pfister_ - nights: journey of dreams -- one hour review
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nights: journey of dreams -- one hour review
NIGHTS: Journey of Dreams, developed for the Wii by Sonic Team USA, is the sequel to the cult classic Nights into Dreams for the Sega Saturn.
The original's reputation is the reason I wanted to eventually track down a Saturn. I was excited by the announcement of a sequel, because that meant I wouldn't have to bother. Then I remembered that Sonic Team hasn't made a decent game since Chu Chu Rocket, and I got a bit less excited.
0:00 After entering my name, I'm presented with an option of one of 32 national flags. Do they have 32 languages on the disc? "Please select your network icon," it says. Oh.
0:01 The cloying orchestral music in the background would've fit well in the Mary Poppins soundtrack. Maybe I'm just saying that because Big Ben is in the background of the options screen.
0:02 The game gives me the choice of Will's Dream or... Will's Dream. That's the only choice onscreen.
0:03 It starts with about a minute of CGI of an anime-styled kid playing soccer with himself. Then the screen goes blue and his father leaves him. Then a bunch of kids appear around him and start laughing. Then they all collapse into dust. This would all be really evocative for a five-year-old, I'm sure.
0:04 The game starts, and I'm in a park of some sort. I get to run forward collecting orbs for about 10 seconds before hitting another cut scene, this one rendered in-engine. An anthropomorphic owl is telling the kid that the dreams I've been having are real -- in the world of dreams!
0:06 A frightening purple harlequin flies down from the sky. It's the evidently-eponymous NIGHTS. NIGHTS is the name of a character? I didn't know that.
0:06 "Go over and touch NIGHTS." Alright. I get to walk forward for two seconds and then there's another cutscene.
0:07 It's giving me a tutorial for the controller I'm not using.
0:08 The flight controls are interesting. They're essentially 2D, but the gamespace takes place on the surface of a cylinder.
0:10 It was just a cylinder during the first part of the tutorial. Now the 2D gamespace follows a track all over the 3D world it's embedded in.
0:11 The camera angle is pretty bad for seeing what's ahead of you.
0:13 It's even worse for combat.
0:14 I can see this being a lot of fun without the tutorial interrupting it repeatedly. The controls are fluid and responsive, and the sensation of flight is good -- very similar to the sensation of movement while driving in Vice City and San Andreas, actually.
0:16 Aw man, I'm back on foot again. These controls are decidedly unfluid and irresponsive.
0:18 I find a magic-looking door, and the "1st mission" starts loading.
0:19 Which starts with another terrible, unskippable cutscene. NIGHTS's evil twin puts her in a cage. The owl says I need to "dualize" with her. I feel like I'm on the set of Star Trek, except nobody's given me a script.
0:20 The weird jiggling artifacts on the owl's feather animation are oddly hypnotic. Are they supposed to be simulating natural swaying motion, like you see in fur rendering?
0:21 The music here is the same Mary-Poppins orchestral style as before except with a breakbeat loop layered on. The loop is playing at double speed, so it's running at about 180 BPM where the rest of the music sounds more like 90 BPM.
0:22 The music might be more appropriate if I were flying and not jogging about.
0:23 I've found an egg the size of my head. I'm now carrying it around, and walking at half speed, and the driving music seems even more ridiculous by contrast.
0:25 I figure out how to put the egg down, and it hatches into a gnome thing. Now I'm walking around with a gnome thing named Maoda.
0:26 A bell just rang and some shiny ghosts start chasing me. I'd be enjoying the surreality of this a lot if I didn't actually have a goal to accomplish, i.e. get back into a game mode with the flight controls.
0:27 The ghosts catch me. NIGHT OVER. The options are tiny and illegible on my standard definition TV, so I end up back at the main menu rather than retrying the mission. Whoops.
0:30 I navigate through the menus back to the level, and I have to sit through the cutscene again. Damn, damn, damn.
0:32 This time, I go in a different direction from the start and immediately run into the base of NIGHTS's cage. Whoops. I climb up, some particle effects start dancing about -- representing "dualization," presumably -- and I'm off!
0:35 All the good things I said about the flight interface still apply, but it really does have serious interface issues. You just can't look ahead. The game doesn't let you. Even when the camera angled seems to allow you to look ahead, often what you're seeing is not actually directly ahead, but only accessible via twists and turns implicit in the embedded 2D flight path.
0:38 I'm stuck in a tree now, and the camera isn't helping at all. Remember when it was only 3D games that had camera issues? Those were the days.
0:41 There's a move I can do that involves forming a closed loop with the sparkles trailing behind me. It forms a sort of an explosion inside the loop, which destroys enemies and collects items. I'm also using it to, I think, hatch eggs like the one I found before. I can't really tell if it's the same egg as before, because I'm moving too fast.
0:43 Uh, the game ends again, when time runs out. I thought I had to be chased down by shiny ghosts first? Also, a strict time limit on the first level? Srsry? Give me time to learn how to play first.
0:45 Retrying. I'm supposed to be chasing down some birds, and I've met a few, but then they vanish. The owl is telling me I'm supposed to be chasing them, but I really don't know how I'm supposed to effectively follow them with this camera.
0:48 The embedded 2D level actually actually intersects with itself -- no wonder I was so confused about its layout.
0:51 I don't know whether I'm getting better or just got lucky, but one of the birds stayed in the camera's FOV long enough for me to chase it down.
0:52 I think the level layout changed again after I brought the bird back to the cage.
0:54 As I'm flying about, the owl asks me to hold on a moment, because it senses a secret nearby. I try to, but the game is having none of it -- it shoves me into a short sequence where my flight controls move me perpendicular to the direction of flight. There are a bunch of collectibles in here, but I don't want them; I want to figure out what the owl's trying to tell me, before time runs out.
0:57 I found the last bird, but it got away due to my continual running into rubber bands that bounce me in the direction I came from. Would be nice if I could see those coming. Like, you know, if the camera were angled slightly in the direction I was flying, maybe?
0:59 And time runs out before I can track it down again. The use of "track" here is perhaps inappropriate, because there's no actual method available that I can ascertain. I was just flying around at random in hopes of spotting it.
Would I play this game for more than an hour? No. Even if the flight mechanic eventually clicked with me, and I suspect it would, everything about the game except that mechanic is pretty terrible. Sega has actually just announced a straight remake of Nights into Dreams for the Playstation 2, so I'll see how that one is when it comes out.
Tags: one hour review
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