Mighty No. 9 Beta Opens For Backers, May Include Online Race Mode

During a Q&A PAX panel with Keiji Inafune, the Mighty No. 9 creator revealed backers of the game's Kickstarter will be able to dive into the beta within the next 24 hours.

According to the official Mighty No. 9 twitter account, many have already begun to jump in and play. At its start, the beta only has one level, but Inafune said two more levels will be added over the course of the beta.

The beta announcement came at the end of the panel which covered some details about Mighty No. 9's development, as well as development on the recently released Azure Striker Gunvolt and Mighty Gunvolt the 8-bit demake included for free with copies of Azure Striker Gunvolt for the next three months.

Inafune didn't know Inti Creates was making Azure Striker Gunvolt until it was already well into development. When he first played it, he started offering unsolicited feedback to the point where the developer just asked him to come on board as the game's action director.

Following those details on Azure Striker Gunvolt, a new gameplay video was played for Mighty No. 9 showing a new outdoor area, an icy area filled with pipes, and a moving train level. We also got to see protagonist Beck use the ice and fire weapons obtained from bosses, as well as some gameplay from secondary playable character Call.

Inafune also talked about why the game is so fast paced, thanks to Beck's dash and absorb ability. When developing for classic consoles, the limited screen size forced games to move slower as you couldn't see very far ahead. The expanded screen allows more enemies to appear on screen, which means the player needs to be able to move faster to attack and avoid the additional enemies.

Another video shown during the panel showed experiments being done with an online race mode, where two Becks race to the end of a level while trying to dash through as many defeated enemies as possible. In the video, Infune beat Inti Creates' president and CEO Takuya Aizu. Inafune joked that Aizu sucked, but Aizu said he was simply being polite and letting his boss win.

The panel was then opened up to the crowd for questions. Someone brought up Kaio: King of Pirates, but Inafune couldn't say anything about the game. He also said he would love to see Beck appear in other game genres in the future of varying genre, much like Mega Man, and would love to make another strategy RPG game like Mega Man: Battle Network, but in Beck's world. Inafune also talked about some of his motivation behind leaving Capcom and taking a risk with the Mighty No. 9 Kickstarter. He said many Japanese developers get comfortable where they are and want to protect the franchises they work on in order to retain their jobs. Inafune hopes that the success of Mighty No. 9 will encourage Japanese developers to try new things and have courage to play with their innovative ideas.

Mighty No. 9 doesn't have a release date, but Infaune says the core game is coming along smoothly and are preparing to start on some of the game's additional features, like co-op.