The head of Mighty No. 9 developer Inti Creates is not happy about the game's latest trailer, released yesterday by publisher Deep Silver.
The trailer, which currently boasts nearly 14,000 dislikes on YouTube, is perhaps one of the biggest game-marketing misfires of the last several years. The trailer makes a point to offend anime fans with an in-poor-taste joke, saying players can "make the bad guys cry like an anime fan on prom night."
It plays up the worst stereotypes of nerd culture for a cheap laugh ... except it's not funny at all. Considering how anime fans likely make up a large portion of the Japanese-developed Mighty No. 9's audience, the joke wasn't a smart move on Deep Silver's part. It's also worth noting that Mighty No. 9 wouldn't exist at all without contributions from fans via the game's Kickstarter, making this entire scenario even more embarrassing. Who thought it was a good idea to insult the fans who paid for the game's creation in the first place?
However, while that one joke is truly awful, the entire trailer isn't much better. All the jokes fall equally flat, the entire tone is bizarre and the trailer even manages to make the game's visuals look like something from the PlayStation 2 era (just look at the explosion in the trailer below for an example of what we're talking about).
Though Mighty No. 9 was crowdfunded on Kickstarter, the game secured additional funding via game publisher Deep Silver in order to see the light of day. It seems Deep Silver, not the game's developers, are responsible for this latest trailer, and at least one developer is just as mad as many fans.
Inti Creates chief executive Takuya Aizu recently tweeted, "What the hell was D*** *il*** thinking making a crappy PV like this?! Unforgivable."
Presumably, he did not spell out Deep Silver's entire name in order to prevent the tweet from appearing in searches.
Deep Silver has yet to respond to the fan backlash, but this latest controversy is just the latest in a long line of problems for Mighty No. 9, one of them being that the developers sought out Deep Silver in the first place. The game raised nearly $4 million on Kickstarter, leading many fans to assume that the need for a publisher was unnecessary. Since then, the game has been delayed numerous times, though it looks like it will finally arrive on June 21 for nearly every platform (excluding Nintendo 3DS and PS Vita). Hopefully, it's better than this latest trailer.
