Mega Man 9 confirms 2d gaming is long dead.

So a Mega Man 9 release has been confirmed. This is an official sequel to the main series of games spanning from the Nintendo to the Playstation. Yeah, the Playstation. So here is my problem. They decided to go with 8 bit graphics for this game. This coupled with the fact that the game is being released only as a download on WiiWare has convinced me. Real 2d gaming is dead and Capcom cares little about it or the Mega Man franchise.

Here are a couple of pictures from Mega Man 9:


And here is a picture from Mega Man 8:

Now while Mega Man 8 might not suit your artistic tastes, it was taking advantage of its hardware. And for its time, it looked great. Mega Man 9 is obviously just a nostalgia cash in as the game is just designed to look like one of the old NES iterations. Some may argue they this approach is cool; that it will draw out feelings of playing Mega Man as a kid. And while I have no doubt this will be the case, I firmly believe that this is a negative.

You see this choice of art style and platform has convinced me that Capcom feels Mega Man is only worthy of shitty handheld spinoffs and nostalgia jerk off sessions. The Mega Man series helped define 2d action for its time, and Capcom could have used Mega Man 9 to challenge this genre yet again. What this should have been was a beautiful 2d game maximizing the hardware the Xbox360 or PS3 has to offer, and maybe in the process offering something unique to the dying genre. As a 8 bit download only title they are instead throwing away potential.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was a 2d game in a world that only cared about 3d, but because of its beauty and quality, people didn't care. Same could be said with the more recent PS2 game, Odin Sphere. This 2d action adventure game was filled with large hand drawn characters in large hand drawn environments. It was all in 2d but most still considered it to be one of the most beautiful games of the year. It also did things you've never seen in video games. So much so that many can't actually place it in a particular genre. Check out this video:



Why not something like this Capcom? It would even work well with the art style at the very top of the post. Now Odin Sphere didn't sell all that well to the general population. But if it were a Mega Man game that looked this amazing, and it had Capcom marketing dollars behind it, I think we would see new people caring about this series again.

What the hell Capcom?


Brad


PS Take everything I said here and apply it to the upcoming shitty Castlevania 3d fighter on Wii.

What the hell Konami??