Ninety-Nine Nights

The Short


Pros
- Lots of hacking and also slashing to be had
- Tons of different characters with unique abilities
- Shows a pretty insane number of units on-screen at once
- You feel kind of badass when you are killing 20 people at once with a massive weapon
- Has a story. I think.

Cons
- Gets boring after about the first five minutes
- Characters are poorly balanced; some are extremely powerful, others are just horrible
- Tons of cheap deaths
- Boss units/fights aren't fun
- Incredible lack of depth
- They attempt to interweave a story between characters. They don't pull it off.

Get ready to kill boatloads of dudes by yourself. 

The Long

Ninety-Nine Nights has drawn comparisons with the Dynasty Warriors series, and for good reason. Both games involve essentially two massive armies clashing into each other, with you playing as a super-powered hero tasked to push the front forward until you win. Apparently there are people who actually like these games, because there's almost as many Dynasty Warriors games as there are Final Fantasy games, with new ones coming out on every platform at a pretty regular clip. Seeing as I hadn't played any Dynasty Warriors games before busting out Ninety-Nine Nights (hereto referred to as N3), I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

What I found was a game that looked cool from the offset, but quickly coasts its way into monotony. 

Armored, winged anime character with gratuitous cleavage? Must be a Japanese game. 

The basic premise of N3 is simple: many armies are clashing, you are a hero/leader/captain/whatever, and you have to make it so they win. So a jillion dudes will go running at each other, and its your job to run out and murder as many of them as possible. The more you murder, the further your troops can advance. You'll capture points and kill some bosses on the maps, and then you'll win. Later, rise, repeat for a dozen or so levels and then you switch characters. Play through every characters' dozen levels and you beat the game. Done.

The repetitiveness in terms of overarching structure is nothing compared to the repetitiveness in actual combat. 

Pre-teen witch showing enough leg to make a hooker blush? Japan. 

It's your regular hack-n-slash, meaning you hit "x" and "y" a lot and people die. There is literally no depth to this combat whatsoever. There is the ability to gather "souls" or something of that sort from enemies that lets you go into a powered-up state, but that's pretty much the only additional ability you have. There are a few combos but none are particularly interesting or necessary (since the hordes of enemies tend to just stand there and die unless they are the bosses), and though each character does have unique attacks and abilities (and upgrades, which are all small and do next to nothing) the monotony of the whole thing is just overwhelming. How do you fail at a hack n' slash games? These games are boring by design, so their target audience is usually more forgiving. This game is just...tedium incarnate. 

The effects aren't particularly flashy, and the only good thing graphically is the massive number of foes on-screen

That was really short, but that's essentially N3. That's the whole game. I know, now you are chomping at the bit to run out and buy it, but hold on, savvy consumer! I forgot to mention the best part: the balance issues!

So as you play through the levels with each specific character they level up and grow more powerful, and it's an extremely slow burn with regard to difficulty: each specific character scenario starts off slightly harder than the one before it, but you still have to burn through a dozen levels before it becomes a challenge. The issue is that two of the last characters are the extremely slow brute character and the fragile, bad-combo pre-teen witch (as seen above). By this point the game is starting each mission with a higher difficultly level, but they aren't giving you better characters to cope with these (the fast, twin-daggered goblin is probably the most powerful character in terms of raw damage). This was about the time I really started hating N3: it went from being a dull, boring, easy grind to a rather difficult grind. Sure, the previous characters had tons of cheap deaths, but at least I could get to the end levels before it started getting ridiculousness. With jailbait witch I was dying constantly from the start. Maybe I just suck, but it really got old fast and seemed like some really poor pacing and balancing.

The characters couldn't be more cookie-cutter anime cliches

The graphics also look blurry and muddy, with poor textures throughout. Your main characters look decent (it's an early release Xbox 360 game, so I'm willing to cut it some slack) but all the generic enemies look like something off the PS2. They probably had to do this because they put a trillion of them on screen at once, which I'll admit is pretty impressive, but since they all look like garbage the magic is sort of dead. Effects like fire and magic all putter out without much flare or excitement, and the backdrops for this action are blurry, boring, and uninteresting. It's about as bland as it comes. 

Hiding your bad graphics under motion blur doesn't work, N3. 

As it stands, it's hard for me to recommend Ninety-Nine Nights, even for those who enjoy these types of games. I will admit I managed to have at least a little bit of fun with the game during the first few characters, with the idea of murdering tons of people constantly driving the game forward...sort of. But in retrospect it was a long, dull experience that I'd probably not want to ever replay. It wasted my Saturday, I can say that much, but it shouldn't waste yours, because you read this review and now know better. 

I don't suggest buying it, but if you are really insistent I suppose under $5 isn't too horrible. It just does so many things wrong, even in its own genre that makes a name for doing things wrong, that Ninety-Nine Nights is just...it's bad, ok? No more joking: this game sucks. Just....it's bad. Don't play it. I'm done.

One out of five stars.