Inphyy is the main character in the game, as is evident from her presence on the box’s cover and the amount of depth placed into her moveset and campaign.
Fresh off completing Samurai Warriors 2, I moved into another “epic” hack and slash type game: Ninety-Nine Nights. I really liked the “N3: Ninety-Nine Nights” title design. I think maybe my favorite letter of the alphabet is N, so to see N3 very big right before the actual title seemed cool to me. How many other letters can be rotated 180 degrees and still look at the same? Besides the interesting design of the letter “N,” many things that I enjoy seem to start with N – Nintendo, Nautica, and New Balance. Would Ninety-Nine Nights also be added to this list? Unfortunately not. It has some fun gameplay elements, but several design decisions to the game hinder it more than help the game. While it’s easy for me to see why professional game reviews have given it such a low score, I believe that the game itself is slightly under-rated. Just slightly.
Intro
Ninety-Nine Nights was a collaborative effort between a Japanese development company and a Korean one. Rarely do we ever see two companies working together for one game, let alone two companies where the companies don’t even speak the same language. The Japanese developer involved, Q Entertainment, is responsible for Lumines and Meteos, while the Korean developer, Phantagram, is known for its Kingdom Under Fire series. It’s easy to see the similarities Ninety-Nine Nights has to Kingdom Under Fire, a game similar to Koei’s Dynasty/Samurai Warriors franchise. Maybe Q Entertainment should go back to puzzle games, because this team-up definitely left more to be desired. Surprisingly, Famitsu, one of the “harshest” yet most popular Japanese game review magazines, gave it a 37/40. That’s just plain ridiculous that one of the reviewers thought the game deserved a perfect 10! Famitsu also recently stated though, that the review scores they give out for games are not only determined just for the game, but also due to its hype. I guess Ninety-Nine Nights was very hyped in Japan – which also probably explains why it didn’t do too well as people were completely let down.
Whenever I write reviews for games, I tend to focus on the gameplay itself and little on the aesthetics and inessential features of the game. I want to make a clear note though, that the aesthetics to the game are very well done, even if the gameplay itself is not the greatest. The graphics are breathtaking – the ability to render 100s or 1000s of enemy units on the screen running down a mountain to surround you is quite epic. Unfortunately, this game does push the processing power of the 360, as there is massive frame-stopping slowdown in this game when enough enemies are on the screen and you perform a super attack that brings down buildings. The musical score is also very well done – the English voice dubbing is horrible, but the music itself is quite pleasant. It definitely fits the game, although I wish it were more varied (there’s probably less than 10 epic musical tracks in the game).
One of the playable characters in the game is from the Goblin side, allowing you to see the humans in a more sinister light.
Storyline and Premise of the Game
The storyline is pretty bad for the game, unlike Samurai Warriors 2. It loosely follows the path of seven different characters in a fantasy world where humans and elves are fighting against goblins, orcs, trolls, and dark elves. The humans and the goblins each have half a gem, that when formed with its other half, will allow that race to rule. Hence, the humans and goblins are at war – it’s all very Lord of the Rings-ish. Each character has their own storyline and stages to play, although the game itself is very short and the storylines leave holes all over the place. Two of the “main characters” have six stages, while the rest have between two to five stages each. Each stage lasts about 20 minutes and has cutscenes before and after each stage. Unfortunately, with almost all of the characters’s endings, there is no sense of closure with any of them. It’s better to just not try to get into the story, as it isn’t quite complete.
The game is about action and fantasy warfare. If someone were to ask me how to describe the premise of Ninety-Nine Nights’s gameplay, I would say it’s just a huge all out war. The game is for the type of player that would enjoy mindlessly plowing through hundreds (or even thousands) of enemies at a time. Participating in epic fantasy battles as a hero is what this game is about. The levels in this game are more varied than those in Samurai Warriors 2, but are much fewer in number. It probably takes maybe 5-6 hours to get through the game on every character, unlike the 40+ hours it would take for all of Samurai Warriors 2′s 20+ unique characters.
Just like Samurai Warriors 2, there are mobs that are unnamed and weak, and there are enemy heroes and captains that you need to kill to advance through the level. Your character also gains experience and levels up with the more enemies you kill, maxing out at level 9. Along the way, you’ll find upgrades to your current weapon, new items to equip, and temporary items to use in battle. At the end of a stage you get graded for how well you did.
Killing enemies produce red orbs, which fill your Orb Attack meter
Game Mechanics
The main combat mechanic in this game revolves around orb attacks and orb sparks. Basically, any time you kill an enemy, they leave behind a red orb that automatically flies to you and fills a little part of your orb attack meter. Kill enough guys and your red orb attack meter eventually fills. Once that is full, you can perform an orb attack, which lasts until your decreasing orb attack meter empties. The orb attack allows you to do a high amount of damage to enemies and in large groups at a time. You can pretty much just plow through crowds of enemies killing everyone that stands in the way. Enemies killed from an orb attack will produce blue orbs, which go towards filling your blue orb spark meter. Once that meter is full, you can perform your super orb spark attack, which can not only destroy a large amount of enemies and buildings at the same time, but it is also the main cause of the massive slowdowns you’ll experience in the game.
Blue orbs appear when you kill enemies with your red Orb Attack.
