N3 is a potentially good game that has a very rushed feel. The game just doesn't seem finished.
Now that we've got that behind us, let us talk about Ninety-Nine Nights. N3 is a game that does a lot of things right, but, more often then not, held back by certain things done wrong. It's a game that has flashes of greatness, where the potential of this game really and truly shines, but too soon sinks into just average hacking and slashing elements.
The basic premise, tells a tale of two civilizations, the Humans and the Goblins, at war. Each believe the other is responsible for breaking an ancient relic of great power, and the Humans have consigned the goblins to the outlands while they themselves prosper. When the game begins, the goblins are starting an uprising in hopes of reclaiming their dues. This is told from the perspective of seven relatively shallow characters, and each have a different set of missions to choose from. Similar to the end of Dynasty Warriors musou modes, only throughout the entire game. These rarely differ from winning a battle you would have otherwise lost, however. Each character fights for their own reasons, and have their fair share of the character development. Though not very deep, the characters are defined well enough to understand their intentions and personalities. Inphyy(the female lead) wants to kill the goblin leader to avenge her father's death, whilst Dwingvatt(the white goblin) wants to kill Inphyy to avenge big brother. Aspharr's your typical male hero in shining armor fighting for justice. Seemingly carefree Myifee joins the mercenaries to catch the eye of an attractive lady within the mercenaries. Klarrann is a criminal turned priest, and seeks the truth behind the war. Bubbly twelve year old sorceress Tyurru just wants to test her skills and prove herself but later realises the tragedies of war.
There are two attacks, normal and strong. You mix them together to string together combos. As you kill enemies, you collect red orbs that level you up, as well as build a red power bar. Once the power bar is full you can unleash a massive attack that kills most enemies in a single hit until the red bar drains. For every enemy you kill in this state, you get blue orbs that fill up a blue power bar. Once that is full, you can execute a screen clearing super move that are actually undeniably impressive to watch. Every time you level up from orb collection, you gain more combos which were substantially cooler and more effective than the previous level's combos, as well as more life and the ability to equip more items.
Inphyy, Aspharr and Myifee have bodyguards that accompany you on each level. At the start of each mission, you are allowed to select the type of guards that cover your flanks. The selection is Archers, Infantry, Heavy Infantry, and Pikemen. The LB and RB buttons govern your left and right flank respectively, ordering your guards to follow or stay. The D-pad's up button orders them to be in attacking stance, while down orders them to be in defending stance. Visually, the game is stunning. Seeing thousands of enemies pour onto the screen is pretty epic. The game has been granted with extremely fine details. Blades of grass, fine dust and dirt, bits and pieces being slashed off foes, helmets falling, armor chipping, weapons flying. The details of the models in the games go right down to facial complexions.
Framerate stays pretty solid for the most part. There is slow down however, though rare. They come very noticeably when you're doing orb attacks or orb sparks.
Just like war, not everything goes as planned in N3. Apparently, arrows are so strong that they can pierce through mountains. To have a glitch such as that is incredibly annoying. Both allied and enemy AI also seem to suffer from a bout of psychosis as they quickly lose touch with reality by running in circles like insane asylum patients.
Cutscenes constantly interupt the orb attacks and Orb sparks, making you lose that built up power. To add to the insult, the scene is normally just a character running. It's just too bad we have no idea where. For some reason, Phantagram felt it was important to include cut scenes where characters seem to be in desperate need of a satellite navigation system. The save system is, in a word, terrible. Separate save slots for each of the seven characters create a great opportunity to accidentally save over a lot of work. As well, when you die in a mission, you lose all experience and items you gained, and must start over from the beginning of the level. I don't mind the lack of checkpoints, since the missions are generally short (10 minutes when you are good at them, 30 minutes tops), but I would have at least liked to keep the experience I got.
The game is also obviously rushed. I can't prove it, but the game just feels like it was halfway done, when someone made the decision to slap together the disparate parts of the game which they did have complete and release them. It feels like they did the best they could to meld these parts together, but the end result is mildly confusing to say the least.
All things considered, this game will last you a while. With 6 characters with 2-6 half-hour missions each, just the main quest will last, but getting all of the achievement points requires you to play for many a marathon session. There's a secret level to beat in which you actually face the King of Ninety-Nine Nights, the challenge of raising every character to level 9 (which takes much longer than it seems), and earning an A-S ranking in all missions. But with so little variety, would you want to?
Ninety-nine Nights is very short, but good for what it is. Epic battles with enough variety to keep the fights entertaining, and characters who get more and more enjoyable depending on how late they're unlocked. It's odd for a game of such minute length to require patience, but it does. Still, the patient are rewarded quite well for what's left of the game.