N3: Ninety-Nine Nights (Xbox 360)

The main appeal of the Dynasty Warriors series and its spin-offs is likely meant to be carving through huge armies with relative ease, but what gives them their longevity and difficulty are the objectives and more difficult lieutenants and generals found between the easily defeated enemy hordes. N3: Ninety-Nine Nights, also known just as Ninety-Nine Nights, clearly wants to provide the same satisfaction of easily defeating scores of monsters with little struggle, but when it comes to adding substance to the experience beyond that basic thrill, it seems to struggle. Considering the game was put together in less than six months though, perhaps it’s little surprise it was a bit thin on ideas on how to bolster its hack and slash action.

 

Ninety-Nine Nights takes place in a fantasy world where the main focus rests on a war between the humans and the goblins. These aren’t the only races involved in the conflict, the goblins receiving aid from orcs, dark elves, and lizardmen for example, but while having a bunch of monsters for the playable human characters to mow down with great ease and little remorse does seem like it’s initially going to be part of the premise, the plot actually tries to portray the war as a bit more complex. All seven of the playable characters have their own set of levels to play in order to unlock a final mission to wrap things up, but the first two you have access to have story paths that seem designed to make you question the war. Inphyy, the girl in angelic armor seen on the box art, and her brother Aspharr are both members of the Temple Knights, and depending on which story you play, one will have a higher ranking in that organization than the other. Inphyy uses her position of power to try and lead an extermination campaign against every goblin regardless of if they are soldiers or not while Aspharr is the one who realizes that fighting a war shouldn’t necessarily lead to such barbarism, but interestingly enough the game’s final mission seems to be a continuation of Inphyy’s story.

Even when you start playing as other characters, you’ll start to see that almost all of them include details that aren’t fully congruent with the events of the others, which is mostly odd because sometimes you’ll witness the climax of another character’s arc happen in someone else’s story before you even have the context to know what’s going on. The dramatic irony does make it a touch interesting to meet such characters, but the game also waits quite a while to really bring up what the Ninety-Nine Nights are at all and the greater danger beyond the war between humans and monstrous races doesn’t get too much time to establish itself. The game’s ending turns out to be remarkably underwhelming as it doesn’t really try to sort out much from this messy mix of possible events, but it also doesn’t work too hard to invest you in anyone’s story save for the more compact tale of the “mystery character” so it’s not too much of a loss to have the final cutscene barely last a few seconds before you watch the credits for the eighth time.

 

In most levels of Ninety-Nine Nights, you’ll set out with a character far stronger than the enemy army and a small army of your own to back you up. Some stages will allow you to pick which kind of soldiers will directly walk alongside you, and there is at least some strategy between bringing archers who can’t fight up close or infantry who can keep most enemy troops busy so your archers aren’t overwhelmed, but the levels mostly suggest which soldiers to use and there seems little reason to argue with its judgment. Your character is going to do the bulk of the fighting anyway, to the point finishing a stage having only killed 250 or so soldiers is actually on the lower end. To fight, you mostly rely on the X and Y button, the X button meant for quick and easy to chain attacks while throwing in uses of the Y button can add special effects. For example, the water mage Tyurru fires rapid fire water blasts with X, but Y will have her send out large waves of water instead, and if you combo them together she can do moves like leaping into the air to fire a large ball of water down on a group. Each character fights in a different manner with a weapon unique to them, and while characters like the goblin commander Dwingvatt will zip around wildly during their combos, for the most part, you can just get away with mashing the simplest attack buttons to mow through the enemy ranks. This is definitely meant to be deliberately easy and straightforward, the player rarely getting hit and even if an enemy troop is rearing up to strike, they often make it clear enough you can easily adjust the direction you’re attacking to take them out.

