It has some easily identifiable flaws but Ninety-Nine Nights is still an enjoyable entry in the Hack and Slash genre.
The game starts you off as Imphyy, a Templar Knight tasked with saving the kingdom. After finishing her short storyline, more and more chacters are unlocked, each with their own storylines. Between all the characters, Ninety-Nine Nights is easily a 15 hour game. Best of all, the game makes you feel that your far from done after finishing Imphyy's story. Also, all 7 characters each play very differently from each other.
The game is broken up into missions where each mission basically has you getting from Point A to Point B killing large groups of enemies in between. While you only control the main character, you can choose to have a group of soldiers help fight the battles. Oddly enough, the soldiers seemingly attack the enemies but dont do any damage to them thus rendering the soldiers completely useless- A glaring flaw. Like in the Dynasty Warrior games, your character can take on hundreds of enemies at a time without breaking a sweat.
Killing enemies nets you red orbs which fill up a red bar. Once this red bar is full, you can press the Y button to unleash a powerful attack capable of killing many enemies at once. Enemies killed this way net you blue orbs which in turn fill up your blue bar. Once your blue bar is filled you can unleash an attack so devastating that it can take out hundreds of enemies at once. This is a fun system of killing enemies when combined with trying to get a high combo of hitting enemies. Ninety-Nine Nights adds some RPG elements such as equippable items and leveling up to get more powerful. Each character can reach a maximum level of 9 and has 6 slots to equip items. As your character grows in level, he or she gets more item slots. Items can have such effects as increasing defense, attack, and health. You can also get new weapons to equip your character which is always nice. The RPG elements make the game much more enjoyable than it would be without them.
The gameplay is great for the most part but there are still some big issues. One being the lack of a checkpoint system. The missions in the game are huge and can sometimes take upwards of an hour to complete. Imagine playing a mission for an hour and getting to the final boss only to die and start all over back from the beginning of the mission- It sucks. A checkpoint system is something that this game should have and there is no excuse not to have one in here. Another gameplay flaw is of course the whole repetitive nature of the game which makes playing more than 3 missions at a time extremely tedious. One last little diddy is that the only way you can heal health is by picking up health potions on the battlefield. These potions turn up randomly and when you need them, they never seem to show up. Health potions being useable items would have easily fixed this problem.
Ninety-Nine Nights sports good if not impressive graphics. The character models are all nicely detailed but the environments are very bland with not much color going on. The cinemas of the game look good but the problem with them is that they happen to pop up any time in the middle of a mission which most of the time interupts any combo you might of had and disposes of it. The sound design of the game is also average with sound effects that are just there and embarrasingly bad voice acting. However, the music is very well done with nicely designed epic tunes that match the gameplay perfectly.
Ultimately, It has some easily identifiable flaws but Ninety-Nine Nights is still an enjoyable entry in the Hack and Slash genre.