N3 (Ninety-Nine Nights) is a game that looked really good in concept, but like games often do, the concept got lost somewhere along the road to creation. Going from an ideal perspective, who wouldn’t want a Dynasty Warriors type game with incredible next-gen graphics, an epic story shown from multiple perspectives, and a wide-range of moves that played a resemblance closer to a fighting game than a simple hack and slash? That would have been the game to move systems in Japan and the US. That would have been the action title to define the Xbox 360 for now. But unfortunately that’s not what we got.

The Good
First let’s start with what N3 actually came through on as not to paint a completely ugly picture on what is not all that bad of game. Visually N3 delivers on its promise of next-gen DW. Character models look far nicer than anything a DW-type game has shown to date (though they don’t really stand up to other X360 games due to their Dreamcast looking hair and bad animation), and the game keeps its promise and spits out hundreds and even thousands of these detailed characters at one time. Watching a hill in the distance go from a empty grassland to a war torn battlefield of hundreds can really get exciting and give that epic feeling. Attack animations are good as well, with what looks to be motion captured movements representing exaggerated real life weapon swinging techniques. Even the environments of N3 look good (though still sparse, with more detail and nicer colors (and grass!) than we’ve seen in these types of games before. Overall it’s a very pleasing title on the eyes and even the framerate stays pretty good most of the time. It definitely raises the bar for what should be expected of the first true next-gen DW game.

Music is another aspect of N3 that holds to the ideal of “epic” and “beauty”. While not every track is a winner, the majority of the music is fairly good and the few pieces that really do stick out are excellent and soundtrack-buying worthy. In battle the dramatic music pieces do a great job at getting your blood pumped for taking on the masses standing your way.

Also nice is that all of the characters in the game that you play as (7 in total), are quite unique individuals. They look different, play very differently (both in weapon properties and move lists), and all have their own personality. Unfortunately they aren’t balanced at all and while some of them are really great characters that are fun to play as, others are awful characters that you’ll grit your teeth while playing through.

Lastly the crowd control aka. mass battle gameplay in N3 is fairly solid. There’s very, very little depth, strategy, or skill to the game…but otherwise hacking at hundreds of enemies feels enjoyable and is at least as fun as any of the other DW-type games. As promised, players are treated to a large movelist that grows at each level-up (levels are gained from killing hundreds), but for the most part you can beat the entire game just sticking to mashing on X. For those that enjoy this type of mindless and flashy fighting, N3 satisfies in this department.