Ninety Nine Nights II

Nine? Nein!

Chalk up another thousand kills. That’s three thousand so far, and plenty of level left to go. I feel my fingers twitch on the controller, like my character’s on his twin swords, and supress a smile. There’s a raw thrill to hacking your way through legions of enemies, a base satisfaction that calls out to the would-be warrior in all of us. Allied infantry cheer my name with elation when I join the fray; their survival rests solely on my shoulders.

The Musou genre, as coined by Tecmo Koei’s Dynasty Warriors series, is unique in bringing this sensation to the player. Of course, when playing as Kratos, or Dante, or Bayonetta, you feel that you’re a powerful warrior capable of taking down enemies by the dozen. But only by the dozen. In crowd combat games of the genre that Tecmo Koei still dominates, dozens are a triviality. Hundreds, if not thousands, are the order of the day for the likes of Ninety Nine Nights II.

Much like the original, Blue Side’s second foray into this genre eschews the faux-realistic trappings of Koei’s Warriors games and opts instead for a more western-feeling fantasy setting, and couples it with buckets of gore. The result is an altogether darker, grittier game, fitting given the storyline and a welcome break from the too-clean violence of Dynasty Warriors. Picking up an undisclosed time after the first game, Ninety Nine Nights II – or N3II, as it prefers to be stylised – once again tells the saga of a world in which the powers of light and darkness are ensconced in magical Orbs, the Orb of Day and the Orb of Night, maintaining the balance of the world. If the Orb of Night is awoken, the Lord of Night can return. 99 days of night descend, and the Lord of Night and his forces will try to obtain the Orb of Day. Should he do so, the world is reborn in darkness. Guess what? The Lord of the Night has returned, and as the story begins, has just a few days left to obtain the Orb of Light.

Cue the arrival of warrior Galen to the Elf capital of Orphea, currently under siege by the Lord of Night’s armies. Why is it under siege? Because that’s where princess Sephia guards the Orb of Day, of course. Galen is one of five playable characters in N3II – the others introduced gradually as you encounter them in the game - and though each has separate campaigns which tell their stories through the last few days the core of the saga is really about Galen, and to a lesser extent Sephia. The storylines of the other characters are important, though, since they fill in glaring gaps in events- in order to really follow what goes on in the storyline, you’ll need to play the game through with all of them.

And how does it play? N3II doesn’t do a great deal to mess with the formula of its predecessor. Your hero takes to the battlefield – usually alone, though occasionally accompanied by an incompetent AI companion – and must complete the myriad tasks before him (or her). N3II actually comes up with some interesting scenarios here; whilst many boil down to ‘kill this enemy’ there are occasional flashes of inspiration, like having to navigate through a maze of whirlwinds conjured by wizards, negotiate your way past poison spores and defend strategic locations from waves of foes. Nothing genre-defining, but enough variety to keep your interest for a while. Combat itself feels initially less varied, since your character basically has traditional light and heavy attacks that can be chained together into combos that cut swathes through your foes, though N3II mixes things up by including customisable skills and varied enemy types. Footsoldiers and Archers are par for the course, though the freakish centaur knights are rather more challenging, Wizards delight in spewing spells at you and conjuring more foes, Giants prove too stubborn to really notice when you hit them and just pummel you into the ground instead, whilst harpies take great delight in flying away and chucking things at you. New enemies are introduced gradually, but by the later levels you’ll be trying to fight through legions of mixed enemies which can prove rather demanding. Individually, most foes are neither challenging nor particularly smart; but there’s a clear emphasis on strength in numbers.

Each character also has access to a unique Orb attack. These differ slightly, and each can be used in two ways; either rendering a character invincible whilst they carry out frenzied power attacks, culminating in a final, powerful blow, or by unleashing an explosion centred around the character. The five characters on offer – warrior Galen, determined Princess Sephia, hulking blue-skinend brute Magni, sneaky goblin Levv and underdressed archer Zazi – all play mostly the same; though each has a unique ability that alters the way in which the different levels play out and the routes you take. Most levels are shared between two or more characters, though with subtle differences, but a couple are unique to each protagonist.

Skills offer a welcome degree of character customisation (though different weapons and unlockable costumes help a little, too). You can equip four active skills and four passive; active skills range from sweeping attacks and magic missiles to healing abilities, whilst passive skills confer different traits; providing resistance to certain types of damage, for instance, adding elemental properties to attacks, or enhancing other skills. Experimenting with different skills actually proves quite satisfying, though most skills are hidden away in the levels, often guarded by tough enemies, making the act of acquiring them a bit tricky.

Because N3II is not an easy game, and that’s not always down to sheer difficulty – quite often it comes down to irritatingly poor design decisions. Most of the time you won’t notice as you’re happily mowing down hordes of foes, but every once in a while things start to grate. Bosses are tough, and do immense damage, but there’s normally a knack to them that makes them easy to defeat. Some encounters are painfully unbalanced, but they’re usually optional. Some set pieces will hammer you down until you realise you’re taking completely the wrong tack. The problem is, learning usually involves quite a bit of trial and error, and a lot of death. But when levels can last upwards of 30 minutes, and you might only get one –if any- checkpoint in that time, the notion becomes less palatable. Healing potions are placed sporadically, the sole healing spell has a lengthy cooldown between uses, and your health doesn’t naturally regenerate. If you die, you do at least start again with full health, but given that you might be booted back to the beginning of the level even though you died right before the boss, that’s little consolation.

N3II also includes an online co-op mode, which lets two players take on sections of the campaign and unique levels with their characters (which carry over their experience, weapons and skills from the single player game). Given that the levels often split players up, taking alternate routes and clearing paths for one another, there’s quite a bit of promise here, but we weren’t able to test the co-op mode at the time of writing. Even without that, though, N3II is a lengthy game – completing the game with all 5 characters on the standard difficulty will easily take upwards of 20 hours. Whether that’s an investment you want to make will, of course, depend on your feelings of the genre.

As for the visuals, N3II is leaps and bounds ahead of its rivals here. The characters are nicely animated and detailed, even down to the enemies, and whilst there’s a fair bit of repetition in the legions of identical foes this is forgivable when the game throws so many on screen at a time. Its noticeably darker than the first game, with a grim, semi-gothic art style and lashings of blood accompanying the various dismemberments of enemies, but the framerate largely keeps up with the action, even during the most crowded or special effects-laden sections. A few hiccups mar the look; rubble from destroyed objects bounces and fades away into nothingness, and the environments themselves can often look a bit drab. It’s certainly not the best looking title on the platform, but it’s a considerable improvement over the recent Dynasty Warriors titles, and over the first game. The soundtrack hasn’t fared so well; Pinar Topak’s score for the first game was superb, but N3II’s accompaniment is mostly forgettable, if appropriately dramatic at the right places. You can elect to go for Japanese or English voice acting; The English cast mostly does a decent job but a couple of characters really let the side down, so you might want to opt for Japanese for a more consistent experience.

Written by :

James Hall