Title: Ninety-Nine Nights

Date: 06.01.2006

Genre: 3D Action

Platform: Xbox 360

Developer: Q-Entertainment

Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios

N3 (Ninety-Nine Nights) is a game that looked really good in concept, but like games often do, the concept got lost somewhere along the road to creation. Going from an ideal perspective, who wouldn’t want a Dynasty Warriors type game with incredible next-gen graphics, an epic story shown from multiple perspectives, and a wide-range of moves that played a resemblance closer to a fighting game than a simple hack and slash? That would have been the game to move systems in Japan and the US. That would have been the action title to define the Xbox 360 for now. But unfortunately that’s not what we got.

The Good

First let’s start with what N3 actually came through on as not to paint a completely ugly picture on what is not all that bad of game. Visually N3 delivers on its promise of next-gen DW. Character models look far nicer than anything a DW-type game has shown to date (though they don’t really stand up to other X360 games due to their Dreamcast looking hair and bad animation), and the game keeps its promise and spits out hundreds and even thousands of these detailed characters at one time. Watching a hill in the distance go from a empty grassland to a war torn battlefield of hundreds can really get exciting and give that epic feeling. Attack animations are good as well, with what looks to be motion captured movements representing exaggerated real life weapon swinging techniques. Even the environments of N3 look good (though still sparse, with more detail and nicer colors (and grass!) than we’ve seen in these types of games before. Overall it’s a very pleasing title on the eyes and even the frame-rate stays pretty good most of the time. It definitely raises the bar for what should be expected of the first true next-gen DW game.

Music is another aspect of N3 that holds to the ideal of “epic” and “beauty”. While not every track is a winner, the majority of the music is fairly good and the few pieces that really do stick out are excellent and soundtrack-buying worthy. In battle the dramatic music pieces do a great job at getting your blood pumped for taking on the masses standing your way.

Also nice is that all of the characters in the game that you play as (7 in total), are quite unique individuals. They look different, play very differently (both in weapon properties and move lists), and all have their own personality. Unfortunately they aren’t balanced at all and while some of them are really great characters that are fun to play as, others are awful characters that you’ll grit your teeth while playing through. Lastly the crowd control aka mass battle gameplay in N3 is fairly solid. There’s very, very little depth, strategy, or skill to the game…but otherwise hacking at hundreds of enemies feels enjoyable and is at least as fun as any of the other DW-type games. As promised, players are treated to a large “move list” that grows at each level-up (levels are gained from killing hundreds), but for the most part you can beat the entire game just sticking to mashing on X. For those that enjoy this type of mindless and flashy fighting, N3 satisfies in this department.

The Bad

Now while N3 has issues with a lot of small things, what really kills the game from being a good title is that the engine is fundamentally broken when it comes to boss fights. For some reason, unlike normal enemies, bosses can have attacks pass right through them without taking any damage, even if they aren’t blocking. During these fights it seems that about half of your hits against a boss never register as hitting, or even if they do, half of the time they won’t register any damage. There’s really no rhyme, reason, or predictability to this because just when you think you’re doing something wrong you’ll get random hits in that will do real damage and you’ll slowly start chipping life off the boss.

To make this worse, while it’s almost impossible to die on normal enemies because they do basically no damage (besides one type of shaman enemies that does incredible amounts of damage), bosses will kill you in one to three hits. Yet, just as half of your attacks won’t register on the boss, half of their attacks won’t register on yourself as well! So sometimes you’ll get hit and take no damage and then sometimes you’ll get hit and die instantly. It’s this random aspect of the broken-beyond-words hit detection that really kills any strategy on bosses besides letting the boss fight your invincible NPC (always provided as if the developers realized the bosses were so broken it would be impossible to fight them directly) and poking him/her in the back while they prey on the NPC, meanwhile running away every time the boss turns its attention to you. This strategy is used for every boss in the entire game from start to finish and since every level has a boss, there’s not a level that doesn’t feel broken in some way.

This is made much worse than it should be do to the lack of any checkpoints whatsoever. Take a wrong hit on a boss twenty minutes or more into the stage and bam! You’re back at the start. Since when you do and when you take damage is almost random, this means until you master the art of running away and poking bosses, you’ll find yourself dying over and over on certain stages and wasting hours trying to complete a twenty-five minute stage. Checkpoints could have made this issue much less painful, but alas, there are none.

Then there is the low replay value and lack of story. Despite having only seven characters, each character scenario is only 4-5 stages long (with the hidden character only having 2). Since stages are around 20-30 minutes in length that means most characters can be completed in a 2 hour session. Unfortunately once you complete all the scenarios there’s no real incentive to play the game anymore.

N3 has no difficulty levels (something that could have fixed the balance issues a bit plus added replay value), no online modes, and the max level for each character is fairly low and easy to obtain. Maybe this could’ve been ok if the characters had great stories that would make you want to replay their campaigns, but the story in N3 is basically non-existent and what is there is absolutely dreadful. The stories of the various characters (well if you count one or two 30 second cut-scenes as a “story”) don’t even match up as a coherent piece and the closest comparison to how much of a tale these characters have would be the amount of “story” each character has in a fighting game like Tekken or Soul Calibur has…except at least some of those ones are entertaining. If N3 represents Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s storytelling ability, than maybe he should stick to making great games and leaving the writing to others.

Overall

With no online play, a bunch of short campaigns that can be completed in a few days, no balance whatsoever, no story, and the worst boss fights you’ll ever experience, N3 is a game that can’t even stand up to the ranking of “average”. While it’s true that for 70% of each stage while you are just mashing buttons and sending enemies flying, N3 is an enjoyable mindless romp, the fact of the matter is that the other 30% is so bad it definitely qualifies as “broken”. If you enjoy wanting to break your controller and enjoy mediocre DW clones, then give N3 a try. Otherwise it’s barely even a rental.

Pros

Graphics are nice
Music is good
Crowd Control is mindless but fun if that’s your kind of thing

Cons

Boss fights are dreadful
Engine is broken when it comes to one on one fights
There is no gameplay balance
No checkpoints
No Story
No lip-synch in cut-scenes and the animation is jerky for some reason
Fairly short game with limited amount of stages

Game Score

7.2

Reviewed By: Contributed