reality.

My hunch is that this trailer was made not by Comcept, but by Deep Silver. It was uploaded to Deep Silver’s YouTube account, but it’s not linked on Comcept’s Twitter account, on the game’s Kickstarter page, on www.mightyno9.com, or on mightyno9.com (yes, those are two different official Mighty No. 9 sites that have confusingly similar names), and the Mighty No. 9 Twitter account seemed to get to the party 12 hours late. None the less, nobody should have produced this trailer, and while it’s one item on a large pile, it’s a pile that’s already toppling. At the very least maybe this can be yet another Mighty No. 9-branded lesson to others on how not to present your game. Thanks for reading.