Ninety-Nine Nights (N3) Review

Tetsuya Mizuguchi is back, and he’s brought a Dynasty Warriors-styled game with elements of gameplay similar to the Diablo series, and he’s putting hundreds upon hundreds of characters all on screen at the same time. It’s a hack-and-slash with RPG-like upgrades and leveling, and a voice-acted storyline. It’s like “Miz” took off the puzzle training wheels and decided to go for the big time with Ninety-Nine Nights.

So what do you get when you take the creator of some of the best puzzle and music games of all time (Rez, Space Station 5, Lumines, Meteos), and give him an Xbox 360 development kit to create such an epic game? You wouldn’t expect it, but the answer is an unmitigated disaster.

N3 is a game that tries very hard to be fun. Playing it, you can almost feel the fun trying to get out. It’s like maybe, if I really put myself into it, I’ll somehow unleash the fun. Well, get over it, because there isn’t any. From the repetitive game mechanics (just press X or Y a lot) and the sad excuse for a storyline, to a useless army and a lazy implementation of Achievements, Ninety-Nine Nights is a colossal disappointment.

The RPG elements are interesting. In addition to gaining new moves as you “level up”, you can pick up items on the battlefield. Some are used as instant upgrades, some are items that you can switch between as the situation warrants. Just like in most RPGs, the big “boss” characters are the ones that drop the best items, but in one of many perplexing design decisions, if killing a boss ends a mission, the mission ends almost immediately, and if you didn’t run and grab the item right away, you miss out.

The story is epic in scale, and equally yawn-inducing, and seems to only exist as an excuse to introduce characters that you might be able to play if you agonize your way through the game. The story is communicated occasionally by in-game text, but mostly through cut-scenes, many of which interrupt the gameplay. They also interrupt your combos (which were one of the only redeeming parts of the game). String together as many hits as you can, making some truly impressive combos, and watch while a cutscene destroys all of your hard work. It’s almost criminal to take one of the few truly enjoyable moments in the game, and rip it out of a poor gamer’s hands as if to say, “No, you will have fun only when I allow it.”

The final straw was the clumsy save system. While anything else would have probably made the game too easy, if you die during a mission, you go back to the beginning of the mission. As more evidence that your armies are irrelevant, you don’t get the option to choose new units, but you do have to go back through the entire level from the start. Since some of the missions can be up to half an hour long, that’s a stiff penalty, though as I mentioned, the game is easy enough that any other option would have destroyed any semblance of challege ... usually a sign that something went terribly wrong in the design process.

I’m an Achievement whore, but I suck at it (as is evidenced by my pathetic GamerScore). I have yet to get every Achievement in a game, but that’s OK. While most Xbox 360 games will give you a small Achievement for finishing a mission or level, and larger ones for beating the game or significant progress, N3 lumps them all together, giving you achievements only when you finish all the missions available to a character. That only serves to hold the carrot too far away to function as a real carrot at all and is just about the laziest implementation you could conjure up.

The entire game stands in stark contrast to Dead Rising, which also serves up endless hordes of enemies (without the slowdown that plagues N3), but even with clumsy mechanics, ends up being loads of fun. N3 is nothing of the sort. Most of my disappointment comes from the fact that most Mizuguchi games have this point where you can get into a Zen-like state, at which point the game becomes very relaxing. Rez and Lumines both had this quality, but N3 goes far past relaxation into sheer boredom. I suspect that Microsoft Game Studios published this game in order to secure an Xbox Live Arcade release of Lumines called Lumines Live, making it a pretty good trade for Mizuguchi and Q Entertainment.

N3 is good for a rental, but not much else. By all means, avoid buying this game.

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