 

While most of what you face will be simple soldiers with melee weapons who mostly require time to kill rather than effort, there are a few foes like archers who will pester you if you don’t approach them, where they will then whip out regular weapons and become easy pickings. Some foes from different species are a little more capable, a frog man attacks more quickly than a goblin so you don’t want to get surrounded, but your own forces often provide a crowd you can find some safety in. In fact, many levels it’s probably more pressing you protect your men than yourself since they will actually get worn down fairly easily. Ninety-Nine Nights will try to put out some objectives to make it more pressing you fight the right enemies or clear out enough of them, but at the same time it can feel like it’s not putting enough pressure on you. When it’s time to protect an ally who’s surrounded by foes, they seem to be fine for a considerable amount of time. Ninety-Nine Nights does have dynamic difficulty that increases or decreases based on how often you die or clear levels, but the objectives are rarely meant to be challenges and more feel like they’re just there to tell you where you should go next to progress.

Ninety-Nine Nights isn’t lacking in tough enemies you’ll have to fight more carefully, some even taking the form of a briefly featured new enemy type, but when you fight a named character or something like a troll or goblin shaman, it feels less like the game is expecting creative comboing and more like you’re prodding a defense and hoping for it to be conveniently open. Boss characters hit hard and can hit multiple times, and while there are healing items to be found sometimes, there are other times you’ll wear your damage between conflicts and levels can go on for a half hour or more at times. Hammering the basic attack button to mindlessly clear baddies, losing to a hard hitting boss, and having to restart a stage that had no checkpoints ends up a slog, especially since you have little control over the battles with the tougher commanders. You do have more than your basic combos with two different meters you can build up. One is the Orb Attack where you briefly become much stronger and utilize new attacks, this great for quickly clearing a huge group of troops or dealing a good bit of damage to a boss. The Orb Spark is even better, it being an instant attack that will instantly wipe out most enemies it hits and it can take a big chunk out of a boss unless they decide to guard. Orb Attack’s enhanced mode can only be used after collecting enough orbs from fallen enemies and Orb Spark requires you to build energy up during Orb Attack, so there are times where you can’t build it up anymore during a conflict so you’re left with just your basic moves. Sometimes when you’re in the midst of a combo you’re temporarily invincible, but the boss characters have this benefit too and others won’t flinch when hit so they can attack you as you’re attacking. Too many fights like this can feel like you rely on another named character to be the boss’s focus while you run in and out, taking rare moments of opportunity to barely attack them before running back to stay safe. Alternatively though, you can sometimes exploit them, get them stuck in a loop of attacking them every time they get up, but beating a boss with a repetitive trick isn’t really a step up in entertainment value.

 

One unfortunate element of Ninety-Nine Nights is that it is an RPG. The role-playing game mechanics definitely feel more like a hindrance than a help, because while you can train up against previous levels to try and get stronger if one level is giving you trouble, most stories have 4 to 6 stages and all are fairly long. You won’t even be able to pull off certain attack combos until you’ve leveled up enough, which mostly just impacts the battles with sturdy foes where you’d want more options than the standard button mashing. Experience gained won’t be kept if you die and clearing more levels will bump up the difficulty too, but more importantly, actually leveling up is a slow process still. You can clear an entire level and not go up one level even when being thorough and wearing accommodating gear. You’ll grow at a decent rate if you continue the story, save for Inphyy whose final unlockable mission seems like it expects you to have reached max level to make it anything more than a tediously slow battle that makes previous boss battles feel brisk by comparison. Getting equipment can sometimes be more important than your natural strength though, and this can be a rough system as well. There are treasure chests with equipment to find, but others are random drops and not all equipment is even really useful at all. You need to level up to even get some accessory slots too, so helpful things like bolstering your health or experience point gain might not even be good to equip since you might want to pick something better like strength boosts to speed up the action a touch. When you clear a level you will be ranked on it, and if you get an A or S rank you will likely get a fairly good piece of gear, but for some levels it can feel like you get these rankings without even trying while others would be a considerable time investment. Just being thorough and clearing out most enemy groups you come across can often get you up there in rankings anyway, but having another barrier in your path to being tough enough to handle the boss characters who love to defend and negate damage really makes the game drag on much longer than it already does.

