Zenien
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Gamespot Review
5.9
Gameplay 6
Graphics 7
Sound 6
Value 6
Tilt 5
[size]Ninety-Nine Nights puts a lot of enemies onscreen but doesn't give you many interesting ways to dispose of them. [/size=3]
The Good: Puts a lot of enemies onscreen.
The Bad: Basic attacks work better than the flashier combos; lame english voice acting with no apparent alternative soundtrack; combat is very repetitive.
Ninety-Nine Nights attempts to mine the same ground that games like Koei's Dynasty Warriors and Phantagram's Kingdom Under Fire have covered in the past, but it does so with only a bare minimum of strategy. While you still have limited control over other troops, this game is all about running into a crowd of hundreds of enemies and slamming on the two attack buttons until everyone is dead. While those attack buttons produce some flashy combos, Ninety-Nine Nights is a very shallow game that gets old fast.
Ninety-Nine Nights tells the tale of a war between humans and foul creatures, such as goblins and frogmen. But it doesn't necessarily tell its story as one epic event. Instead, you're given the same story from multiple perspectives. You start out with only one character available, the 17-year-old Inphyy. Her story is one of vengeance, as she sets out with her army to destroy the goblins responsible for killing her father. You'll also play as Inphyy's older brother, Aspharr, and a mercenary named Myifee, as well as a few others. Each of the game's seven characters offers varying takes on events from both sides of the conflict, but a handful of missions flow through the same basic areas. So by playing through with every character, you'll notice a fair amount of repetition. Also, the campaigns of Inphyy and Aspharr are definitely the cornerstones of the game. Many of the other characters' stories are significantly shorter, though even the longer ones are only around six missions. Regardless, none of the characters have particularly compelling stories to tell, and the game's annoying English voice acting doesn't do a good job of conveying what little story there is.
Though a couple of the unlockable characters play differently, the bulk of the action in the game is painfully straightforward. You have two attack buttons, a dash maneuver, and the ability to jump or block. Hammering on the X and Y buttons will bust out combos that send the swarming hordes of enemies flying, and clearing a space around your character is usually easy, keeping you relatively safe from most damage. The characters gain experience and level up as you play, and each level brings longer, flashier combos. But the longer combos are usually a bit more canned, which can often leave your back open to attack. As a result, the shorter, four-hit combos take priority. Kills earn you red orbs that charge up a super-attack meter. Enemies killed while you're in your super-attack mode give up blue orbs, which charge up another meter that can be used for a devastating screen-clearing attack. Each character has different combos, timing, weapons, and super attacks, but the process of picking a short, simple combo and doing it over and over again doesn't change much.
In addition to leveling up your character, you'll find items around the battlefield that can be equipped. You'll find new, more powerful weapons, but they're just stronger versions of your existing weapon. They'll look a bit different in your character's hands, but they don't grant new combo attacks or change the gameplay in any way. You'll also find items that can boost your hit points, attack range, and defensive ability, among other attributes.
Though you're the most effective fighter on the battlefield, you'll also be given control of two groups of soldiers in most missions. Prior to entering a level, you can choose which soldiers you'd like to bring, like swordsman, archers, and so on. Your control over these soldiers is pretty limited, but it does what it needs to do. You can tell them to attack or hold back, as well as dismiss them altogether, causing them to stand back while you do the fighting. Your troops often seem completely useless and rarely seem to kill enemies. But they're usually good at engaging the enemy, which frees you up to run around behind enemies and take them out. Either way, their presence seems designed to make the battles look and feel larger, which works.
Graphically, the game is built around putting tons of characters onscreen at one time. You'll see hordes of goblins come swarming over a hill in your direction, and it's initially impressive, but when the hordes grow too large, the game does slow down quite a bit. While it gets sheer numbers right, the game uses an ugly blur effect on far-away enemies that looks less like a distance blur and more like you're seeing double. Plus, as you might expect, the hordes of enemies all look alike. You'll encounter a handful of different enemies as you play, but there isn't enough variety. The boss characters you encounter do, at least, look a little different and use different, more interesting-looking attacks.
The first couple of characters you play have the lengthiest campaigns. The rest feel sort of tacked on.
Individual campaigns won't take much time to finish, and if you run into trouble with any one mission, you can always go back to the previous one and kill more enemies until you gain a level and become more powerful, making everything a bit easier. The game does become time consuming, however, if you want to get all of its achievement points. You'll earn points for completing each character's storyline, and there are additional points to be had for getting all the characters up to level nine and finishing all of the missions with at least an A ranking.
On paper, the multiple characters and item collection might make Ninety-Nine Nights sound like a reasonably deep action game. Unfortunately, the action starts out completely mindless and wears even thinner as time goes on. Whether you're a fan of the let's-see-how-many-guys-we-can-cram-onscreen genre or not, this one's probably not worth your time.
