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Ninety-Nine Nights was supposedly something special. Microsoft boasted about it, and gamers were anticipating its arrival. Disappointed? I know I am. If you’ve played any of the multitude of Dynasty Warriors games, or its many clones, in essence, you’ve played N3. On the brink of the most toe-to-toe console war since Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, N3 feels like a relic from years past.

The paper thin story of N3 follows a war between humans and goblins. The story is told through cut scenes that you’ll come by playing as each of the games seven playable characters. I suppose in a better game it would be interesting to see the war from seven separate perspectives, but because N3 isn’t much fun to play at all, it doesn’t really matter.

Why isn’t N3 much fun? Well, the gameplay is shallow, the voice acting is terrible, and having huge armies on the screen at any given time is simply not enough to carry an entire game, but first thing is first:

N3 is a button mashing action-fest. You travel around the map laying waste to large groups of enemies with the X and Y buttons. Killing off enemies gains you experience that levels your character up. As you level up, you gain new moves, but there’s really no use for them outside of being able to watch a new animation. You can use charge attacks that award you with small blue orbs from your enemies. After collecting enough of these orbs, you’re able to do a larger attack with the B button that will attack multiple enemies. Deep.

All of the games playable characters feel very similar. Thanks to the shallow gameplay,  it feels at most times that character choice is strictly cosmetic, giving you something new to look at as you mindlessly slam on the X button. The storylines for each character are boring and don’t do anything in the way of making you care about your character or what happens to them.

Technically speaking, the first three characters you play as are suppose to be different than the last four in that they are ‘commanders’, and I use that term loosely. The commander characters have the ability to choose guard units for the battle, from a short list of infantry, archers, pikemen and heavy infantry. The choice you make doesn’t make a lick of difference, though, since the guards are all completely useless. Their main occupation seems to be standing still and watching you duke it out with the army on your own. As the commander, you’re given the ability to command your guards to follow you or stay put in one spot. It’s by no means an expansive gameplay element, and may as well been taken out altogether for the terrible implementation.

During the larger battles, you’ll come face to face with enemy hero characters. The only real difference between these special fighters and the rest of the faceless minions is that these characters take more hits to kill, and they look different. There is no excessive strategy needed to take them down, making them yet another useless addition to the gameplay.

N3’s biggest draw was that there were always tons of enemies on-screen at once. Unfortunately for them, they couldn’t even get that much right, and the entire game suffers from slowdown during the larger scale battles. The character models themselves look great, and the animations are smooth, but because you’ll be facing off against hundreds of enemies that look the exact same, you get bored of the scenery very quickly, which negates the fact that the game is actually quite pretty. The same can be said for the levels, which you’ll revisit seven times if you (can stand the game long enough to) play the game with every character. The graphics, much like the gameplay, lack variety.

Somehow the soundtrack manages to be the stand out feature in the entire game. It’s an orchestrated soundtrack of excellent quality that has some legitimately good tunes in it. The voice acting is awful, as was expected it would be, and listening to voice clips repeat themselves a million times during a mission is grinding on the nerves.

It’s unfortunate when a game is harder to enjoy than it is to beat, but somehow, N3 manages it. The game is a mindless romp of button mashing with an uninteresting story and characters even less so than that. Even if you somehow manage to last long enough to beat the game with all seven characters, there’s absolutely no real reason to go back and play the game over again. N3 was hyped up as a big deal, but ended up a big pile. Thankfully, though, the holiday rush is seemingly moments away, and games like Gears of War and Call of Duty 3 will be making N3 a distant memory in only a few short weeks time.