When Ninety-Nine Nights takes off, it's epic: You're leading troops against wave upon wave of twisted monsters, cutting them down with a sword as big as yourself, only to find another mob over the hill. And you wind up wrestling with questions about genocide, justice, and revenge in a way that only clicks when you're delirious with bloodlust and standing in a pile of heads, and somebody asks why you enjoyed it so much.
But break the momentum, and the drama fades—and you'll realize that you're just hacking through one cookie-cutter crowd after another, banging out the same few attacks again and again. The levels have engaging twists and turns, and they flow together well. But too often, you'll have to go back and repeat them, either to build up your stats, or because you got all the way to the end of a 40-minute mission only to lose the final battle—which means you have to slog through it all over again. When a game is this cinematic, it should never make the player sit through the same reel twice.
Beyond the game: The scuttlebutt says that the anime-styled Ninety-Nine Nights was positioned to draw more Japanese gamers to the XBox 360. If so, you can infer that Japanese boys love to buy bags of little plastic Army men and jam them all in a blender just like we do.
Worth playing for: Seven playable characters give you different perspectives on roughly the same story, though you'll start with the sneezy-faced but voluptuous Inphyy. Where most knights wear a breastplate, Inphyy just has … breasts.
Frustration sets in when: Your armies are just there to fill out the scenery: they're fantastically inept and harmless, and watching your troops just standing around a goblin, poking it like a caged animal, will make you crazy.
Final judgment: Ninety-Nine Nights tries to capture the glories and horrors of war, but it's more like mowing the lawn.