Welcome to World Zero - Reviews for the hardcore gamer

The back story of N3 is a convoluted one. While relatively fleshed out in the manual, you’re given very little to work with in-game; you’re thrown right into the middle of an ongoing war with little to no explanation as to how you got there. However, as the story progresses, you’ll be hard pressed not to find the events contained within each of the seven playable characters’ unique perspectives to be reasonably engaging. The overall story arc is the seemingly cliché light versus dark battle of epic proportions. The catch (and N3’s attempt to add a bit of creativity to the mix) is that the light and dark war is really just one big shade of gray. While getting the chance to witness the war from both sides, it becomes apparent right from the start that things aren’t what they should be. It’s an interesting, albeit a tad overplayed, dichotomy that Phatagram also implemented in Kingdom Under Fire.

N3’s visual flair is the same creative elegance that is seemingly radiating from South Korean developers at the moment. Cut from the same cloth as the beautiful artwork flaunted in other visually striking Korean titles such as Lineage 2 and Phantagram’s own Kingdom Under Fire, Ninety-Nine Nights’ aesthetic is stunning. To match its visual flair, N3’s soundtrack is equally impressive. Its soaring orchestral symphony mirrors the massive battles that unfold on your screen with dramatic overtures and imposing battle marches that do an impressive job of making the ambitiously colossal skirmishes come across as simply epic.

Throughout the game, your characters get stronger by leveling up and finding items on the battlefield, as is almost expected in contemporary action titles. While starting a fresh character as a lowly level one, you are given only a handful of combos and a single item slot to fill with one of the game’s countless stat enhancing or ability granting items. As you grow stronger you find better equipment, increase your equipable item capacity, and augment your ever-growing arsenal of combos that, upon reaching maximum level, is almost excessive. Unleashing some of the end game combos that you unlock at higher levels is a true reward for leveling up; performing a screen clearing combo on an advancing troop of literally hundreds of foes and watching every single one of them go flying is a rush beyond words. It’s simply impressive to wield so much power and see the ground littered with hundreds upon hundreds of corpses when the dust settles.

Bringing down a foe results in an Onimusha-style red orb (which is thankfully auto-absorbed) representing the source of the game’s experience system, but it also doubles as a means to fill up your character’s orb spark meter. Once full, your character becomes a destructive god for a good ten or fifteen seconds with the push of a button. While very Dynasty Warriors-ish in nature (albeit on a much, much more grand scale), N3 ups the ante by throwing a second orb spark meter into the mix. During the carnage of the initial orb spark, defeated foes drop blue orbs which fill up the aforementioned second meter. The secondary blue meter usually takes three or four initial orb sparks to fill up, but once you do, it unleashes devastating results on a scale few games have even remotely come close to. One mere example out of the seven character-specific powers is the ability to call down a shower of meteors upon your foes that nearly puts Final Fantasy's own to shame. Connecting to the Earth with such force, the meteors’ impact throws their unfortunate victims hundreds of feet into the air, leaving you in the middle of a shower of enemies falling down from the heavens above as you continue your onslaught. The genius of this is that it’s all happening in real time. You can spot a massive army charging toward you from a valley below, call the meteor storm on their location, then charge in head-first while massive, flaming rocks pound your foes, mid-combo, and subsequently witness the beautiful carnage as your enemies come crashing down around you all while confronting the next advancing horde.

Ninety-Nine Nights absolutely nails all of the integral creative and visceral aspects, which is unfortunately why its technical flaws stick out like a sore thumb. Most notably is that while the 360 does a remarkable job of throwing so many detailed characters on screen at once, the game gets hit by some unreasonably frequent slowdown when things get intense. This isn’t a mere framerate drop either. This is good, old-fashioned slow motion the likes I haven’t seen in years. While rare, there are some extremely excessive moments that can take the game down to a crawl for extended periods of time. That’s inexcusable.

