Military.com Game Review: Nights

Valerie Gorchinski - Military.com

Jan 17, 2008

Nights: Journey of Dreams is apparently a sequel to an old Dreamcast game, made anew for the Nintendo Wii. It chronicles the adventure of Nights, a brightly colored cartoon harlequin, through her (I’m using “her” for the sake of having a pronoun, Nights is actually annoyingly androgynous) adventures in Nightopia. The story is completely secondary to the visuals of the game. Every level is vibrant and positively dripping with charm.

There are a variety of missions, most of which involve flying around as Nights through the dreamland obstacle courses in order to accomplish the mission goals. Mission goals, as it turns out are not always a clear as they could be. Often times mission goals are no more specific than "Free Nights!" Luckily flying missions are, more or less, on a track which makes getting lost extremely difficult.

There are several options for controlling Nights, with the nunchuk, the Wii remote, or with the classic controller. The game suggests starting out with the nunchuk or classic controller, which I did. After failing an early mission way too many times I yanked out the nunchuk cord and gave it a go with just the Wii remote. It was brilliant. The controls feel far more natural leading Nights around by pointing at the screen than by pushing the joystick in the desired direction. The nunchuk controls feel clumsy by comparison.

It is unfortunate that the level design and gameplay mechanics team up to keep the game just short of being fun. The story is, well awful, and the voice acting is even worse. Unskippable cut scenes gave me some time to ponder the questions that playing Nights leaves you with. Questions such as “Is Nights a girl or a boy?” and “why do I have to play a tutorial every time I want to fly around the courtyard?” and “why isn’t this game better?”

Nights: Journey of Dreams gets an E for effort and D for not realizing that your effort doesn’t count if your final product isn’t very good.

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