Thus, in order to do well in this game, you need to pile up as many enemies as you can before unleashing an orb attack or an orb spark. This involves running around levels and training as big of a crowd as you can get before unleashing a super. Of course, it is more difficult because sometimes some mob groups won’t leave a certain area, and others get triggered to attack your side’s NPCs. Trying to round up lots of enemies to kill them all at once is actually somewhat of a fun premise, as some of the heroes’ super attacks are quite fun. One guy in particular has a meteor shower for his super orb spark attack, and not only will it decimate anyone on the ground ahead of him, it’ll knock flying enemy dragons out of the sky. The first time I was able to do that, I was just like, “whoa.” and laughed gleefully to myself.
Each playable character has a launcher and air juggle combo
At each level you have certain combo moves opened up to you – as you level up, you will gain access to more intricate and more powerful combos. It feels almost like a fighting game with some of these combos. The fighting system is well done and I have no complaints.
Circles under allied units represent units guards that you can order to attack a target or defend you.
There is also a guard system in the game. Most characters are allowed to have two armies guarding them, composed of either melee or archer units. They aren’t really useful besides holding the enemy mobs in place – as they do little to no damage. You pretty much tell them to attack a certain enemy group really just to keep the monster group held in that location so you can go and kill them by yourself.
There are, of course, negatives to this game. I was aware of these negatives before I bought the game, so they didn’t quite detract from my experience but I would like to state them regardless. The first negative is the hit detection in the game, especially for bigger bosses. Most of the time it’s adequate, but for the bigger bosses such as trolls and huge frog kings, you can keep swinging your weapon but it doesn’t feel like you’re ever connecting. It may be because the boss is so massive that its actual hit box is somewhere in the middle of its body, and your current weapon is not long enough to actually hit it. For me this problem was alleviated by equipping items that lengthened my weapon’s attack.
The other main complaint (besides it being too short) is that the save/checkpoint system is quite annoying. In the save system, you need to save each character’s profile to a different save because if you save them all to the same account, only the current character’s data is saved. I guess it make sense, since each character’s save has a huge icon of their face on the save data, but it’s not intuitive enough, nor does it make that much sense why the system can’t keep all the character files on just one save slot.
As for the checkpoints, there aren’t any. That means if you go through a level and die at the boss, you will start from the beginning of the level again. This seems like a big problem and annoyance in the game, but is actually not that bad. The only real time you get affected by this issue is on your first or second level for a particular character, when he’s just starting off and doesn’t have enough stats to beat the boss easily. Once you get over that hump, you can pretty much plow through the game’s levels without worrying about dying. So while it is annoying, I wouldn’t call it a show stopper.
Inphyy’s super Orb Attack allows her to slice through crowds of enemies like an arrow
Achievement System
The Achievement system in the game is both bad and good. It’s bad because there’s only 12 Achievements, and half of those are for just beating each character’s storyline. What’s good about it though, is that a few of these Achievements are actually something to be proud of, and they constitute the other 500 points in the Achievements besides the 500 you get from clearing every character’s story.
100 points are associated with the Achievement for defeating the real boss of the game. The only way you can actually fight him is to go through each character’s storyline. The boss of the game is no joke either – in fact, the only real way to be able to beat him is to get a random drop from one of the mobs on the level, which allows you infinite uses of your most powerful attack. I had to play through this level 4-5 times before getting this drop and killing the boss.
200 points are associated with getting at least a level A grade for every level in the game. This is not a bad Achievement, although I wish the 200 was broken up into level As for each character’s storyline. There were definitely some levels which were hard to get level As on, making the Achievement something to be somewhat proud of.
200 points are associated with maxing out each character to level 9 and beating their storyline again on their max levels. This was generally the most annoying Achievement. You can pretty much finish the game in 6-8 hours, but to get this achievement you need to probably put in maybe 10 more hours. And these 10 or so more hours aren’t exactly fun – for some characters that have only two to three stages, that means you have to play those stages over and over again maybe 5-6 times in order to level them to 9. And finally, even after you’ve leveled every character to 9, you still have to go through all their stages again as a level 9 to actually get the achievement. Granted, it’s a lot easier as a maxed out character plowing through every stage again, but it’s not something I enjoy – especially after spending the past several hours leveling up on those stages. So I’m not sure if this one achievement is something to be proud of, but if I saw another player with it, I would know that he definitely put a lot of time into mindless grinding like I did.
If you want to feel like you’re fighting in the middle of a fantasy war as a super powered hero with next gen graphics, this is the game to do that…
Final Thoughts
As much as I enjoy linear repetitive games that involve leveling up your character and collecting items, this game was a bit too repetitive to me. I can deal with actual gameplay repetition, as long as I’m presented new levels and/or different objectives as I continue to play the game. To be forced to replay the same few stages over and over again is definitely an exercise in patience and poor gameplay. Even Samurai Warriors 2 alleviated this issue by not only having a ton more characters to play as, but there was an option to play as any character on any stage in the game in a “free mode.”
Besides the mindless repetition of playing the same level for hours, the poor hit detection, unforgiving save feature, and frame stopping slowdown overshadow the game’s actual positive qualities. The game’s premise is fun, but it’s too short and it has too many problems.
I feel that it’s underrated in that it didn’t quite deserve the 50s and 60s from different review sites, but my review is not that much higher. I give it a C-. The game is inexpensive so it doesn’t feel like a major rip off for its length, and the visuals and music are top notch. It’s funny that screenshots make the game look great and fun to play, but only after playing it will you be able to see the poor hit detection and slowdown. I recommend this game to only fans of the genre, and even then, only to those that are willing to trade Samurai Warriors 2′s depth of gameplay and replayability for Ninety-Nine Nights’ graphics and presentation.
