N3: Ninety-Nine Nights

This review is nine years in the making after earning my first achievement way back in 2006. I think I bought the game simply because it was in the best-sellers chart at some random game store but at least it wasn’t one that just sat of my shelf for years. That said, I am glad to finally have this one done with but more on that later.

N3 is a Japanese hack and slash which follows the story of Inphyy, a Temple-Knight with a questionable moral compass. Her personality traits involve a weird superiority complex over her brother Aspharr, a horrible squeaky voice that makes her sound like a power mad 5-year-old and an unquenchable thirst for blood which ultimately drives her mad.

In addition to Inphyy, there are six other playable characters with their own stories that have absolutely no bearing on each other despite their paths crossing at several points in each others’ stories. To be honest, the whole story concept is weak. It seems like a great original story but it is very poorly executed and could have been much better than it is.

The sound effects are... how can I put this... very Japanese. The menu and mission scrolling music is very epic-sounding despite the fact nothing epic has happened yet and I found it horribly disconcerting to hear this sort of music after Inphyy has killed a fuck load of innocent goblins. So I suppose that’s my main criticism of the music in that, for the most part it’s not in keeping with what’s going on in the game.

Now a lot of what I’m about to say is probably completely biased as I’m not a fan of the hack and slash genre but I found the gameplay dull, underwhelming, inconsistent and simply not fun. There is a lot of repetitiveness in the combos and I don’t know if other people’s experiences are different but I found that every character has one combo that worked which also served to make all their other moves redundant.

Aside from the combat, there is one other element to the gameplay; walking from one fight to another. This is just an episode in frustration from start to finish. Your character is not generally fast and the only way to get somewhere quicker is by using the evade move which is good for some characters and atrocious for others. It is a very tiresome and boring aspect of the game, especially when there is a requirement to replay the boring missions.

Another awful flaw with the gameplay is the boss fights. When your allies are attacking certain bosses, it makes it impossible for you to attack them and cause any significant damage. For some reason because a boss is being attacked by your archers this means you cannot interrupt that damage chain. Probably because it’s unfair on the AI or something. A bit twatish, but there you go.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

Don’t be fooled by the low achievement count. This takes utter hours. There are a relatively easy seven achievements for completing the game with each of the uniquely shit characters but after I did that, I decided to take a nine year break. When I came back to it, I understood why.

Now, I’m not one who wants to replay anything that I didn’t have a fond memory of. In fact, the only games I would consider redoing are Oblivion or maybe Mass Effect. With this in mind there was no way I was replaying the full story missions for each character again so I looked up a very basic guide on how to complete the special mission and gain achievement 8 of 10. The guide said to spam the same move on the final boss. Great. More hack and slash fun.

After I have got this one down, my next quest was to get an A rank in all missions. When I left the game, I only had one mission (two if you count the special mission) left to get an A rank in. I had to read several opinions – I don’t think these count as guides – on the matter before I was able to do it and I still think it was more luck and the game feeling sorry for me that I actually earned this. The mission I struggled with was the Ywa-Ue-Uar Forest level but I heard other has some problems with Ashpharr’s final level as well.

Anyway, the main issue with the forest level is the fact that you don’t have a lot of opportunities to kill enemies, everything is really spread out so getting anywhere is a bitch and you have to fight the massive frog king thing which was the main cause of my earlier frustration around boss fights. After about 20 attempts, I finally scored the A Rank and was able to move on to the final achievement.

That just leaves the last achievement of which the description states, and I quote, ‘Build every character up to Level 9.’ Translated, this actually means, ‘get every character to level 9... and then recomplete all of the levels again. Gotcha!’ Now, I think I can be forgiven for looking up the unlock criteria for a poorly labelled achievement like this. Despite me not liking to replay pointless shit for no reason, I managed to complete this arduous task through will power and a good iTunes playlist. I nearly cried with happiness on seeing this unlock and finally being done with this piece of shit game.

Downloadable Content – N/A

On a side note, I really did take exception to one of the guides on IGN for this game. The guy who wrote it clearly hated it more than I did so my question to him is; why would you write a guide for a game that you clearly didn’t like? My statement to him is; I don’t care about your opinion, I just want help. If you wanted you to give your opinion, then you could have written a review where you tell your friends and me to fuck this game in the ass with a lead hammer wrapped in sandpaper. It’s not worth playing even if you love hack and slash games as there are much better ones out there.