Ninety-Nine Nights

"Pretty graphics and... well..."

Ninety-Nine Nights is not a quality game, as much as it may look like one. The novelty of having hundreds of enemies and allies on the screen at once fades quickly once you realize you can't see a thing you are doing anymore. Along with glaring gameplay problems, spikes in difficulty, and voice acting that will make your ears bleed, N3 falls very short of worthiness.

Plot: 2 of 10
Frankly, there isn't one. The characters' personalities are as sophisticated as wooden boards and the story is random and incoherent. There's barely a reason for why you move from stage to stage except "Oh, no, some other place is being attacked in this war we don't know anything about!" The cutscenes during battles are very badly directed and disrupt the flow of the mindless killing.

Graphics: 8 of 10
The quality of the playable characters' models and major enemies is very good, except for some clipping of their hair and clothing. Games like this don't put much effort into the appearance of your basic grunt unit, especially if you're wanting to have three hundred of them on-screen at once. The scenery within levels is fairly boring and repetitive, but there is a good amount of variance between the levels themselves.

Sound: 3 of 10
When the characters aren't shouting things at each other... well, that's about all they do. The acting is terrible, and the lip syncing during cutscenes makes it worse. There are a handful of music tracks, but really, I can't remember any of them.

Everything above is nitpicking at parts of games that, in essence, don't really matter, especially in the hack n' slash genre. Gameplay is where a game does (or should) truly shine or be burned as a crime against society.

Gameplay: 2 of 10
Oops. Imagine Dynasty Warriors without the epic feeling of the battles. Imagine Drakengard without the dragons. Imagine Kingdom Under Fire without the need of coherent thought. Then you have Ninety-Nine Nights. You will perform combos on large numbers of enemies from the time you pick up the controller to when you place it down. Fighting against the goblin hordes is fun, for a while. Then you may notice that you can get 1500+ combos by only pressing the Y button. Your guards do somewhere between no to little damage, and if left to their own devices, will be slaughtered mercilessly. You are babysitting a crowd of decoys. Normal monsters die before they can even pose a threat to you, but a boss monster can kill you easily in 3-4 hits, even with full life. Combine that with the sheer difficulty of even striking the boss because of A) if they're attacking you cannot harm them, B) if they're standing still you probably won't hit them because your attacks won't clip, C) if you do hit them most attacks do no damage, or D) if someone else is attacking them you can't hit them. Since there are no checkpoints, getting killed by a boss forces you to restart the entire stage, some of which are very long and boring.

Rent or Buy: Rent if you dare

I am a fan of the Dynasty Warriors franchise. I enjoyed playing Drakengard and Kingdom Under Fire. I breathe hack n' slash games. This one makes me gag.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 09/05/06