N3: Ninety-Nine Nights Review

August 14, 2006 – If you haven’t grown tired of the hack-and-slash gameplay in Dynasty Warriors games, Ninety-Nine Nights might be the title that does it. The gameplay is shallow, the story is generic, and there isn’t anything present to make you feel like you’re going to miss out if you just turn the game off and walk away. Although we are months into a new generation of hardware, N3 shows that not all games have made the jump.

Ninety-Nine Nights follows the tale of a war between goblins and humans. In order to learn the full background and reason for the war, you’ll have to play as each of seven heroes. Depending upon which character you play as, you’ll receive a different bit of the story, though the outcome of the war will be different due to that hero’s actions. It’s fun having different perspectives, but having different outcomes serves to fracture any sort of cohesion there may have been. Not that it matters too much. The story is paper thin and feels like a cheap Lord of the Rings clone. The game doesn’t spend much time enveloping you in a story or in the characters’ motivations, making it feel like the story was slapped on as an afterthought. Even for fantasy fans, there isn’t much to get excited about here.