Ninety Nine Mistakes

I played the demo for Ninety Nine Nights (hereafter known as N3) while visiting Japan last March. In that insulated setting, the game experience was excellent. The game's rich graphics and wonderful designs drew me in and I'm always a sucker for short bursts of Dynasty Warriors-Style Combat.

The game, however did not live up to its potential. While this is unfortunate, I don't think N3 was a lost cause and so I've thrown together a few key changes could have saved it from the Bargain Bin.

1. Fix the damn save system. The game has like six playable characters, and their progress is saved in individual save files, accidentally overwrite one and poof! Everything you did with that character is gone. This is an obtuse system that should be a distant memory, not an unfortunate reality.

2. Make the boss fights more interesting and more frequent. One of the ways N3 separates itself from Dynasty Warriors is though the use of boss battles. DW simply puts you though a series of battles against similarly powered heroes, whereas N3 actually had the occasional large, challenging-looking boss. I say "challenging-looking" because generally speaking, the object is to find the boss's blind spot and go to town for what feels like forever until the fucker finally goes down.
This doesn't work.
You can't spit without hitting a game that has done decent boss fights, boss fights with some sort of hook that makes it more then just a repetitious chore. It doesn't take that much work and it really adds so much more to your game.

3. Save Points must be included. Yes, this is different from complaining about the overall save system. If your game has forty-five minute missions, particularly when you often have a big ass boss at the end of them who are capable of killing you in one or two hits, then you must allow for some sort mid-mission saving. Otherwise, instead of providing challenge, you provide frustration.

4. What's with the Cursed Items? N3 has equipment that actually drops your stats. Equipment that you have to manually equip having read in advance that they are indeed cursed. Hell, even the font color is is different as to eliminate any need for you to have to actually read the negative numbers. They serve zero purpose, lose them.

5. Give me some extras. You are allowed and encouraged to replay missions in N3 in order to get experience and drops. Thats fine, in fact, that's a great idea. But there needs to be more incentive to replay like that. The game's one hidden character has but two missions, both of which are reused missions from other characters, which this game does a lot of, and that's fine. But you could easily have used the other non player characters in the game as additional unlockables. The assets are already there and there's almost no work involved in shifting a mission's point of view to them. It's an exceptionally cheap and easy way to make more content and heavily increases replayability.

I don't think a game like this will ever be a top selling game, but if they are smart about it, a well crafted one can defiantly be profitable.