I'd rather have Ninety-Nine bottles of beer on the wall
Having been a huge fan of the Dynasty Warrior series, as redundant as they all are, I had high hopes of Ninety-Nine Nights. However, these high hopes have been met with frustration and disappointment. There is little good to say about this game. Seeing a horde of goblins charging at you from afar is very epic looking the first few times around. The mixture of characters, if and when unlocked, are done well also, despite there being a very very small amount compared to the DW or Orochi series. But none of this can make up for frustrating camera angles, uninteresting weapon upgrades, and a combo system that is very unbalanced. There are a lot of pretty combos, but most of them leave you as a sitting duck while the enemy counters, so you'll find that most of the time you stick to your 3-hit combo. The fantasy setting was a nice change from ancient China, but the 'story', if you can call it that, is barely there. It's like taking a bad fantasy novel, translating it badly, reading every 20th page, then trying to enjoy what's going on. But beyond all that, what the MOST fustrating thing about this game is, the save system, or should I say lack there of. Each round takes on average about 30 - 45 minutes to complete, and it is very slow going (no horses? wtf!) with ZERO save points. This means that if you spend an hour hacking and slashing thousands of enemies, getting items, and grinding exp, and then on the last boss fight you die, you just wasted an entire hour of your time. And as badass as you may feel cutting down wave after wave of goblins and orcs, most boss fights require you to not get hit with a single combo, because that more than likely means death and a thrown controller. The boss' are very unbalanced and it's as if the game wants you to waste time losing. And the reply value is non existent. With games like DW, I would come back time and time again until I max leveled all 75 characters and got everyones weapon, horse, etc. then I'd buy the next installment of DW and do it all over again. But with 99 Nights, I could easily walk away not caring if I ever touched the game again. Maybe I would recommend this as a $5 bargain bin game if you really need a hack'n'slash fix. But otherwise avoid it. And as for you 360 gamer score freaks, there is barely anything to accomplish here. The only scores offered are for completing the game with 'X' character, and they barely give you anything even then.Read full review