Another glarring, but rather odd fault the game almost seems to flaunt is the malevolent manner in which game interrupting cut scenes do their best to ruin the on-screen action. The game will continue to unfold behind the scenes a good second or so during the initiation and conclusion of any in-game cut scene. What this means is that if you’re in the middle of a large battle and a cut scene is triggered, chances are at least one enemy is going to get one or perhaps even two free hits in on you, which can’t be avoided. Entering a cut scene while in the middle of a battle with one of the game’s most hard hitting mobs while using the physically weakest playable character can result in a complete life bar being taken from you. I’ve actually failed a mission because of this exact situation. Luckily, this is a fairly rare occurrence, but it's still an unforgivable issue. More frequent, however, is that cut scenes also interrupt whatever action your character is performing when they commence. If you were in the middle of an orb spark move, it simply stops, and you’ll have to build your meter back up from where the cut scene stopped it. Worse yet, cut scenes even drop your chain combo count. This ruins the momentum of the battle but also serves as a considerable nuisance when trying to achieve those S ranks.

Despite the game’s own conspiracy to hinder your mission rating, the ranking system itself is actually very well implemented. Upon completion of a mission, you are given the standard gaming letter grade based on a number of accomplishments such as combo count and orb spark kills. Achieving an S or A rank will reward you with either a powerful new weapon or a rare equipable item, both being significantly advantageous in battle more often than not. But what’s even more notable is that each individual mission has an independent difficulty level assigned to it that dynamically changes based on your overall performance of that stage. Fortunately, it’s a bit more complex than your typical dynamic difficulty slider. How it works is A or S-ranking a stage will not only increase that stage’s difficulty, but it also adds in or modifies existing bosses and mini-bosses, enemy troop size, and even item drops, and it does it only upon stage completion and only whenever you choose to replay that stage. To balance out the system, failing or doing poorly results in the opposite game augmentations. The best facet of this system’s implementation is that you won’t ever have to begin a new stage on a handicap because you completely decimated the last one. The dynamic difficulty only works on an individual stage basis and only on subsequent replays. I can’t stress how smart of a decision this was on the developer’s part, especially after witnessing how broken dynamic difficulty truly can be in Oblivion.

Because each of the seven playable characters are so radically different from each other from a gameplay standpoint, I was slightly disappointed to find out there wasn’t a bigger playable cast, especially considering that the supporting ensemble is just as fleshed out as the main group both aesthetically and through the actions and abilities they utilize on the battlefield. Another knock against the small cast of characters is that each character has their own unique campaign but said campaigns only range from a mere two to six missions in length, depending on the character. N3 would have severely benefited from a “free mode” of sorts, akin to that of Dynasty Warriors, to make up for the relatively short campaigns. Instead, each character is stuck with replaying only the missions available in his or her own campaign and not the missions of the other characters. While the dynamic difficulty considerably lessens this drawback by making your experience on each stage differ, even if slightly, it’s not enough to keep you coming back once you’ve unlocked everything and completed all the achievements.

Despite a tight 14-month development cycle, Ninety-Nine Nights is an excessively polished game. Everything from the menus to the flashy combos is presented in a streamlined package. On the combat end of the spectrum, N3 almost comes across as Dynasty Warriors’ sophisticated older brother. On the flip side, that’s not to say the strict development schedule didn’t come without major setbacks. Despite being an absolute visceral, exciting experience, N3 contains a few fairly inexcusable flaws for a next generation title. When it’s all said and done, you’ll either be left yearning for additional downloadable content or trying to shake the feeling that you just completed an unfinished game, depending on your appreciation for the genre which is already preety niche to begin with. Good or bad, you’ll definitely be left wanting more in the end.

Rating	The rating scale in detail
9.0	++ Tons of surprisingly detailed enemies on screen, beautiful landscapes, great use of lighting, and shockingly gorgeous orb spark abilities. - A perplexing amount of slowdown.
8.5	++ An absolutely outstanding soundtrack that compliments the game flawlessly. -- Sub par English only audio dub.
7.5	++ Gratifyingly intense combat on a massive scale. + The light RPG elements work well within the game. - Combat isn’t as deep as recent action titles; find the right combo for the situation and exploit it.
8.5	++ Beautiful art style and presentation.
6.0	+ The seven playable characters all control very differently. + Dynamic difficulty works well and adds replayability. -- Campaigns are excessively short. -- Lack of a free mode severely hurts the game’s longevity. -- Why isn’t the rest of the cast playable?
8.0	+ Beautiful, intense, exhilarating, but rushed.