NiGHTS has entered the Wii and our hearts.
NiGHTS has been referred to as "genderless" by the game's creators. The character's personality is described by Iizuka (the game designer) as "a mirror of the child's personality." The player is supposed to become Nights, thus being either gender depending on the interpretation of the player. Technically, you can call NiGHTS a he, a she, or both. Either way, NiGHTS has a sexy body and a nice tight ass (No, I'm not gay).
Nights: Journey of Dreams is a sequel, not a remake (according to Sega).
Ok, now for the review.
In the game, you will notice that most or all of the characters are British or sound British, including NiGHTS, who lives in a dream world. The developers believed that sonic was focusing on Tokyo and New York, so NiGHTS focuses on England.
NiGHTS has a lot of unique abilities. NiGHTS can fly very fast and doesn't get tired, NiGHTS can create a portal called the paraloop that sucks in small creatures or objects. Possibly the best ability is transformation. During certain levels, NiGHTS can transform into a ball, a boat and a rollercoaster with stretching wheels. After completing certain levels, you can become a super fast rocket, a swimming dolphin or a cool, bad ass sky dragon that is strong against wind storms. You have to fight an army of nightmarens, creatures that cause nightmares and destruction.
The game has 9 worlds-1 level selection mode, 1 dream garden (similar to sonic's chao gardens), 3 levels for the male protagonist, Will, 3 levels for the female protagonist, Helen and a final level. Each level has 5 different modes, each of them not only hard to do, but hard to perfect. Like the sonic games, each mission is ranked from A to E (A is perfect-E sucks). In almost all of these levels, an owl tells you what to do to help you. At first, he seems ok, but he gets very annoying very quickly. It can even go to a point where you have to say 'Get the XXXX out of my way! Screw you! Just shut the hell up!'
The dream garden is home to nightopians, little angles that were the inspiration for the famous chao creatures from sonic games. Like a chao, nightopians are put in this garden where they pretty much have some fun. Their halos represent their condition (yellow-ok/red-unhappy). The more nightopians you get, the better your garden will be. Occasionally, these baby faced creatures make out behind your back and lay an egg, giving you a new nightopian. You get these nightopians into your garden by using the paraloop. All the normal nightmarens are sent here too. They will try to eat nightopians and destroy your garden. Also, you can show off your garden online with wi-fi.
All the levels begin with a hunting strategy where NiGHTS has to find giant birds and steal their keys to unlock cages that NiGHTS is imprisoned in... wait what? NiGHTS is stuck in a cage and the only way out is to fuse with Helen or Will temporarily and unlock all the cages, including the ones that NiGHTS was not in. It's a dream world, nothing makes sense. What makes even less sense is that NiGHTS gets captured 6 times, but there's always a good… uh… there might be a good reason why NiGHTS gets captured. After the level is complete, you fight a boss for bonus points.
After this, you get three random levels. One is when you chase an octopaw, a flying octopus. While flying, you need to make as many combos as possible. Chasing a harmless animal just for fun seems like animal abuse, but tell that to Mario, who is killing hundreds of turtles and walking mushrooms.
Another mission involves one of the humans losing NiGHTS, and has to go through a large area filled with nightmarens. This pretty much sucks, especially since your only weapons are those orbs that you find in the game. However, you can easily run out of ammo, so this is one of the bad levels.
Another mission involves NiGHTS doing a special task. From playing with bubbles to saving hundreds of nightopians, there are really random, but most of them are really fun.
The final level is the boss you fought at the end of the first level, but the boss is either stronger or is at a stage where they have a huge advantage.
The bosses are-
Donbalon (a balloon clown)
The way to defeat him is to fight him on a giant pinball table. NiGHTS need to send him flying to the top of the stage, where a bunch of spikes will poke and pop him. It's really hard to do it fast enough to get an A. I don't see why you can't find a nail and just pop him that way; he is a balloon after all.
Chamelan (a chameleon magician)
This Chameleon creates a magical barrier that he hides behind. You can destroy the barrier, but the point of the match is to defeat him. This guy loves poker apparently so he has a deck of giant cards. The Chameleon is hiding near a group of aces. Watch out, just like in the movie, Nightmare Before Christmas, the Kings attack you with spinning swords. He's actually very easy to defeat, especially since he only has 1 hp.
Cerberus (a Cerberus (hence the name))
Cerberus is a group of 3 demotic dogs tied together with chains. The golden, middle body turns into a round ball if you are far away, but turns into a dangerous, spiky dog if you get too close. However, he can't transform if you ram into him quick enough. Once that happens, you send the middle body flying while the other two bodies collide with each other. Do this two more times to win. This is pretty easy if you can do it right.
