Orphea is in dark times. 92 days ago the Lord of the Night appeared, and his armies began spreading all over the land. What’s worse, most of Orphea’s men are useless, which is where the five epic heroes come in to save the day, hacking and slashing the dark forces that ravage the land into bits by the thousands. In the newest addition to Ninety Nine Nights saga, the game begins with you assuming the role of the main character Galen. As you travel further and further you begin to unlock more and more of the available characters, combos, special powers and even some extra badass looking weapons to spice the game up just a little bit more.
Unfortunately Q Entertainment could have done a much better job of the game. You would expect that so much more could have been done with this sequel than just change the story line and characters. It does really seem to be the same ol’ hack-‘n’-slash game with repetitive use of combos and enemies to fight, which took up 80 percent of the game time.
Even though there are a nice variety of characters to choose from, there is not much of a difference between them all. Yes, of course each of the characters do come with their own weapons and one special ability, but trying different strategies is not really necessary to clear the game. You can easily get away with running into the middle of the battle and button mashing those combos to victory. Even if one character was a little faster or stronger than another all I really had to do to clear to the next mission was the same strategy over and over again using different combos.
Even though it’s always fun to just completely embarrass your foes, it made the battles seem very repetitive. With special abilities you really only use them when your in a very tight situation (which was very rare because the AI was so poor), or when you environmental obstacles blocked your progress. For the brief moments outside of battle, like in the midst of some frustrating platform sections, the game’s controls just did not make the jumping an easy task at all – you could tell this game was not made to favour that aspect whatsoever.
The crossover between stories also have so many unfortunate side effects of repeating entire stages over and over again. Q Entertainment does in fact do a very good job at varying the objectives and pieces of a stage in between each of the characters, but re-using the same locations and even some of the same objectives with most of the characters does not help with the outmoded combat, and also does not make it feel any fresher. I had to trail along the same stage, with almost all exact objectives, using four of the five characters which can get very annoying, boring and extremely repetetive.
The massive amount of enemies they put in Ninety Nine Nights 2 leads to other troubles as well. Sometimes the handout of power causes dozens of targets on-screen to pop up all at once, caused the game to show signs of ugly environmental pop-ins. Being caught between a wall and hundreds of enemies with no method of escape would really frustrate me.
The game has solid combat mechanics. Attacks only have two strengths, but by doing those combos you unlock a variety of spells, letting you develop your own style of battle. A major change I would have like to see, though, would be a much more fluid combat system because the combat animations, once in motion, could not be cancelled. Especially because most of the time your guard command is useless when you’re committed to your attack. It was almost always more beneficial to continue attacking and dodging their attacks rather than defending.
Guarding isn’t really a necessity in Ninety Nine Nights 2, mostly because the enemies aren’t particularily very smart. What the Lord of the Night’s hordes have in quantity, they lack in quality. Even though there are hundreds of enemies on-screen, almost all of them are just plain useless. If you’re planning on taking over the world anytime soon I wouldn’t recommend using these minions – if they attack, they don’t attack all at one time (or at least 2 at the same time), and if and when they do attack, they usually run away from the battle or get stuck on a wall.
As a major fan of the first Ninety Nine Nights, I was a little disappointed in the second N3 saga and I also thought the game was average and forgettable. Even if you could have plenty of fun from hacking and slashing down the mass amounts of enemies coming at you at once, the entertainment is shortlived and the repetitiveness of the combat and same missions can not carry on the 20- plus hour campaign.
Ideally, I would like to see a much smarter and challenging spread out of enemies in this game for more of a challenge, because the way they made this game it’s a very easy task to complete it. Even if they have to take a few hundred of the thousands of soldiers out of the game to get the better all-round quality boss battles and normal game battles for a better challenge and to keep you thinking. I would also like to see more of a free-roam additive to the game so you can choose whether to go further on into the missions or just choose to explore all the previous areas you have cleared and/or level up, kind of like in Final Fantasy.
There is, however, always a bright side to a less-then-average game. On a good note I loved the length of the campaign. One of the most important things to me and most other gamers is a long lasting game, as most games these days are so fast-paced and head-on that the give you little time to enjoy the game completely, they’re for not getting your entire money’s worth out of.
Hopefully if Q Entertainment decides to make a third Ninety Nine Nights, they will seriously consider adding more challenging foes, more freedom to explore, maybe more than one special move and hey they could even add a couple more characters to unlock.
