Ninety-Nine Nights

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Ninety-Nine Nights Feature Preview Continued..

-- April 5, 2006 by: Chris Remo

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.

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