NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams

AMN’s Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don’t waste your time. This is why we’ve split our reviews into four sections: What the Game’s About, What’s Hot, What’s Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.

What’s The Game About?
The dream realm of Nightopia is under attack by Nightmarens! It’s up to children William and Helen to team up with an androgynous jester named NiGHTS, explore the land, face down enemies, and face their fears while driving the Nightmaren away. While some of the gameplay involves taking direct control of one of the children for a little walking and jumping action, the bulk of the gameplay involves NiGHTS bonding (or “dualizing”) with one of the children to enable the duo to fly through the air and flip around in circles to perform a paraloop. Any items or enemies caught in the diameter of a paraloop vanish while comes in handy as plenty of missions involve flying through floating hoops and collecting special orbs before time runs out. Special persona masks grant NiGHTS the ability to fly through strong winds or even swim.

The game’s seven main dream levels should keep players busy with multiple missions per world, but when friends drop by there’s always multiplayer mode for more NiGHTS action. Racing and battle challenges are slim at first, but as more and more of the single player game is cleared, new multiplayer arenas become available. Online multiplayer is also available with opponents coming either from one’s own Wii friend list or from a random match-up organized by the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection.

What’s Hot
NiGHTS is very ambitious when it comes to using as many of the Wii’s capabilities as possible. For example, the game can be played with the Wii remote, the remote plus nunchuk, the classic controller, or the GameCube controller. Players are encouraged to try all four methods and find the one that works best on an individual level. Then there’s the game’s ability to tap into data from the Forecast Channel and change the in-game weather to match the current (predicted?) conditions outside.

Internet capabilities are also included with NiGHTS. Each enemy or friend captured by NiGHTS ends up in the My Dream garden where they can grow and eat and mate and just generally exist. Players can go to the garden and mingle amongst the creatures, although some of them frown on being approached and will take a bite out of a hapless exploring child. Players can step through a special door to access the Internet where the dream gardens of other players await. Since each garden is different there are a whole slew of unique places to visit, and although there isn’t much to do in the garden, it’s a neat idea and the next logical advancement from the old Chao gardens from the Sonic Adventure days. An online scoreboard rounds out the Internet goodies.

There are also numerous unlockable goodies to find, although without spoiling anything let us just say that these rewards will most likely only be of interest to fans of the original NiGHTS game.

What’s Not
Some of those various control schemes take some training and patience to understand. Using the remote by itself forces the player to rely on an onscreen targeting reticule to influence NiGHTS’s direction, and due to the not-so-accurate control it is just not possible to perform tight paraloops required of some missions. Using a controller featuring a traditional control stick makes NiGHTS much more satisfying, and frankly the remote and nunchuk combination works best.

This new NiGHTS seems to have been designed with fans of the original Sega Saturn game in mind, and while that’s a definite plus for longtime NiGHTS boosters, those of us who only just now stepped into the dream world run the risk of being left on the curb. A questionably-voiced introduction explains the basics of NiGHTS and his world, but there’s little information presented on why NiGHTS needs to complete the missions assigned to him and his dreaming partner. One particular mission very early in the game left us stumped for far too long because the game did not adequately explain the task to be completed. Instead it gave a rushed Warioware-like order and then started the ticking clock. Original NiGHTS fans most likely know just what to do at this point, but newbies are nearly assured to suffer from confusion and frustration.

Final Word
NiGHTS: Journey Of Dreams has been a long time coming and it’s safe to say that ardent fans of the original NiGHTS game will get so much more out of this sequel than anyone approaching the series for the first time. It’s a fun experience, although not very deep. Consider it for a purchase when it hits the bargain bin sometime in the future or, at the very least, a weekend rental. Taking advantage of all the neat things the Wii technology has to offer should be applauded, but when the core gameplay itself is merely so-so, it all goes to waste.