 

The graphics deserve at least a special note for how they can nearly handle having the huge armies on screen but seem to struggle at other times. Simple cutscenes that aren’t even showing large groups can have inexplicably bad camera angles, and even during a regular fight you might lose your character in a crowd of soldiers and goblins where you can’t make out much of what’s going on. It isn’t a hindrance technically, it’s not like you’ll need to change up your attack combo to compensate, and when there is slowdown, it’s usually during an understandable moment like when Tyurru’s tidal wave Orb Spark is able to cover so much of the battlefield while demonstrating decent water physics that it’s a bit surprising the game even went for such a visual. The battlefields unfortunately grow rather familiar with how few there are too, but at least a wintry gate, a castle town, the goblin fort, and other such locations try some to stand apart despite the inevitable revisits even if you never go level up your characters or search for gear.

THE VERDICT: N3: Ninety-Nine Nights seems poorly thought out in general. Rather than the story presenting different perspectives on a conflict, it muddles any chance to build a broader narrative with how things contradict each other while failing to build up the main threat enough. The battle system feels like it could have pulled off a mix of carving through basic enemies with ease but using smarter combos against bosses, but the game barely places objectives to guide the affair beyond where to head to next and tougher foes mostly just defend better so you lean more on exploitative tricks than smart battle tactics. With long levels with little going on that are a chore to repeat either because you die or you need to become stronger, Ninety-Nine Nights generally feels like its systems are at odds with each other, leading to a repetitive and aggravatingly dull experience.

 

And so, I give N3: Ninety-Nine Nights for Xbox 360…

A TERRIBLE rating. Ninety-Nine Nights may have been created in a rush, but it really didn’t need to drag out things the way it did. A cohesive plot that was split into pieces you’d gradually put together would be much better than the alternate takes and out-of-context scenes that poorly connect the seven stories we did get. Boss characters and special objectives are the right way to go about things, but on one end of the spectrum you have enemy commanders who are annoying to fight and on the other you have toothless objectives. If the game asks you to protect the catapults, they should feel like they’re in jeopardy, but your character is too strong against the rabble you normally fight but constantly rubbing against issues dealing damage to any foe with a bit of a brain. Already creatures like the troll take some time to kill and will only react to certain types of attacks, so having boss commanders lean into this design more instead of being guard-happy walls would make them actually have a chance of forcing out more interesting combo attacks. The RPG elements really let the game down here though since Ninety-Nine Nights can’t always be sure you’d have something that could knock a foe down since it wants to wait to dole out better combo options, but the way you earn new gear also can leave you fighting uphill battles unless you want to put time into slowly searching for random drops or killing every goblin to get a high rank. The game is at least not too stingy with things like health pick-ups or temporary power-ups and being able to so easily take out waves and waves of soldiers without much trouble will always work on some minor level as a power trip. However, that loses its luster quickly and plunging into a new level is often going to be a question of hoping you won’t spend thirty minutes doing mindless fighting only for something to hit you for your full health bar when something like the odd rock-rolling physics act up or the enemy commander pulled off a combo of their own.

 

N3: Ninety-Nine Nights is a failure of design, and one reason I lead with the easy Dynasty Warriors comparison is because game design is where something seemingly simple can push itself above its inherently repetitive core combat. Ninety-Nine Nights has many systems in it but they don’t feel like they agree with each other, and while probably only the messy narrative really feels like it outright fails when considered in isolation, it’s the game’s inability to gel something like the combo system with the enemies it presents where Ninety-Nine Nights goes from something repetitive to outright awful. I’d like to say more than six months could have given the team time to figure out how to make this a more harmonious package, but there is a sequel that doesn’t sound like it learned much from this experience. There are better and more rewarding time sinks with a similar concept out there, so it does seem like it’s best to stick with the series that understand the appeal of large scale battles rather than N3: Ninety-Nine Nights’s failed attempts to make much of what it offers.