Ninety-Nine Nights

Has Mizuguchi been able to add his touch to this Dynasty Warriors-esque action game?

	Version Xbox 360	Developer Phantagram, Q Entertainment	Publisher Microsoft	Genre Action

By Alex Wollenschlaeger

If you're hoping to have any fun with Ninety-Nine Nights, the first thing you need to do is rid your brain of the knowledge that Tetsuya Mizuguchi had anything to do with it. This is a button-mashing battlefield hack-'n'-slash in the vein of Dynasty Warriors taken down the middle with no eye to pushing the genre or the hardware.

It's a shame, really, because it starts out so well. The first few battles you fight are ripe with the new as you discover the combo system and take in the gussied up destruction. Some of the earliest press shots for Ninety-Nine Nights showed bodies hurling through the air, and that's exactly what you're able to do in the game.

The core gameplay involves chaining together light and heavy attacks in an accelerating death-waltz. The more you kill (and, with body counts hitting a thousand in a 20-minute level, you're killing a lot) the more magical orbs (think Onimusha) you earn. Once you've gathered enough of these, you gain special attacks and then you can really send the death-ticker flying. The problem is that it gets old not long after you've settled in.

Battles become so intense so quickly that you're essentially pressing buttons without actually being able to see what you're doing. Actually, keeping an eye on your immediate surroundings is challenging enough, thanks to the troublesome camera. It doesn't help that all the enemies are of a similar shade of grey as your own troops, muddying what is already a murky battlefield. So instead of deliberating pressing combos, once things get heady you'll oftentimes find yourself reverting to the basic moves without even targeting anything in particular. Mash, mash, mash.

Phantagram has tried to include a semblance of broader control through guard units whose actions are mapped to the trigger buttons and the D-pad. You can choose from a variety of guard unit types before battle, putting them in attack and defense formations when you see fit. It's an admirable attempt at expanding the experience, or at least it would be if it were at all practical to use the feature. You can just as easily keep the default guard types, set them to attack, and leave it at that. The guard units are dumb enough that no matter what you do they'll be rather ineffective, so there's no point in trying to use finesse.

Guards aren't the only dimwits in the game. Enemies act in groups, surging packs of malicious though ultimately daft attack dogs. Their aggression seems to be triggered by proximity, and if you're not close enough, they'll sometimes just stand there, in bizarre silence on the otherwise chaotic battlefield.

In these aspects, Ninety-Nine Nights is a mildly entertaining Dynasty Warriors clone, but outside of the main experience it falls flat. There are no other modes to keep you playing after the seven-pronged story mode is done and online play in any form is a no-show. It feels like the developers had the main mode in mind and simply blew off the idea of taking it any further.