Inafune says launch version of Mighty No.9 ‘is better than nothing’

It’s better than nothing”. That’s the assessment of Keiji Inafune following the damning critical reception of his new platformer Mighty No.9.

The reviews for the game have not been kind, with the title currently carrying a Metacritic rating of 60 per cent. There has also been some frustration about the game’s visuals, which – as per this Eurogamer video – are nothing like the quality previously hinted at.

To celebrate the Mighty No.9’s North American and Japanese launch, developer Comcept ran a live stream in which Inafune himself appeared to admit that things hadn’t panned out as expected.

"The reality is they put everything into making this game,” Inafune said, as translated by Comcept’s Ben Judd, Vice reports. They didn’t try to microtransaction it out, they didn’t try to DLC it out for extra money. They put it all in.

So, for now, this is what you see and what you get, for the Mighty No. 9 world. But, again, we can hope that if things go well, there’ll be sequels. Because I’ll tell you what, I’m not getting my 2D side-scrolling fill. And at the end of the day, even if it’s not perfect, it’s better than nothing. At least, that’s my opinion."

Judd also explained how Inafune began work on other projects once the game had hit around the 70 per cent completion mark and was not involved in its porting to various platforms.

Mighty No.9 was crowdfunded to the tune of $3.8m back in September 2013, but has since been hit with a string of delays, as well as questions about the campaign’s sincerity. Note that the Xbox 360, Mac and Linux versions have been delayed, with 360 backers instead being offered a Steam code for PC.