The Bad
Now while N3 has issues with a lot of small things, what really kills the game from being a good title is that the engine is fundamentally broken when it comes to boss fights. For some reason, unlike normal enemies, bosses can have attacks pass right through them without taking any damage, even if they aren’t blocking. During these fights it seems that about half of your hits against a boss never register as hitting, or even if they do, half of the time they won’t register any damage. There’s really no rhyme, reason, or predictability to this because just when you think you’re doing something wrong you’ll get random hits in that will do real damage and you’ll slowly start chipping life off the boss. To make this worse, while it’s almost impossible to die on normal enemies because they do basically no damage (besides one type of shaman enemies that does incredible amounts of damage), bosses will kill you in one to three hits. Yet, just as half of your attacks won’t register on the boss, half of their attacks won’t register on yourself as well! So sometimes you’ll get hit and take no damage and then sometimes you’ll get hit and die instantly. It’s this random aspect of the broken-beyond-words hit detection that really kills any strategy on bosses besides letting the boss fight your invincible NPC (always provided as if the developers realized the bosses were so broken it would be impossible to fight them directly) and poking him/her in the back while they prey on the NPC, meanwhile running away every time the boss turns its attention to you. This strategy is used for every boss in the entire game from start to finish and since every level has a boss, there’s not a level that doesn’t feel broken in some way.

This is made much worse than it should be do to the lack of any checkpoints whatsoever. Take a wrong hit on a boss twenty minutes or more into the stage and bam! You’re back at the start. Since when you do and when you take damage is almost random, this means until you master the art of running away and poking bosses, you’ll find yourself dying over and over on certain stages and wasting hours trying to complete a twenty-five minute stage. Checkpoints could have made this issue much less painful, but alas, there are none.

Then there is the low replay value and lack of story. Despite having only seven characters, each character scenario is only 4-5 stages long (with the hidden character only having 2). Since stages are around 20-30 minutes in length that means most characters can be completed in a 2 hour session. Unfortunately once you complete all the scenarios there’s no real incentive to play the game anymore.

N3 has no difficulty levels (something that could have fixed the balance issues a bit plus added replay value), no online modes, and the max level for each character is fairly low and easy to obtain. Maybe this could’ve been ok if the characters had great stories that would make you want to replay their campaigns, but the story in N3 is basically non-existent and what is there is absolutely dreadful. The stories of the various characters (well if you count one or two 30 second cutscenes as a “story”) don’t even match up as a coherent piece and the closest comparison to how much of a tale these characters have would be the amount of “story” each character has in a fighting game like Tekken or Soul Calibur has…except at least some of those ones are entertaining. If N3 represents Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s storytelling ability, than maybe he should stick to making great games and leaving the writing to others.