I'm not going to lie, I'm an old school
Nintendo guy dating all the way back to the launch of the NES, like many in my generation. As
children of the 80s, we grew up on the 8-bit goodness that dominated
the day and a lot of us still think that some of the games from those
archaic ages are among the best games ever created, even when held up
against their technologically towering successors. So, like anyone does as they get older in an era of
rapidly growing technology, we're forced to ask ourselves why we
continue to hold onto the past. Is it out of nostalgia and the longing
for days gone by? Is it because old dogs can't learn new tricks and we
quickly retreat back into that comfort zone? I don't think so, and it's good that Mega
Man 9 came around, because it represents a validation of all the things
people of my generation have known for 20 years, whether or not we knew
that we knew them.
When any game mechanic is iterated on in a series of sequels, there's a natural temptation to add more complexity to what's already there. Especially in cases where the same creator is responsible for both the initial installment and subsequent installments, it's easy to see why he might put that brainpower toward doing more than they were able to do the last time. In many cases, this has resulted in game concepts and designs being refined and perfected. In addition, rapidly evolving technology only exacerbated the drive to add more, as every time a new frontier was opened to developers and games started taking advantage of the new technology, any creator working on an existing franchise was naturally pressured to make sure the next installment could run with its contemporaries. The "new, bigger, better" mentality has been a fact of life in the video game world for so long that most of us have become numb to it.
However, in 2008, exponential growth of processing power is no longer the driving factor for success in the video game industry. Game budgets have reached a point where doing everything bigger every time a new frontier of graphical achievement is realized is often foolhardy. Graphic proficiency has become a commodity, as previously noted, and complexity can now be as much of a liability as an advantage. From a technical standpoint, the number of ideas and concepts that are not feasible due to limits in processing power has decreased dramatically and new generations of hardware don't open up the same worlds of achievement that they have in the past. The destruction of this paradigm has left some developers floundering wondering what to do next, especially those that have grown up inside the technological arms race that has defined gaming up until now. However, Mega Man 9 proves that not everyone is clueless as to where we can go now.
The thought process behind the creation of Mega Man 9 was rather simple on its surface, as one look at YouTube clearly shows that Mega Man 2 is the most culturally beloved of the series, and combined with the rise of the Virtual Console and other "smaller scale, smaller price" downloadable titles, Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune realized that the market was finally ripe for a game that gets back to the "simple fun" of Mega Man 2 and builds on the 20 years of good will that that classic title has engendered in the community. However, in trying to answer the question "why is Mega Man 2 as beloved as it is" Inafune identified the concepts that make Mega Man 9 one of the most important statements in gaming in a long while.
Even throughout its 6 NES iterations, Mega Man grew to include several enhancements that were not there at the beginning, and Inafune stripped most of these away for Mega Man 9. In pulling back the charge shot and slide, Inafune demonstrated that while a good design is possible with those elements in the game, they were absolutely not necessary. If the game itself can be made just as good without the charge shot or slide, leaving those elements in made the game more cumbersome with no discernible value to show for it. With no value, they had to go, and the designers could just focus on creating the best possible game design for solely the jump and shoot mechanics without forcing the player to worry about things like constantly holding the B button. The design they came up with is where Mega Man 9's true achievement is realized.
Some of my developer friends were appalled that Inafune would go beyond the aesthetic tributes to the 8-bit style and invoke the technological limits of the NES as well, taking actions like artificially limiting the designers to 3 enemies on the screen at a time, restricting a dedicated level designer who is used to the luxuries of excess that modern technology. As stated in an excellent interview in Gamasutra with Hironobu Takeshita, one of MM9's producers, these mandates and artificial limitations "opened up a new world" to the designers. When stripped of all said luxuries, the experienced professionals at Inti Creates with decades of game design under their belts were able to create a focused and precise design and really focus on using their limited resources to create the best possible game for the player. Limits like these transformed the design process from a game of Warhammer into a game of chess, as every enemy placement had to be carefully considered. This effort is blatantly evident upon spending some time with the finished product and it completely validates such a seemingly arcane approach. The finished game doesn't strike the player as a simple, casual game. There's a difference between pure simplicity and elegance, and what Inafune and Inti Creates achieved here is one of the most elegant games to come along in generations.
The game is no cakewalk, far from it, however, I've heard the difficulty argument batted around as a major flaw in the game and I think the criticism that the game's unforgiving nature limits accessibility is off the mark. I think the degree that this might "turn off" a non-expert audience is immensely overstated. One need only look at the number of devoted rhythm game players who may have never touched a complex FPS once and yet are able to full combo Through the Fire and Flames and post it to YouTube. The game may be incredibly hard, but the basic mechanic is straightforward, so even a person who just started playing games can lock in, sit down, and conquer it. The legions of these players (often labeled as "hard casuals") may not be interested in learning a complex new game mechanic, sitting through a two-hour tutorial, and printing out a poster-sized tech tree at Kinko's, but are they turned off by the frustration and unforgiving failure of a hard fair game? Hardly. In fact, many of them are only egged on by it.
I will take on the classic concept of "hard games" in general at some point but claiming that a game which does demand expert play to conquer it is anywhere near as inaccessible as some of the twin stick monstrosities today's game industry offers players does not hold water to me. There's a big difference to me between games that derive their difficulty from a great degree of complexity and games which clearly define a few simple rules and force you to master them in order to obtain success. MM9 is remarkable in its ability to present an extremely challenging game experience without being unwieldy, complex, or unfair. The people who are going to find MM9 the most exclusionary are people who have grown up with today's complex big budget games that hold the player's hand and try as hard as possible to minimize failure and frustration. MM9, for these players, will be like a shot of everclear to sober players that don't know what it's like to play a game that's ready to throw down. It certainly might exclude those players, but for the sizable group of aforementioned "hard casual" players, I suspect the challenge it offers will be viewed as an asset, rather than a drawback.
Mega Man 9 is important because in reverting to the basics with such great results, Inafune has clearly illustrated that at some point in the evolution of most game designs, more complexity detracts from a game rather than adds to it. The crux of the point on display here is not that simpler 8-bit versions of every game are better, but that for every game design that you might wish to evolve, there comes a peak point where you need to just leave it be or else you're going to experience subtraction by addition. MM9 is an extremely effective example because that point in Mega Man's evolution set in so early that a reversion like Inafune attempted was so drastic that it was bound to turn heads. I'm not advocating an 8-bit reversion for something like Final Fantasy, however, looking at that series or genre from this perspective perspective reveals its own peak point.
This is an important and redeeming validation for all the veteran gamers like me who have held onto the classics for so long. It can be hard to tell yourself that something that has been technologically surpassed so many times over is in any way better without worrying that you're slipping into "kids these days" nostalgia territory and just unable to hope to accept change anymore. Mega Man 9 offers a validation of the value of the best of those old games and an explanation for why many of the best games of past eras remain unsurpassed beyond simple nostalgia. The aesthetic question and the value of the retro graphics and sound is another story altogether and I'll hit on that in another entry, but if today's developers are paying attention, Inafune just offered a poignant lesson that can point a lot of them in an exciting new direction.
