An angelic vision?

If you’re anything like me then you’ve probably had the following experience. You meet a pretty woman (or man depending on your gender or persuasion) and summon the courage to ask her out. You plan a nice evening out and take her to a good restaurant, and everything seems to be going just wonderfully … until you attempt to start an interesting conversation and find that there’s not much going on behind those beautiful eyes. Suddenly she doesn’t quite seem that pretty any more, time slows down to a crawl, and you begin trying to come up with a Plan B that will minimize your time and financial commitment for the rest of the evening. What does this have to do with video games and Nintey-Nine Nights (N3) in particular? Well N3 is a gorgeous game. Its heroine is beautiful, the graphics are fantastic, and the game places you into the middle of battles with literally dozens of foes. You’ll sit down with the game, watch the pretty cinematics, and get practically giddy as you charge across the battlefield into the middle of an enemy legion. You’ll think that you found action gaming bliss. Unfortunately reality soon sets in as you find that there’s not really any depth to the game and what you’ve got sitting in your Xbox 360 is a button-masher. A gorgeous, stylized button-masher, but a button-masher nonetheless. Perhaps it’s time to give that dependable game your mom has been trying to get you to play a chance…

N3 manages to take your standard “kingdom under siege by forces of evil” storyline and make it a bit more interesting by having you play through key events from the perspectives of the different playable characters. However, the missions themselves are not that distinguishable from one another and all boil down to a series of battles in which you wade into the middle of one enemy column after another and start pounding on the attack buttons. The game does have an extensive combo system, but all that this really adds to the game is a number of cool looking attacks that defy the laws of our universe. There are often so many characters on screen at once that you won’t even be able to see your character, let alone select a situation-appropriate combo. Yet this doesn’t even really matter as all of the combos seem to be equally effective in piling up the body count. Couple this with the fact that you can’t harm any of your allies in the mob of bodies and there really is no need nor reason to do anything more than plunge into the middle of things and begin button-mashing.

Speaking of allies, the game lets you control two squads of supporting troops and issue basic attack and defend orders to them. While this may sound like a cool feature it really doesn’t have much effect on anything in the game. I suppose that my allies were killing enemies while I was bouncing all over the place, but it looked like I was doing most if not all of the work. This seemed particularly so when nearing the end of skirmishes when I had to walk around killing the last few enemies despite that fact that each one was already being attacked by four or five of my allies. After the first mission I pretty much ignored my troops and just let them follow me around if they wanted to.

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