When the Xbox 360 was announced, the fact that Tetsuya Mizuguchi was working on a Dynasty Warriors style beat 'em up got the Microsoft fanboys all atwitter. I didn't understand this at all, as Dynasty Warriors had been available on the Xbox for some time now, and I wasn't sure why they felt like they needed an exclusive version of it. (After all, it's pretty much a rule these days that if it doesn't have Kou Shibusawa's name on it, it's a cheap knock-off.)
E3 rolled around, and on the first day around the Microsoft booth I heard people talking about N3 who hadn't got any time with it and were eager to check it out. I checked it out and discovered...it's Dynasty Warriors, except with characters have superfluous double letters in their names, and there's even less enemy AI. Nevertheless, the faithful remained optimistic.
Then I got my hands on the game, and I discovered, this is even worse than I had imagined at E3. It's not Dynasty Warriors, it's worse, and to top it off, it's pretentious.
Story
Inphyy hates goblins! Inphyy SMASH! Also, Inphyy shows off cleavage. Good thing she isn't a part of, oh, say a temple that's trying to start a “holy” war. Oh wait, she IS! So, Inphyy and her brother Aspharr leave their church, Our Lady of the Bouncing Bosom and head off to slaughter a bunch of goblins, because Inphyy's extra “y” makes her an angry, stupid, bi...bigot. Yeah, that's it. Bigot.
After you clear the game with Inphyy, you'll unlock other unfortunately named characters (Myifee! Dwingvatt!) and beat the crap out of thousands of enemy troops that don't fight back. If there's supposed to be some larger, sensible story in this game, I didn't find it, but judging by the 3 second long endings I got for 4 of the characters, I'm guessing that Korean developer Phantagram just didn't put any real effort into the story aspects of the game.
Gameplay
If you've ever played a single version of Dynasty Warriors, you know how this works. Run around and kill everything not on your side, try and stay alive, and respond to any scripted threats that emerge. The only difference between Ninety Nine Nights and Dynasty Warriors, in terms of gameplay, is that you have two super gauges. The red gauge is filled by killing enemies (and doesn't charge when you take damage.) and the blue gauge is filled by killing enemies in with your special attack.
When you kill people with the blue special attack, it gives you some green orbs, which I guess do something for your scores at the end of the level, but honestly, I'm not totally sure. Aside from that, it's basically a straight clone of Dynasty Warriors with bigger kill counts and not set in China.
What really irks me is that this was supposed to be more. According to this Gamasutra interview with Mizuguchi himself, he talks about experiencing different aspects of the story with different characters.
"We decided to show the subtle difference from each character's point of view in a large scale war action game. We decided to create a story of justice for each character. The player can experience all of them, and the player will assume a different point of view."
I thought that sounded cool. Maybe one character would think another's actions to be traitorous, or incorrect. This had potential to be something, kind of like the first few parts of Suikoden III, I figured.
Only it's not. The game doesn't show crap from multiple perspectives. It gives each character a unique campaign. I would be remiss here if I didn't point out that Dynasty Warriors has been doing this in every DW game since Dynasty Warriors 2, a launch title for the Playstation 2, and the current incarnation of Dynasty Warriors does it with about 5 times the number of characters as N3.
I don't know if this was just flim-flammery on the part of Mizuguchi and SangYoun Lee, or a misunderstanding due to English not being their first language, but this aspect of the game that was billed as “the other major half” of Ninety Nine Nights is basically an expected feature for any game in this particular genre.
If that's not bad enough, the game suffers from numerous other problems. This game crashed and caused more disc read errors out of my Xbox 360 than any other 360 game I've played, and I probably played N3 for less than 10 hours. The game has framerate issues, draw-distance problems and enemy pop-in...but I'll save discussion of that for the ever-popular "Gripes" section.
Graphics
This is not next-gen. The animations for the main characters are fine, but the game frequently forgets them for squads moving in the background, so you'll be treated to the unintentionally hilarious sights of division of armored knights sliding across the battlefield like they were set to partake in a game of Battle Chess.
Aside from a siege of a town, the majority of the environments are drab, and I swear, they're actually just slight modifications to Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes. You've got stock ice plains, snowy forest, regular forest, and that's it.
