Ninety-Nine Nights 2 Review

08 Sep 2010 at 14:59:14 by John Robertson
Systems used to review this title: (360)

Ninety-Nine Nights 2 faces an uphill battle for acceptance from a Western gaming audience; the one man versus ten thousand, hack and slash, Dynasty Warriors-esque style of gameplay has never really obtained much of a footing outside of Japan. Perhaps one day a game will emerge that makes us Westerners sit up, take notice and declare that this is a genre worthy of praise and respect. Whenever that day is, it’s not today.

Rather than representing a chance to increase the genre’s relatively small appreciation society in this part of the world, Ninety-Nine Nights 2 will only act as further ammunition to the argument that is a type of game that’ll never do particularly well ‘at the box office’. Like other games in the same ilk, it suffers from a massive personality crisis.

Is it a fighting game? Is it an adventure game? Is it purely an action game? It is an RPG? The answer is that’s a little bit of all of them, resulting in it being a master of none. There are a number of potentially interesting elements on display here but no single one of them has been developed to the point where it becomes especially interesting, enjoyable or worthy of your time.

If they’ve ever played a Dynasty Warriors game, or the original Ninety-Nine Nights, then the basic structure on show here is going to be familiar. Essentially each mission tasks you with traversing through an environment, taking out the bad guys and sometimes accomplishing some other objective (usually involving smashing something to bits or facing off against an end of level boss). Missions are split among five different characters that differ in their speed, strength and health, as well as their appearance. You’ve got your big, slow tough guy and your small, fast, nimble girl alongside the typical ‘average-at-every-skill’ main character, Galen.

Each has their own story that intertwines with the rest of the cast as you progress but, in truth, it’s all extremely basic stuff that you’ve no doubt experienced in any number of run of the mill fantasy movies, books, TV shows and videogames. Long before you reach the climax of a character’s story you’ll have stopped caring about their quest and realised that it’s not just worth the effort in continuing to see the end. Besides, the cut-scenes and voice acting are so wooden and barren of any charisma or charm that you’ll likely end up skipping them altogether after you’ve put yourself through the first few.

As is expected of the genre, each mission throws about ten thousand enemies your way. For a while there’s fun to be had in diving headlong into a mass of minions and decimating their numbers with wild swings of your weapon, launching them into the air and watching as limbs part company with their owners. That fun however, only exists on a very primal, instantly fleeting level and soon mutates into a sense of suffocating boredom as you realise that you’re performing exactly the same actions on very similar enemies three hours later.

Boss fights are no better. Lazily incorporated into the main missions, you’re staple diet of generic enemies alters now and then as you’re forced to take on bigger a foe. The tactics needed to take them down though are exactly the same, essentially involving running straight at them and smashing away at the buttons until they flop over and die. Sometimes you’ll need to time your attacks to avoid their own, but that’s about as deep as it gets.

Most missions decree that you must meet certain objectives tasks to achieve victory. These almost exclusively involve finding a certain object in the environment (a pillar or alter) and smashing away at it until it’s either destroyed, or it changes colour to signify you’ve activated whatever it is you’re supposed to activate. It’s this type of lazy game design that really stops this being a worthwhile experience. If the combat was exactly the same but the game tasked with you interesting ways to utilise your skills and explore the world then Ninety-Nine Nights 2 might have been halfway enjoyable, but the level design quickly removes any possibility of that being the case.

There’s also an issue with the length of the missions, almost all go on far too long and fail to keep you interested up until the end. Add to that the extremely harsh check pointing that forces you back to an area you passed through fifteen minutes ago upon death, and you’ve got a game that only the most hardcore of fans are going to get much satisfaction from.

To spice the action up a little, red orbs are collected from enemies you’ve defeated in battle as well as from those most quintessential of item storage locations, the wooden crate and/or treasure chest. Between missions these can be used to upgrade your character, your weapons or your assigned magic abilities.

RPG elements like these are becoming more and more common in action orientated games, so it’s no surprise to see them here. It’s also no surprise, given the quality of the rest of the game, that they do nothing to heighten the experience beyond the fact that you’re collecting and spending some kind of in-game currency. The improvements to your character are barely noticeable because the difficulty increases at pretty much the same rate as you level up, meaning that no matter how tough you get the enemies always seem to be as strong as ever. Spending for the sake of spending is fun in the real world but not so fun elsewhere.

Visually as well, there’s not a lot to get worked up about. Areas are dull and uninteresting, textures lack any real detail and the character models lack any substantial creativity or individuality. Clearly the processing power has gone into generating as many onscreen enemies as possible, but the result is that you’re fighting you’re way through a game that looks many years old.

It’s difficult to see who is going to be tempted by Ninety-Nine Nights 2. As mentioned before, the genre is not particularly well liked over here and this is not a good example of what it can produce. The best advice is to probably just ignore this altogether, whether you’re a genre fan or not.   

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