E3 06: Ninety-Nine Nights Hands-On

LOS ANGELES--As the mind behind such intriguing titles as Lumines, Meteos, and Rez, the hack-and-slash genre might not be the first place you'd expect designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi to go on his first console game of the new generation. But Ninety-Nine Nights is a pure hack-and-slasher, brought to you by both Mizuguchi's Q! Entertainment and Kingdom Under Fire developers Phantagram. The game's been out in Japan for a little while now and just hit Korea this past month. The game is currently slated for a US release later this year, and it's on display at Microsoft's booth here at E3 2006. We took some time to sit down and play Ninety-Nine Nights on the show floor, and while the game does seem extremely simplistic, we'll confess to having some fun with it anyway.

The lone playable character in the demo version of Ninety-Nine Nights was Inphyy, a buxomly attractive female warrior with a fairly large sword as her primary weapon. Inphyy is described as the daughter of a powerful warrior who was slain by goblins years prior. Inphyy's brother also played a significant role on the battlefield during our time with the game, though he wasn't playable in this demo. The two of them are part of an overarching storyline that is told from the perspective of seven different playable characters. Unfortunately, we weren't able to get much of a sense of the actual plotline from the demo we played--at least not beyond the basic concept of, "You are a warrior, and you kill lots and lots of dudes."

If you've ever played a Dynasty Warriors or anything closely resembling one, you'll have a pretty good idea of what to expect from Ninety-Nine Nights' action. Many of the game's attack combos seemed to consist of random combinations of the X and Y buttons on the 360 controller. There were some aerial attacks and juggling combos, as well, but even that stuff seemed pretty easy to pull off. The thing that sets Ninety-Nine Nights apart from the archetypal Dynasty Warriors game is the scope of the battlefields. To put it mildly, there were a metric ton of enemies and allied soldiers battling it out at once throughout each of the few levels we played through. Whether it was standard soldiers or hordes and hordes of goblins, huge swarms of them would come at us in any given battle. The actual variance in enemy types didn't seem especially huge, though. We noticed some differences between basic grunt enemies and archers, and every once in a while we'd come across individual commander types, but generally we found ourselves fighting off lots and lots of clones.

Granted, those clones looked pretty nice in the thick of battle. There's lots of detail in each character's design, especially the main warriors. Some of the grunts seemed a little lighter on polygons, but with so much chaos, it's tough to really sit there and nitpick on how many of the exact same soldier you're fighting, and the way the battles came together seemed pretty cool. The enemy artificial intelligence, while not exceedingly aggressive, seemed much more adept at fighting back than your average Dynasty Warriors-type game. That's not to suggest that the portions of the game we played were terribly hard, mind you. We had a little trouble fighting off some of the individual generals in a quick fashion, but mostly all we had to do was swing our sword like crazy and combo away, and we survived just fine.

We did note a couple of wrinkles in the gameplay that do seem to set it apart from the purely typical hack-and-slash games. When in battle, you'll have the chance to command allied troops to a certain degree. It appears that you can order them to attack or retreat as required. Also, the game includes a character-upgrade system with a meter that fills as you fight. Each level affords you new moves and abilities, though the abilities we earned over the course of our playtime didn't seem too far outside of the scope of the abilities Inphyy came preloaded with.

The levels we saw showed off a nice range of environments and battle situations. We went from a grassy field in what looked like the late morning to a dark, ominous-looking mountain area to another field in a late-afternoon haze. The game uses some impressive light-bloom effects, and the way those effects reflect off some characters' armor is quite pleasant to look at. More impressive, however, is how well the frame rate holds up. We saw very few bits of noticeable slowdown throughout our demo, and generally the action moved quite smoothly.

Though the game isn't due out for at least a few months yet in North America, the demo build of Ninety-Nine Nights seemed quite complete. As it stands now, Ninety-Nine Nights feels like a decent bit of fun that didn't necessarily demonstrate much depth in the levels we played, but, with any luck, it'll get deeper as the game continues on. We'll be sure to bring you more on Ninety-Nine Nights in the coming weeks.