Ninety-Nine Nights Feature Preview

Tetsuya Mizuguchi isn't exactly a household name, though many gamers are familiar with some of his work. Most of the designer's titles are unique, to say the least, and with the few exceptions of titles such as Sega Rally Championship (SAT, Arcade) they are like almost nothing else out there. After his internal Sega studio known as AM Annex was renamed to United Game Artists and Mizuguchi put in charge, he designed the games that would in many ways design his style: Space Channel 5 (PS2, DC) and Rez (PS2, DC). Both were fresh and original, tying music to gameplay in a natural way; the abstract and trippy rails shooter Rez has become something of a hallowed cult classic. Mizuguchi eventually left Sega to form his own studio, Q? Entertainment, where he designed the acclaimed audio/visual-centric puzzler Lumines (PSP) and produced another falling-blocks title, the insane and multi-layered Meteos (DS). While Mizuguchi's games are routinely praised by critics and gamers who actually play his titles, his eclectic but inventive design sensibilities have arguably led to retail reception that fails to live up to his reputation. With his next game, it appears that Mizuguchi may be attempting to buck that trend. He is designing an anticipated Xbox 360 title, Ninety-Nine Nights, co-developed by Q? and Phantagram, the South Korean developer of Kingdom Under Fire. At a recent Microsoft event, I had the chance to try out Ninety-Nine Nights and chat briefly with Mizuguchi about the game and his thoughts on development. Before even picking up the controller, it is clear that Ninety-Nine Nights was conceived very differently than Mizuguchi's other titles. Rather than the abstract and colorful visuals that accompany most of his games, Ninety-Nine Nights strives for a realistic depiction of a fantasy world, with large environments and seemingly infinite enemies rendered in impressive detail. The game is a third person beat-em-up putting the player in the role of a powerful hero who must defeat hundreds upon hundreds of enemies in each stage. Phantagram's Kingdom Under Fire action/strategy heritage comes through clearly, but the strategy elements in Ninety-Nine Nights seem considerably downplayed from Phantagram's previous efforts. Rather, the game plays more along the lines of Dynasty Warriors, with the player feeling practically invincible as he or she bulldozes through countless enemy ranks. From level to level, the player will start out with a small army of soldiers, taking on groups of enemies containing dozens or even hundreds of individual soldiers. At really extreme moments, the framerate chugs a bit, but it never got bothersome. After taking out one group, you'll continue on to the next one marked on your map. Your character can jump, execute light and heavy attacks, or combine the three for various combo moves. Based on my time with the game, you won't really need to memorize compled combo strings or anything of the sort; pressing lots of buttons generally results in pretty impressive stuff happening on its own. There's a combo meter measuring how many successive hits you've gotten in, but it's pretty lenient. Anything that hits an enemy counts towards the combo count, and you've got a few seconds in between hits before the meter resets. I got mine well above 1000 within a single level. There's also a special attack meter that fills up as you fight, and reaching the limit allows you to enter an even more devastating mode for a limited time. Attacks gain significantly greater power, and you'll then start filling another meter that only rises when in super-insane mode. When that one is full, you enter super-duper-insane mode and, suffice to say, your enemies don't last long. You're also able to issue basic commands to your fellow soldiers, such as to flank left or right, but at least in the presumably early level I played, it's pretty unnecessary. Your attacks are so powerful and your character so tough that it almost seems like a waste of time to even pay attention to your relatively ineffective comrades. Ninety-Nine Nights comes as something of a shock to those familiar with Mizuguchi's previous work. For the most part, his games stress unique gameplay mechanics and quirkiness, with the player experience hinging on a tight connection between absorbing gameplay and the game's visual and--more importantly--auditory presentation. It's almost startling how opposed that aesthetic is to that of N3, as the game is frequently abbreviated. This game features tried and tested gameplay mechanics, with the immersion coming from graphics and the actual events depicted on screen rather than their purely stylistic presentation; in some ways, intricate gameplay takes a backseat since so much of it is automated. Why the change? There are a few reasons. One is simply that the hardware being used for the game, the Xbox 360, is quite powerful and Mizuguchi wanted to take advantage of it. "I'd like to keep the gameplay not so new for this," he explained. "Instead I wanted to use the 360's power. The 360 can generate many, many, many soldiers on the field, so we wanted that." When asked to further elaborate on the relationship between hardware capabilities and gameplay design, Mizuguchi drew examples from his past games. "It's very important to get influence from the hardware. With the PSP, it is an audio/visual interactive Walkman, so we decided to make [Lumines,] a puzzle game featuring music. With Meteos, we used the touch screen [of the DS]. On this, we have many soldiers. Every soldier has AI and physics. I know that it's a mainstream trend, but we said let's use this and make some chemistry with the dramatic elements." Turn the page for more on the