Can't unsee blue "teardrop" bikini bottom

Some thoughts on the Mighty No 9 design. It's a tricky situation to do Megaman without doing Megaman, of course. They wanted to keep the silhouette and decided to change the internals, but... I think it's too much of a haphazard mélange of color fields, panel lines and mystery function knobbery. When designing characters for old games they had to be iconographically strong (strong silhouette and simple flag-like coloring) (consider Samus or the more obscure Marina Liteyear), because there was little or no space for embroideries... or rather, the embroideries were subordinate to the general masses and relegated to the side-art in manuals and such. Internal details can be useful, but anything which draws attention to it and takes up valuable space, has to be functional and not merely area-fill, I think. All this is easier said than done, of course.

Anyways, here's my take on a "Mighty". It's just a quick sketch of course and can't rival anything with weeks of iterations behind it, but I haven't posted any art here in a while, so...



5 comments:

CCS said...

Design wise I think they are going for more graphic space - so the new character design carries a hybrid of strong, classic silhouette and modern livery-like color groups and forms. (Kind of how touring and LM race cars).

In contrast, there is that kind of fitting 2 schemes in one form feeling. The fan reaction in the forums should interesting when it comes

Arne said...

Their design really reminds me of the later Megaman X stuff which also had a lot of... livery.

I don't really think the design is bad. It's pretty fun. The plug-suit feel could work, but it feels... it feels like it's not quite iconic enough. I keep getting distracted by stuff like the triangular things on the earmuffs, the little colored panels on the shoes...

I wish they had added something to the silhouette too, or just done a complete inversion from malt cross to shuriken (e.g. Marina Liteyear).

CaptainKraft said...

I wish I had something more insightful to say about the design, but this kind of stuff is way out of my wheelhouse.

I'm just here to admire, and maybe learn a thing or two. Brilliant sketches.

Sleightblind said...

I like it, but the helmet looks like a face with a smaller human face in it.

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