NiGHTS is short and limited, but will keep you coming back for more
The point of the game is to free nights every level, and rescue your Idea, or small coloured gems. They all represent some emotion I forget what. You can play the games as the children, and at this point the game is a 3D platformer. Each child can roam freely about the world, although they cannot fly without releasing and playing as NiGHTS. As either child, you can collect the blue gem chips, but this is much easier as NiGHTS. After a while, the clock starts to chase you, and if it catches you twice, you wake up. I heard somewhere that you can beat it by jumping on it, but I never managed. If you play as NiGHTS, you can fly around the world in one of 4 preset routes, although there is some variation in how you go about them, the basic route order and premise is always the same. you must collect a certain number of chips to break the cage. If you avoid the cage and continue to fly around the levels, going through hoops and collecting gold chips, you will rack up a huge amount of points, and get much better score. At the end of each timed level, there is a timed boss, and for each one there is a very quick but difficult to execute trick that gives you a maximum score multiplier.
The level design for this game was amazing, and despite the fact I got the Saturn quite late on (I had a PS2 at the time) I thought the graphics were great. I was told at the time that the analogue controller was one of the first made (although they were beaten by the N64, apparently it had been in production before this). This has only been partially backed up by Wikipedia. Lots of people criticised this game for being too short, and truly, it could be completed in an afternoon, but in doing so, many people missed out on the true genius of the game. It wasn't the innovative and well executed game play, or the fact that the story had been mostly unvoiced and left to your
imagination, but the fact that the music was entirely generated by your performance on the previous level, as was, I believe, your choice of boss fight. And it wasn't just the overall level music that changed depending on your performance, it changed for every route inside the level. So if you had beaten the boss quickly, the next level you played would have good music. The better you did on the first circuit, the better the second circuit's music. And all 5 parts of the level had 5 seamlessly interlocking pieces written for them (one for each grade), that's 25 tracks per level! This was for all 6 levels for both characters (I don't think the Twin Seed level did,). There was nothing in the manual about this, so the mood remained subtly linked to the change in music. It was made apparent on the release of Christmas NiGHTS, as the music editor that you could unlock had all the pieces of music strung together. Another seemingly superfluous feature of NiGHTS, was the acrobatics. It gave you points, and apparently could make you take corners better, but wasn't necessary to finish the game at all. And it was such a joy! It made the flying seem a lot less restricted too.
Despite my childish nostalgia for this game, there were an awful lot of bad points. The game was very short, although the difficulty curve going from C to A grades was steep, and some of the bosses were fiendish enough to drag game play out for a few more hours. The graphics haven't aged well by today's standards, but I think they were great at the time. The tone of the game was horribly sugary, and all this nonsense about Idea and chasing your dreams is wholly unpalatable for me, although the lack of space or speed on this console forced there to be major cut backs on voice acting and story development, which I feel was a blessing. The major let down of this game was the ending theme. One of the earliest games to have an actual song at the end, and it was rubbish! I was shocked! The song lyrics are the usual soppy nonsense of friendship and finding someone, but it is sung by two children. Firstly I feel the theme of the song was a little mature for them to sing, and secondly: Oh my God, they are completely a-tonal! Were they related to the design team or something!? I have never heard such bad singing in all my life, its atrocious. Half way through, the adults have to take over its so bad... And this has become one of the most prominent reoccurring themes throughout all three games! It spoiled a really brilliant game, and since it was before sound compression was widely used took up so much room you could have made a whole new level...
In conclusion, this is a wonderful game, with so much going for it, but I don't think anyone playing this for the first time now will be able to appreciate it as much as I did then. The more time goes by, the more fondly I remember it, but in truth, I think the sequel Journey of Dreams is the better game.