Character models don't far any better. Epharr, the prominent female character in Myifee's campaign walks around in a battle one-piece swimsuit, and it looks like the modelers gave her ass cheek implants...made of cottage cheese. Her legs are way too thin for that much booty, and yet, in the numerous camera shots where her posterior is displayed prominently...there are the cheeks...flopping around like lukewarm oatmeal. Inphyy constantly looks like she's overdosed on meth whenever she's trying to emote, and it doesn't help that it sounds like she's voiced by the psychotic girl from “So I Married an Axe Murderer”.
These are supposed to be the "hot" characters, by the way. Mizuguchi himself describes the psychotic looking Inphyy as "cute", and as "having good cleavage". They come off about as stomach-churningly as I imagine the visuals in The Catfight do.
Audio
The music and effects aren't too bad. However, Phantagram and Q! happen to have assembled just about the worst voice-over talent of any game I've played this year. The only game that might give the awful “talent” in this game a run for its money might be Magna Carta: Tears of Blood.
Gripes
Why are there so few people who can write worth a damn anymore? I'm fine with a game having no story, but when you start building up how awesome your story is, you had better make sure you don't slap down a load of schlock like this.
At a crucial point in Aspharr's own personal story he'll come upon Inphyy's bodyguard. The bodyguard will tell Aspharr that Inphyy's run off and is acting reckless. Aspharr tells the bodyguard to get her back here, and the bodyguard says that he can't do it, and that he and Inphyy need to have some heart to heart time, because she's just trying to please him.
Thanks Dr. Phil, but I'm in the middle of a BLEEPING war here!!!! People are getting slaughtered by the dozens last time I checked. I bet they'd like to be able to have heart-to-heart talks with folks, but their heart's stuck on the end of a pike at this particular moment.
It gets better, though! Aspharr rushes to find Inphyy. He finds her, and Inphyy yells out “Brother!”. They then proceed the have the single most awkward cutscene in video game history. This is even worse than the gratuitous sex scene in Darkwatch, and the Tidus' laugh scene in FFX. They sit around grunting but not saying anything while the camera pans around them for what seems like an eternity. This “dramatic” moment is finally broken when Aspharr declares that they have to be ready, because the enemy is near. They form up, back-to-back, and the camera pans out to reveal...ABSOLUTELY NO ENEMIES HEADING THEIR WAY!
Numerous other cutscenes will feature your selected character delivering long-winded speeches about how you're going to beat the tar out of the enemies that are politely listening within arrow range of you and your troops.
If you intend to send a message about war, have someone take a look at just the cinematics ahead of time, someone who, maybe reads a book every other year or so, and then have them tell you whether your masterpiece is either an unintentional comic masterpiece, or a job well done. Just a suggestion.
It's not like the gameplay succeeds on its own merits, either. In numerous sections of the game you will be completely unable to harm an enemy boss, yet, they can flat out kill you. In the worst scenarios, you won't even be able to move as it loads up a cutscene, but you'll hear your character getting hit, and when the cutscene ends, your character actually has taken all that damage. Good times!
Item drops frequently suck, too. You'll kill enemies and they'll drop loot where you can't pick it up. More often than not, you'll kill the final boss for the stage, and the loot will be embedded in its corpse, which you can't clip through. So you'll try and pick it up, and in the half second interim you're given in between the boss' death and the “Mission Cleared” text appearing on the screen, it will be literally impossible for you to get your reward. Thanks, Phantagram!
Overall
This was clearly rushed to market, and obviously not worth your time. The only question that remains is, “Would this actually have been any better if they did have more time?” My guess is that it probably wouldn't improve by much. Maybe the character models look a little less disgusting, maybe the problems with the item drops and combat would have been fixed.
But it would have still been a Dynasty Warriors knock-off with no innovation to separate the games, and it would have still had the awful, awful story. Even giving the guys at Phantagram another 6 months, I see this game getting boosted maybe another half point, maybe a full point. That's it. This game is designed badly. The fact that it's implemented badly doesn't help matters any, but this really should have been shot down in the very beginning.
