NiGHTS disappoints
Sat 19 Jan 08 20:19 | Tags: Games, Reviews
Way back in April of last year, soon after it was finally confirmed that Sega was making a sequel to its oft-overlooked Saturn classic NiGHTS, I broke out my old Saturn, found a NiGHTS demo disc I had laying around (I had sold the full copy of the game I had owned earlier, regrettably), connected it to my video capture doohickey (my own Pepito, and recorded some footage to put on this blog. That entry became what is likely the most read RGR entry ever, thanks to some link love from Opposable Thumbs. As a fan of the original game, I was looking forward to the sequel, but at the same time apprehensive that the game wouldn't match my nostalgia-influeced expectations.
Well, that sequel, NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams has now been out for a month, and I personally have had it for about two weeks, though I haven't been playing it every day. The verdict? Unfortunately, I was right to be apprehensive.
It doesn't seem like it'd be too hard to replicate NiGHTS' success, really; just create a game that plays just like the first one, where you race through the circuitous levels, collecting chips to destroy the Ideya captures (the snowglobe-looking things), then fighting a boss. (If you haven't played it in a while (or ever), it couldn't hurt to watch the video to refresh your mind of the original's astounding gameplay.) And there are a few stages in Journey of Dreams which are like this, and they are the most fun to play. Unfortunately, instead of collecting twenty blue chips to advance in these stages, you now instead are expected to race through and catch up to a flying bird-like enemy, defeating it to collect a key which lets you advance through the next stage. Right there is a basic change for the worse in the gameplay; in the original, exploration through the levels to find caches of chips was encouraged, but in this game exploration is punished as it allows the bird-thing to fly further ahead; the best thing to do is to fly in a straight line as quickly as possible. But it looks and plays close enough to the original, and the boss battles at the end of these levels are so fantastic, that that's a forgivable change.
What kills the game, though, are the levels which deter from the original's gameplay, and those levels make up about three-quarters of the game. Now the original NiGHTS had a few gimmicky parts of levels, such as switching to a top-down view in the forest level or having NiGHTS transform into a sled in the snow level, but they were relatively short segments. Journey of Dreams' other levels, however, take these gimmicky segments and turns them into entire levels. Whether you're riding on NiGHTS as a boat or a roller-coaster, or winding through a city-styled maze restricted to a top-down perspective, or even doing 3D platforming as William and Helen alone without any flying segment at all; these are just no fun and feel like filler in between the retro-styled levels.
The storyline of Journey is pretty much the same as the original. Just substitute basketball-playing Elliot and singing Claris with soccer-playing William and violin-playing Helen. I won't go into it much further than that.
Allow me to go into lazy rant mode for the rest of my gripes with the game.
The game's levels take quite a bit of time to load compared to other A-list Wii games; and much more time than the Saturn version. Let me say that again; loading times for the Wii version of NiGHTS are significantly worse than the Saturn version. Granted, the Saturn game had unusually short loading times for its peers, but I can't particularly tell why the Wii game's loading times must be longer than its peers.
Another new feature debuting in this Wii version for the worse is dialogue. And unskippable cut scenes. Dang it, the first game did just fine without explaining just how Clarus and Elliot can control NiGHTS (they dualize! Oh wow!) or giving NiGHTS a voice like a British nanny. On a related note, there's an uncanny valley thing going on, I think, with the character designs for William and Helen; they look plastic and unappealing. The other non-human characters we often see, namely NiGHTS and a new character named Owl (he's an owl!), are unimpressively modeled and could use a few more polygons thrown their way. (Why are Owl's glasses shiny false-reflective discs instead of actually transparent glass? Even just modeling empty frames would have looked better than that.) The levels and bosses look fairly good, though.
The Wii controls are not the best for this game. The more traditional way to play is to use the "nunchuck's" joystick to steer NiGHTS and use the Wii remote's A button to give NiGHTS a burst of speed. (The pointing or motion detecting capabilities of the Wiimote are not used.) You can also use the Classic Controller or a GCN controller, if you have one. However, the analogue stick on all of these controllers is in an octagonal well instead of being perfectly round. One of NiGHTS' basic moves is to fly him in a circle quickly to collect or kill the things inside that circle; the octagon makes it quite difficult to do this smoothly, as well as rather noisy -- clickclickclickclickclickclick! In contrast, the Saturn's analogue controller's joystick had a perfectly circular well which made it easy peasy to throw NiGHTS for a loop. An alternative control mode uses just the Wiimote to point a circle on the screen that NiGHTS will fly torwards, but this control scheme is just so far different from the original gameplay that I tried it for about ten seconds and promptly went back to the Wiimote/nunchuck combo style.
The game has a bleak and boring overworld between levels. Overworlds can be cool; this one is lame and just another interruption to the action.
So, all that aside… NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams is not really a bad game. I mean, it's very playable. It's just tragic that it falls so short of the original's glory because it far too much tries to do new things instead of sticking to the finely-tuned simplicity of the original. I will probably keep playing it until I beat it, but then it will be on the short list of games to trade in at GameStop. If you're a NiGHTS fan, maybe give it a rent, but otherwise save your money and hope that Sega decides to release its PS2 remake of the original NiGHTS outside of Japan.
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