All developers were, at one time, forced to use fairly chunky pixel art in their games due to technological restrictions. Chances are, were the technology available, Mega Man would have looked more like Mega Man 8. Back then, pixel art wasn't a stylistic choice at all. It was how games looked. And back then, Mega Man games looked good, both artistically and in terms of graphical power.Now the world of game graphics has opened up significantly. You can make a game that looks as much like a cartoon as Dragon's Lair did -- and have it be an actual game! Or you can go down the route of most developers, and try to make the most realistic-looking 3D game you can. Even hobbyists can make games in much higher resolutions than Mega Man ever had on the NES. So that means that 256x240, 8-bit pixel art is obsolete, right?
Technologically, maybe. In terms of art, quite the opposite. Now that games don't have to have big, jagged pixels, doing so is a stylistic choice. Generally, companies don't design games to intentionally look ugly. Thus, Capcom thought that Mega Man 9's NES style would look good. And they were right.
Gamers have, for too long, associated graphical technology with aesthetics -- something has to have very new graphics to look good. Capcom has turned that on its head by accepting NES-esque graphics as a perfectly viable art style for 2008. They've acknowledged that pixel art can look good -- that there is a reason to use it other than hardware constraints. Gamers have known this forever, but this is a great deal more progressive for a developer than even the most high-resolution, high-polygon 3D engine. And it's a bold move that should resonate with Wii gamers, who have been having to put up with the best 3D engines developers can put together on a tiny budget. Why not use that same budget to make something that looks cool?
For that matter, using pixel art at a lower budget enables companies to make more 2D games. Games are far too expensive to make now, and if a game as great as Mega Man 9 can be made cheaply, it may encourage other developers to go the same route and revive wonderful, but lost, game series.
Even though there's less detail and a lower cost, Mega Man 9 shouldn't be seen as the easy way. Capcom and Inticreates had to make new environments and sprites that could stand side by side with the other NES games. They had to make a game that looked convincingly like an 8-bit Mega Man game rather than an imitation. That takes considerable talent in skills that are mostly lost to big developers. And I think most people, regardless of what they think about Mega Man 9, can recognize that they succeeded in that effort.
