Ninety-Nine Nights was an inexcusable mess.
Ninety-Nine Nights is extremely repetitive hack and slasher. It doesn't offer anything new or exciting. I hated the art style, I hated the cutscenes and how interruption they were. The storyline bored me, the characters were forgettable. The difficulty was inconsistent. Your characters walked way to slow on the massive battlefields. There is no checkpoint in the stages, so you if accidentally die then you have to start over at the beginning, losing all experience or items you gained. I honestly didn't think I would hate this game as much as I did, but it bugged me to no end.
The only thing I liked about Ninety-Nine Nights was the loot drops, and the ability to backtrack.
----------Battle System----------
Ninety-Nine Nights is a basic Dynasty Warriors inspired hack and slasher. You play between 7 playable characters, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, but still play nearly identical. Before battle, they sometimes give you an option to bring 2 full Battalions with you into battle. This means, you get to bring back up with you in battle. You get to choose between four different styles of battalions. You can bring light infantry (swords), heavy infantry (broadswords and armor), pikman (axes) and archers. Each have their strengths and weaknesses towards the enemies they fight. You only have one control over the AI of these characters though. You can tell them to stay or follow.. that's it.
Once you pick a character and stage, you're off fighting a war. Your AI battalion characters are weak and have trouble fighting even one goblin or knight. So it's really up to you to kill everything in sight, and there's alot of things to kill. The basic enemies you fight don't put up much threat at all. One slice can kill up to 20 characters at once if you're lucky. The only true difficulty this game offers is boss fights. This isn't a good thing though because you can waste up to 45 minutes battling 2,000 weak enemies that pose no threat, and then fight a boss character that kills you in two hits. This happened to me a couple times and it was frustrating. Boss fights are all the same though, so there isn't a huge variety in this game.
The frustrating things about boss fights is their block feature. You can't damage them at ALL if they block and they block 90% of the battle. The only chances you can get a swipe at them is if one of your stupid AI members distracts them, or if they attack and you can get a quick hit before they get their balance back. All boss battles are about taking two small hits, then running for safety because boss characters HIT HARD.
There aren't very many maps in the game, and you revisit the same old maps over and over again but in different areas. This is alot like Soul Calibur Legends in way, but luckily, this game is much shorter and more forgiving. The objectives are linearly thrown at you and forced upon you in battle.
Like in most RPGs, you gain experience for every monster you kill. When you gain enough experience, you gain a level. This boosts your maximum HP, Power, Defense and other stats. You also gain a new skill after each level. Also, the higher your level is, the more accessories you can equip and they're pretty important. You can equip 1 weapon and up to 5 accessories in this game. You get new weapons and accessories from the treasures hidden within the stages, or from loot drops by enemies. The most fun I had in this game was equipping the random accessories and weapons, honestly.
When you kill monsters, you absorb red Orbs. This goes into a power meter, and when it's full, you can unleash a powerful attack. When you attack with this Orb power, and you kill enemies with it, they out blue orbs. When you get enough Blue Orbs, you can perform the ULTIMATE attack in the game, which can kill up to 2,000 characters at once. It's cool when you can pull that move off.
----------Characters / Story----------
Uh... I honestly have no idea what the deal is with the story. There IS a story, but I honestly can't remember a thing that happens within it. There is no singular main character in this game though. It kinda reminds me of Saga Frontier or Unlimited Saga in a way. Basically you play as 7 different characters, and each character has their own story. All the characters have intertwining story lines. So character A will fight with or fight character B. Character B will fight Character C, and so on.
You mostly get new stories with these characters though. You're not exactly getting different perspectives within the same single storyline. Depending on what character you are playing as, then the outcome of this war will change.
I like the idea of this storyline. It was just poorly executed. The main problem is the really really boring cutscenes, and bland characters. I honestly can't name you a single character in this game, and I just beat it 5 minutes ago (as of this writing). It sounds like they put the character's names through a random name generator. Here, I'll make up a few names right now. Astaragarr. Xyslithy. Stagitisis. Prephetis. Memstyr. I could go on.
The absolute worst thing about this game was the constant cutscenes. This game has no flow to it. You can fight for 2 seconds, then a cutscene will appear, then slash two more things before another cutscene. It was frustrating.
The worst part about the cutscenes was killing a boss or reaching a treasure chest a millisecond before a cutscene appears and you lose loot or health potion or whatever. The pacing destroys this game.
----------Graphics----------
The graphics are ok.. on a technical level. I mean, it's pretty impressive that they have 200 characters on screen at once, but they sacrificed that for stupid AI and poor animations. I did go through a few slow-downs, but that was mostly towards the end of the game where your attacks were greater, and the number of enemies was massive.
On an aesthetic level, the game looks generic as hell. The landscapes are boring, the character models are forgettable. There is nothing about this games look that I will remember within the next few days.
My biggest grief overall with the graphics was how bland the character and enemies looked on screen. While enemies usually group up and are easy to kill. Once you kill off the majority of the enemies, they blend in with your battalion, and you can't find them within the mess.
----------Sound----------
I was not a fan of the voice acting at all. They just sounded like ametuar voice actors. Despite that, they only have voice acting during the cutscenes. I wish they had voice acting withing the battle sequences. You might be battling 100 goblins at once, but they pop up a stupid text box, expecting you to read it. It would have been much better if they just voiced that stuff out.
The music is weird. There's alot of operatic chanting and heavy orchestral strings. It gets a bit cheesy though. The music reminds me of those De Beers Jewelry commercials.
----------World Map----------
The map is a typical menu map. The game flows pretty linearly. You beat one stage, and another one unlocks. There is one exception where you get to pick between 2 stages, but that is with one character only. You can replay any previous levels at any point in the game though.
They only start you off with one playable character, but once you beat her story, then they unlock two new characters. Then you have to beat both of their stories before you can unlock two more characters. Once again, you have to then beat their stories before you can play as the "Secret" final character.
----------Time to Complete Game----------
Possibly 12 hours.
There are 7 playable characters, and each one has atleast 2 to 6 stages. Stages take between 10 minutes to 45 minutes to complete, but you can backtrack and go through previous stages at any moment in the game if you want to level grind or get a better score. So there is plenty of game into this. When you complete each character's story, then you'll get a "Game over" credit sequence. So I technically beat this game 7 times over.