N3: Ninety-Nine Nights Review
Maybe they should have gone for the full one hundred nights.
by Erik Brudvig
August 14, 2006 - If you haven't grown tired of the hack-and-slash gameplay in Dynasty Warriors games, Ninety-Nine Nights might be the title that does it. The gameplay is shallow, the story is generic, and there isn't anything present to make you feel like you're going to miss out if you just turn the game off and walk away. Although we are months into a new generation of hardware, N3 shows that not all games have made the jump.
Ninety-Nine Nights follows the tale of a war between goblins and humans. In order to learn the full background and reason for the war, you'll have to play as each of seven heroes. Depending upon which character you play as, you'll receive a different bit of the story, though the outcome of the war will be different due to that hero's actions. It's fun having different perspectives, but having different outcomes serves to fracture any sort of cohesion there may have been. Not that it matters too much. The story is paper thin and feels like a cheap Lord of the Rings clone. The game doesn't spend much time enveloping you in a story or in the characters' motivations, making it feel like the story was slapped on as an afterthought. Even for fantasy fans, there isn't much to get excited about here.
The gameplay in Ninety-Nine Nights can be described fairly succinctly. It's a button-masher. You learn new moves as your character gains experience and levels up, but there isn't any incentive to actually use them rather than just slam on the X and Y buttons. You can block by using the left trigger or you can beat the entire game without using it. The choice is yours! Each enemy that you kill drops an orb. Collect enough of these and you do a charged attack. Your charged attack will cause the enemies you kill to drop blue orbs. Grab enough of these suckers and you get an even bigger attack. This serves a welcome rest from the mashing on the X button that you were doing to get to that point because you get to push the B button for once. It's mindless and fun for a short while, but doesn't evolve at all as the game progresses.
Most of the characters you play as are generic as they come and you can pretty much predict the outcome of each of their storylines from the first intro movie. You have the token knight who is unsure of whether the war is worth it, the goblin out for revenge, and even the burly mercenary. The last few characters that you unlock are more interesting, but your time with them is short. Although the characters have their own unique move sets and animations, the same lack of strategy applies to all of them. Just keep pressing that attack button and aim your character towards the next group of enemies. The only difference is the sorceress, Tyurru. She has a ranged water attack and some spells that at least break up the monotony a little. She would be fun to play with if strange camera angles didn't constantly make it difficult to aim her shots.
Had promise...
The first three heroes that you play as are commanders. These characters can choose two guard units to back them up during the fight from a list of infantry, heavy infantry, archers, and pikemen. Which ones you choose doesn't make a bit of difference since these guards are largely useless. They spend most of their time standing in one place looking confused while you do all of the work. To take away every ounce of strategy, you're given almost no control over these guards aside from telling them to follow you or stand in one place. At best, these ally units are a distraction and they probably should have been left completely out of the game. The remaining four heroes don't suffer this annoyance. With them, you only have to worry about yourself. The allies are still on the battlefield, but you can largely ignore them which is what you probably had been doing the whole time.
Or rather, you could ignore the guard allies if they didn't constantly get in your way. You see, the guards will attempt to attack the enemy heroes on the battlefield, but they can't hurt them. They'll swarm them, unleash clouds of arrows, and chase those suckers from here to next Tuesday, but they won't do a speck of damage. That's fine. We wouldn't want the A.I. controlled characters to do all of the work and not give us a chance to have fun. But if they're not going to do any damage, why do they still register hits? Every time they get an attack in, the enemy hero reels back in pain. You can't get a hit in if he or she is already going through the animation of receiving an attack. This means that if you have a large number of ally guards (remember, you can't control most of them), you'll find it hard to even get your own strikes in without first trying to isolate the enemy. Succeeding in your mission and protecting your allies actually turns into a hindrance rather than a bonus.
Just press start when this screen comes up.
Although you're in the midst of a war with hundreds of enemies on the battlefield, the rival heroes are the only opponents that attack you with any frequency or effectiveness. Their A.I. is poor by any standard and once you knock them down, you're set. Your foes are vulnerable as they get up, so simply getting behind them and slamming on the X button while you wait for them to get back on their feet will result in endless combos that they can't defend against. Their only real hope is that your allies get in your way. You'd think some sort of system would have been worked out to make the big fights more engaging, but sadly that is not the case.
Through the game, your character gets stronger by leveling up and finding items on the battlefield. The items are either found in chests or on the bodies of fallen enemies. This creates one of the most frustrating parts of the game. N3 has a tendency to skip straight to a cutscene once you complete an objective, even if you just killed a rather large enemy that dropped something you might want. Too bad for you. If you didn't scoop it up in the half of a second you had after defeating the enemy then you're out of luck. Not to mention that these items can easily fall off into an area where you can't get them at all.