Girania (a giant piranha with a French mustache)
Girania is a giant fish that attacks you by jumping out of… the ground… He then flies into the air until he falls back into the ground. While he is attacking, you can attack him back, which causes him to transform into hundreds of orbs. You then have to paraloop all of these orbs to defeat him. What sucks is that you can't catch him in a fish net and cook him for dinner.
Bomamba (a cat like witch)
There is a unique way of fighting this boss. There's a giant table with some holes. Bomamba creates a small army of ball like cats. You have to tilt the table so that the cats fall into those holes. This is hard since you are constantly being attacked and it's hard to get these cats in the hole when you can't tilt the table well. This is truly one of the hardest bosses. The weird thing is that once all the minions die Bomamba dies automatically, which is stupid, but good for you.
Queen Bella (giant spider queen)
Queen Bella is a spider that attacks you over a giant lava pit. There are floating floors on this stage, preventing the queen from falling to a fiery death, which is kind of what you want. To make her fall, you must use balls of webs and falling rocks to destroy the floors. These objects will bounce around the stage until they fall into the lava. Once you destroy the floor that Queen Bella is standing on, she'll fall down into the lava and burn to death.
The two player mode involves a race or a battle. A race is where the two players fly around to try and reach the finish. The battle involves you to shoot meteors at each other. This is not a good mode as the players are really fast and the meteors are slow and have almost no homing capabilities. The first player is NiGHTS while the second player is Reala, NiGHTS's evil twin that you see in the story. He had never clipped his fingernails; those things can poke an eye out. Remember, you can challenge other people online with wifi.
Spoiler Warning
Once you complete all the levels, you go to a special level that looks like London. You play as one of the humans, but you can fly like NiGHTS. The story in this level is different depending on how you end the game, but you can see the true ending by getting at least a C ranking on every other level in the game. Eventually, you get to fight Wizeman, the deity that created all nightmarens, including NiGHTS. Yes, NiGHTS is a nightmaren, so that's why I'm mentioning it at the spoiler section. NiGHTS might be a nightmaren, but he/she is still good, it's just a racist stereotype that all nightmarens are evil (even Will and Helen believed this to be true, which must make them bad friends). NiGHTS challenges Wizeman to a battle to the death, but Wizeman mentions that destroying the creator of the nightmarens will cause said nightmarens to be destroyed as well, which means NiGHTS will kill himself/herself if he/she wins. NiGHTS doesn't seem bothered by that. Since NiGHTS is with both Helen and Will, NiGHTS fuses with both of them, creating two NiGHTS (one male NiGHTS [Will] and one female NiGHTS [Helen]). While fighting Wizeman, you control one of the NiGHTS while the other follows you. Wizeman is the final boss, but he is surprisingly the easiest boss to defeat. You just need to transform at the right time to go through his attacks.
Once you defeat Wizeman, NiGHTS starts to disappear (because that's the only way to die in E rated games). Will and Helen reenter the real world and meet each other in real life. At the last second, you see NiGHTS, not just alive, but in the real world. It seems illogical, but there's been crazier crap in other videogames.
End of Spoiler
Other notes
NiGHTS, as of 2007, have only two games, but he/she had cameos in other Sega games, mainly sonic games.
Sonic Adventure (DX)
Sonic Adventure 2 (Battle)
Shadow the Hedgehog
Sonic Pinball Party
Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg
Sega Superstars
Sonic Riders
Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity
Sega Superstars Tennis
Phantasy Star Online I & II Plus
The graphics for this game, it's just unbelievable, because it looks sooooo real. The movies in the story mode have more detail than any other Wii game and might even rival PS3 games. It's just so freakin' amazing. In the game, the detail is almost perfect, it is pretty sweet, especially the colorful background. The music is a big 5/5. Almost each musical number is a song that can be considered good. If youtube had more NiGHTS music videos, these would be some of my main favorite songs.
Despite this, having less than 35 levels doesn't seem to be a long game… Also, most of the characters act like pedophiles because they have nothing better to do than to follow these two children. I don't care about NiGHTS being one, but if you got that big ass deity sending an entire army to capture you… then you're pretty much screwed. The fact that preteen kids are sent to a world where everyone act like Michel Jackson and can fly makes it look like a new Peter Pan movie.
They need to make another NiGHTS sequel, hopefully one with more levels.