When you play Nights, you're literally flying.
Let's go more in-depth with the story. There are two children with troubles in their lives. One of them is a boy named Will. He plays soccer quite alot with his dad. So much, his dad is his only real friend. But when his dad has to leave on a trip and cannot take Will, Will feels lonely and starts having tons of nightmares. The other child's name is Helen. She likes to play violin alot with her mother. They're practicing for the recital. But lately, Helen has been feeling guilty because she's hanging out with her friends instead of with her mom. So she starts having nightmares. These two kids then travel to the Dream Gate and meat Nights. Who helps them get rid of their nightmares by helping to defeat Wizeman. While trying to defeat Wizeman, Nights runs into her old rival, Relea.
The gameplay is alot like the original's gameplay. Sega decided to take the easy way and try to stick to the classic as much as they can. Not a bad thing of course. It let's new players get introduced to Nights. Like me. The game also let's you play as the two kids. Their gameplay is very simple. Just press A to jump. B to throw these blue things. You can collect these to earn points, and then you can throw them at enemies. Their gameplay is ok. But it's nothing awesome. Good thing there are only four levels with them.
With Nights, the action becomes really fun. She plays just like the original. With some changes. You use the control stick to fly around with her. Press or hold A to turbo boost. But if your gauge empties, then you cannot boost. You can get more by flying through the rings. Collecting rings and the blue balls will increase your link count. The higher your link count, the more points you get. Though, if you don't touch a ring or blue ball for 3-5 seconds, then you lose the link. Obtaining big links is essential to getting an A rank in levels. Each mission tests your skill with Nights in different ways. Like the Link missions where you have to obtain the biggest link possible for you with Nights. You'll be sure to have quite some fun with Nights and will not regret your purchase then.
The graphics are pretty decent. But they aren't anything steller. When playing the game, the graphics don't look that bad. But when they go close up to the game models in cutscenes, the models are just ugly. They aren't very good for what Sega has done with the Wii like Secret Rings. The CG cutscenes are excellent as always though. They look absoulutely beautiful. Nights looks awesome in CG. The framerate is bad most of the time in the in game cutscenes. But sometimes, it's perfect. But mostly bad.
The soundtrack lives up to the first game's soundtrack. The music fits the Nights theme quite well. It's all calm and happy when it needs to and all bad and rock when it needs to. The soundtrack is nice to listen to alot. It's not overdone to get you distracted from the gameplay. The sound effects are basic and get the job down. The voices though are okay. Nights' voice though just doesn't fit her. In the first game, she was all silent and not a Sonic personality clone. It looks like Sega copy and pasted Sonic into Nights. The children's voices are just....horrid. Nothing else. Horrid. All other voices are pretty good though. Relea's voice is real badass.
There's not alot to do in the game. This game probably didn't have a big enough budget to add so much content. Sega did make up for this though by adding online play. Online play lets you race against random people or your friends around the world with Nights. This is generally fun and helps the replay value alot. Since you only have Story Mode to really do everything in the game, it's nice that Sega added some real good multiplayer action.
Overall, does Nights: Journey of Dreams live up to the first? I'd say not quite. But I never played the original. But from what I've seen of the original, it doesn't. Nights tries too hard to incorporate other types of missions when it should've just focused on Nights flying around collecting ideya like the first game. This game is still fun. If you never played the first, you'll defiantly like this game like me. if you have though, you may be a little disappointed but will still get fun out of the sequel.