Microsoft's been busy drumming up Xbox 360 support in Japan by pushing a plethora of high profile titles, chief among them Ninety Nine Nights. Developed by Lumines mastermind Tetsuya Mizuguchi and Phantagram (the makers of the enjoyable Kingdom Under Fire series), N3 has become one of the most anticipated games of the year and for good reason. Not only is the star power of its creators enough to get us excited, but the game's actually quite enjoyable. I had the opportunity to run through a demo a short while ago, and while it feels just a little too familiar, this game's still on my must play list.

Mizuguchi is mostly known for his work on Rez and Lumines, two games that, while one is a shooter and the other a puzzle game, are both defined by their eclectic soundtracks. In those games, it's the music that drives the experience, but such is not the case with N3, which is a straight up brawler that looks more like the official evolution of Phantagram's Kingdom Under Fire franchise. You're going to select a character to play as and then lead a fantasy army into battle against all sorts of monsters. And, based on what I've seen (which is very little), there doesn't appear to be anything that has to do with grooving to the music. The game's a button masher that's defining characteristic is the ability to cut through literally hundreds of characters at a time and rack up 1000 plus hit combos.

Since the game is running on the Xbox 360, the added processing power has allowed the developers to shove scores of soldiers onto the screen at any given time. The backgrounds appear to be suffering because of this, as the barren and rocky level that I played through wasn't brimming with detail, but it's difficult to notice this when there are bodies running all over the place, and to a greater extent, when they're being pitched into the air and knocked into next week. Similar to Kingdom Under Fire, there's not much strategy required to exceed. All you have to do is run towards the bad guys and start mashing Y, X, or B, and if you want to get really fancy, you can experiment with combinations of the three, and as you do this the game just explodes with particle effects, bursts of color, and plenty of carnage. Armor gets knocked off, red and white swirls envelope the playfield, and carcasses are tossed around like pencils. There's certainly no shortage of effects.

In the demo that I played, which was unfortunately entirely in Japanese, I was this bad ass looking female warrior clad in sparkling armor. Red dots on my map informed me of where the enemy was, so I just ran towards these dots (enemies) and my small army followed close behind. When I discovered the bad guys, everyone just ran towards one another and started chopping away, and as I went to work the combo meter was just going nuts, because in N3, 1,000 hit combos aren't the exception but the norm. And as long as you don't get knocked down or die, your combo meter will continue to climb. It's not like in a fighting game where you have to bust out 25 hit combos by pressing buttons in rapid succession. In N3, you can hit 100, walk around for a little bit, and then pick up where you left off. Actually, the only reason why I didn't get too far past 1,000 is because I ran out of enemies, and with that being said, I would like to think that later on, there will be so many characters on the screen that 2,000, 3,000...hell, maybe 5,000 hit combos will be easily achieved.

Because I only ran through a brief, 10 minute demo I'm going to reserve judgment until I play the entire game. However, based on what I tasted, I'm not sure whether N3 will be enjoyable if this is all there is to its combat. I just can't see myself sitting down for a couple hours with it, as it doesn't appear to have the necessary depth to keep me glued to a couch for more than 30 minutes. Of course, this could be Mizuguchi's idea, to provide users with short and satisfying gameplay experiences, yet at the same time, it feels too similar to feel original, more like it should be called Kingdom Under Fire (insert witty subtitle here) instead of Q Entertainment passing it off as a new intellectual property. It also seems to follow the next gen train of thought that if developers manage to cram more guys onto the TV screen then their games will be cool. Again, I haven't seen enough of the game to understand if this is what's going on, but given Mizuguchi's past works, I'm desperately searching for that "special something" that's going to make N3 different from Kingdom Under Fire and Dynasty Warriors, and thus far, after reading through various articles, watching movies, and actually playing the game, I'm not convinced.

Ninety Nine Nights is ultimately Tetsuya Mizuguchi's most important piece of work because it will ultimately define his versatility as a videogame developer. It's very easy to look at the Space Channel Fives, Lumines, and Rez and say that they're amazing because of how Mizuguchi weaved music through their very fabric, but N3 doesn't seem to bear his trademark signature. Success will mean that we'll anticipate his next release with great enthusiasm, while a failure may result in us thinking that perhaps he's best left to design rhythmic hybrids. We'll know the answer on June 1st.