As a form of a carrot, the game keeps track of how many attacks you've chained together and gives you a rating at the end of each mission, but then breaks the system by interjecting cutscenes without warning. Each time a cutscene plays, your charged attacks are ended and any chains you've strung together are wiped clean. It serves to ruin any momentum you may have been gaining toward enjoying yourself.
This image from a boss fight was taken with one hand while we played the game with the other.
The only items that you can store are those that can be equipped. If you've got a full health bar and find a HP restore potion, it will be wasted since they disappear a short while after being exposed. This, combined with the fact that you can't save midway through a mission, means you'll often wind up coming to the final boss without much in the HP gauge. The only solution is to go off in search of chests you may not have broken open yet in hopes of finding something to restore your health. It's slow and tedious, but you'll wind up doing it so that you don't die and lose all of the experience you've gained.
If there is any fun to be had from Ninety-Nine Nights, it doesn't last long. There are seven playable heroes, each with between two and six missions to play. The longest missions take about a half of an hour, though most can be beaten in ten to fifteen minutes. All told, you'll have the main game completed in about twenty hours. There isn't much to see once you've button mashed your way through it. You can go back and replay missions to gain achievements or improve your characters, but why would you want to subject yourself to replaying the same scenarios and more button mashing? The characters cap out at level 9 and you'll reach level 6 or 7 just by playing through the missions. If you do want to go back and max out your squad, each character will only take you an additional hour and a half or so.
The extras available aren't much to get excited over either. All you get is a difficult special mission that becomes available when each story has been completed and unlockable character art and bios. Each mission you complete provides a few points that you can put towards the art and character profiles, but playing through the game once will give you nearly enough points to unlock everything. The review copy we were sent offered no online leaderboard options. Nor are there any co-operative or versus modes of any sort. It's fitting that the shallow gameplay would be accompanied by shallow options.
Too many things on screen makes for bad slowdown.
Ninety-Nine Nights succeeds in putting an insane number of units on the battlefield at one time. This doesn't come without a cost. Just when you find yourself in the midst of an intense battle against seemingly impossible odds, slowdown strikes. It happens most often when you try to use your special attacks, but even comes during your run of the mill action. When the entire point of the game is to flood the screen with enemies, not being able to keep a solid frame rate is a big letdown. The attack animations are fluid, but since there is no variety in the enemy's appearance, even the nice looking things grow tired after just a short while. Making the graphics seem even blander is the repetitive use of environments. Playing through the war seven times means you're going to be fighting in the same places. The game's visuals are in dire need of some variety.
That's not to say that everything in Ninety-Nine Nights is bad. The controls are tight and if it weren't for unwanted cutscenes popping in and slowdown, you'd be able to create some sweet battle sequences. Stringing together a chain of attacks and capping it off by unleashing your orb powers can be quite fun when everything goes well. The majority of the characters may be generic, but playing as the lumbering VigkVagk is a sweet reward for going through the rest of the game. It's too bad you only get to play two missions as him.
VigkVagk owns all.
The best part about Ninety-Nine Nights is probably the soundtrack. It's all orchestral and, although the selection isn't vast, it doesn't get repetitive or annoying like most soundtracks. It's really quite nice. Just leave the game on the menu screen for some good background music. The voice acting is forgettable most of the time, grating at others, and completely absent at times that it should exist. How come I can wipe out entire armies and never hear them voice any sort of pain? Your voice is generally the only one heard prominently and it can become repetitive as the same voice snippets get played over and over in battle. Thankfully, the missions are short enough that you won't get annoyed with them before the game ends.
Closing Comments
Ninety-Nine Nights has struggled to find an identity since it was first revealed in trailer form. Unfortunately, it appears that it never decided on one. The first half of the game plays like the team was looking at adding some strategic elements, but the second half is pure action. Through it all, you have an attempt to cover up some of the shallowest gameplay around with slick animations and a weak story. The final product isn't terrible, but it's hardly memorable and there isn't anything gripping to make you want to go back and pound on the attack buttons more. With slowdown hitting at the peak of battles and no bonus features worth looking at, Ninety-Nine Nights is a game that is hard to get immersed in and even harder to enjoy.
6.5 Presentation
Nice menus and introductory character movies, but the story and in-game cutscenes could use major work.
5.0 Graphics
Repetitive environments and enemies combined with major slowdown kills the experience.
7.5 Sound
Great music is hurt by bad voice acting.
4.5 Gameplay
Gameplay straight out of the past. Wake us up when this kind of game has evolved beyond pressing one button over and over again.
4.0 Lasting Appeal
No multiplayer modes, bad extras, and repetitive gameplay will not make you want to keep playing.
5.6
Mediocre OVERALL
(out of 10 / not an
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/725/725558p3.html
There you have it.