storytelling aspects of Ninety-Nine Nights. _PAGE_BREAK_ Those dramatic elements can also be considered somewhat new ground for Mizuguchi. Generally, his games have either no story at all, or a basic story that seems largely included for the sake of completeness; the gameplay is generally absorbing enough on its own merits. With N3, however, he set out with very different goals. "I had two inspirations," he said. "One inspiration was an old movie, Akira Kurosawa's old movie titled Rashomon. This movie is over fifty years old, a great movie." A landmark film, Rashomon depicts a single crime through the perspectives of five different people, each of whom hads a different viewpoint the situation. "Each person has a different impression, a different point of view," Mizuguchi continued. "I thought we could make the game an experience not just with one storyline. You play each character, and then you can understand what's happening in this world. This is what I want to express." N3 takes place during a terrible war between humans and goblins. The humans are easily identified with, as they are depicted with heroic faces and shining armor. Plus, you know, they're humans. Still, different characters have different motivations and personalities. The beautiful female character Inphyy, who was playable in the level I previewed, is colder and more battle-hardened than her more sympathetic brother Aspharr. Depending on which character the player is controlling, events in cutscenes will be colored differently. Different humans aren't the only opportunities for the player to experience contrasting viewpoints, however; the brutish and ugly goblins are fair game as well. At various points in the game, cutscenes that are triumphant and seemingly justified from the human side will be painted as gross tragedies when the perspective shifts to that of the goblins. Not only that, but the player will actually assume the role of a goblin warrior and mow down dozens of the human soldiers he may have been fighting alongside only one level previously. That brings us to Mizuguchi's second source of inspiration. "The second inspiration is that after 9/11, many wars and many terrors still exist," he said. "We can watch the many countries' media via the internet or the TV. Each media is saying different things, each media is showing different aspects. It depends on the [sense of] justice of each country. In Ninety-Nine Nights, you can see each sense of justice. You can play the enemy. You play the human being characters first, and after that you can play the goblin soldiers. It's a big switch in your brain. You enter goblin society, and you have sympathy with the goblin soldiers. Then the human being soldiers look very evil." Mizuguchi wanted to tell a stronger story than he has done in the past, so to help create empathy for the characters, the game world is visually realistic rather than overly stylized. What I've seen of the game indicates that while the models are nicely rendered and appealing, the environments aren't necessarily hugely inspring. Most of the visual effort seems to have gone into the scale of the game, which is indeed very impressive. Each successive group of enemies seems to contain more soldiers than the last, which leads to some truly epic scenes in which the entire screen is literally covered with enemies. There are boss battles as well, but even bosses are surrounded by almost as many enemies as you'd find in a normal situation. The result of all this leads to very instantly gratifying gameplay, but makes me wonder how effective the storytelling will be. Not much of the actual plotline has been revealed at this point, but it seems fairly clear that it will be mostly limited to cutscenes interspersed among the action. Whatever the emotional aspects of the story may be, the depth promised by Mizuguchi does seem slightly at odds with what is, for the most part, very basic gameplay. It comes off as the type of game in which many players skip the cutscenes as frequently as possible in order to get back to eradicating countless enemies. It's hard to give such judgments with any degree of reliability at this point, since my hands on experience with the game has been brief, but I can't help but worry that the disparate elements of N3 may end up sabotaging one another. That said, the game is practically guaranteed to do better at retail than many of Mizuguchi's less marketable efforts, and as an independent developer now, that can't hurt. The parallel narratives the designer promises are undeniably interesting. While many games have had multiple playable characters, few have made a concerted attempt to really exploit the possibilities offered by diametrically opposed perspectives. Bungie's Halo 2 (Xbox) took a stab at it, to widely contested results, but it seems almost criminally underused considering games are the only medium to truly put the player directly into a character's perspective. I'm hopeful that, for players interested in a unique story, Mizuguchi can pull it off. After Ninety-Nine Nights, Q? Entertainment will have had games on currently-supported platforms from all three major console manufacturers. In regards to the benefits of independent development, he explained, "If we have an idea, we can work with any company, or any people." For example, Meteos was designed by Masahiro Sakurai, former HAL Laboratories creator of Kirby and the Super Smash Bros. franchise. What's next? "I just need a rest now," laughed Mizuguchi. "I'm thinking about the future for now. Maybe at the E3, we can say... something." And that's all he would reveal. Ninety-Nine Nights, developed by Q? Entertainment and Phantagram, will be released by Microsoft Game Studios for Xbox 360 this year.