Ninety-Nine Nights 2 or N3II from Konami Entertainment. Call it whatever you want, I call it a stinker. N3II is more of the same mind-numbing mash up of Dynasty Warriors and a mature rating that we saw in the first. So if you have played the first and enjoyed it, you’re going to find more of same monotony here. Now, N3II is far from being the worst game I’ve ever played, but it’s pretty bad. N3II follows Galen, a guy out to stop the evil ruler with the massive army. It’s a fresh tale if you’ve never heard a story in your life, but for the rest of us it’s a very typical “hero saves the world” plot. On top of that, it is poorly told with fairly atrocious voice acting as well as poor syncing of audio with almost all cutscenes. Once you get past the story pieces, of which should all be skipped, you land on some gameplay. The best piece of N3II is the gameplay, but that’s not saying a whole lot. Not unlike the Dynasty Warriors series, N3II puts you in a battlefield against hundreds of foes, each bleeding stupidity but with a little gore added in for good measure. There are also various characters that you’ll unlock over the course of the campaign, none of which are likeable. These characters are playable, with some minor variation in attacks but each only feels slightly different from the others. These enemies many in number, few in variations, are basically cannon fodder that occasionally land a hit on you as you hack your way through the masses.
The X and Y buttons take care of the main attacks, so you’ll be mashing both buttons without much strategy and without facing opposition other than some very cheap plays by the AI. You will be accompanied by other soldiers from time to time, that don’t do much other than act like they are killing enemies. These encounters did make the levels feel more like a mass-scale war, but since you’re the only one really killing anything, these allies just feel like stand-ins. The good times I had with the game were somewhere within the first 5 minutes of the game, and even then I was trying to give it the benefit of a doubt. That is of course, until you land at one of the games frustrating bosses. Most of the bosses in the game will bring your progress to a halt, unless you are freakishly amazing at these super-cheap hack and slash titles. Almost every boss encounter in the game forced me to ragequit and wait to come back to the game after a cup o’ chamomile to sooth my overflowing levels of anger. Not really, but the bosses are cheap as hell, with some attacks timed perfectly to not even give you a chance to get back on your feet. What the game forgets to tell you is that most of the bosses have some form of weak spot. These are typically found on accident, after far too many continues. Checkpoints are also few and far between, with levels that drag on much longer than they should.
If you decide to stop playing in the middle of a mission, have fun starting the mission from the beginning when you boot the game up again. It’s cool amassing a large combo and kill count, but that’s about the only redeeming part of slaughtering the same enemies over and over. On top of this, there are multiplayer modes that pit you and a friend against endless hordes of enemies. There is no co-op campaign and no form of local play, which are a few features the game could have very well benefitted from. The level of attractiveness in N3II is almost painful, with framerate issues and poor environments galore. Also, as stated earlier, the audio suffers from poor syncing, as in some of the worst I have seen in a long time. All these compile an experience that makes the game feel like all the elements were thrown into the air and this is the mess that came out of it. Now while I fully understand that there is a decent fan base for hack and slash games, I know that this is not a good one by any means. Everything in the game is sloppily executed; the plot, the visuals, the multiplayer, everything in the game feels broken in some form or another. Even if you enjoyed the first, I implore you to avoid N3II. Go play Dynasty Warriors or at least play the first N3 instead of the sequel, you can thank me later. Not only is it filled with repetition; it’s filled with repetition that is completely flawed. Ninety-Nine Nights 2 isn’t even bargain-bin material; it’s an experience you should actively avoid at all costs.
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