Santa dropped by and left me a copy of Nights: Journey of Dreams (Wii). I was totally cool with that, since I’d asked for it. Being a fan of the Saturn original I just had to have this new game. I popped it into my Wii with an awkward anticipation. I really wanted the game to be a sweet sequel, but at the same time Sonic Team hasn’t made a decent game in nearly six years, so could they really reinvent Nights successfully?
The answer is an unfortunate ‘no’.
I’ll kick this off by speaking a bit about the good parts. The game is broken up into six main levels (and a final level which is the same for both kids). Each level is further broken down into several kinds of missions. The first mission, dubbed “Chase” missions, of every level plays out in a fashion similar to the levels found in the original Nights. The basic structure of these missions has players flying through three paths around a level and then engaging in a boss fight. These levels aren’t exactly the same as the original games levels, but there is a lot of similarity, and it’s just as fun. The rest of the missions are largely a waste of time and are obviously filler to extend the total amount of play time. A few of these are fun (the Octopaw missions are all about setting up large linking chains, and that’s pretty fun) but most of the levels end up feeling tedious because you need to play through them in order to advance to the next ‘good’ part of the game.
Most of the missions are flight based and, thankfully, they control really well. The game handles just like the old game does, except in the remote only mode. Motion controls are awfully executed, but when playing traditionally it’s wonderful. Well,until you play the on-foot sections. But I’ll talk about that a little further down.
Aside from those “Chase” and “Octopaw” missions the rest of the game is awful. The story, the cut scenes, the charatcers, the dialog, the voice acting, the non flying bits, ect, are all pretty bad. The character models are unpolished, and look like something that was done early on last generation. There’s no excuse for how bad the charatcers look close up in the cutscenes. The kids’ models are freakishly ugly and the rest of the models (Nights, Reala, other enemies and allies) aren’t pretty looking either. Take all of the horrible modeling and add in some terrible dialog, terrible story development, and so absolutely lame voice overs and you have some completely unwatchable cut scenes on your hands.
The controls for the on-foot sections around can also be described as, ‘pretty bad’. I don’t know how you screw up making a character move on flat ground, but Sonic Team pulled it off. The walking animations, first off, aren’t nice to look at, and the button configuration is a little stupid. It’s a bearable set-up, but if you hit the Z button (in nun-chuck style) the camera goes insane and you have to mess around to get a decent view on things. It’s a clunky set-up that’s just not that fun to control.
Story wise Nights 2 is largely a disgrace to the Nights series. I maintain that had Sonic Team crafted six brand new levels, and didn’t add in all the filler content Nights 2 would be a much better game. As it is Sonic Team really just screwed with everything by adding in a bunch of lame crap. They killed the atmosphere the original had; it doesn’t have a dream like feel to it. The original had a bare bones story that set up any player with the knowledge that the game was set in a dream world. The story was never forced, like it is in this game. Every time players enter a mission in this game they’re “treated” to some story element, and this content really kills the feel this game should have had. The filler missions really bog everything down too. Simply put, there’s just to much filler content.
And, what really sucked about the story is that it’s kind of set it up in a way that makes it seem like there wasn’t an original game. It’s essentially the same story (just dragged out and made into something completely uninteresting) with new characters that have new, sucky, personalities. It’s a real downer.
To shorten it up, the game rules when it’s doing the things the first one did (all six first missions of the levels) and the rest is filler crap. Is it worth the money? Probably not. I had some high hopes, and I was let down (but, I kind of figured I would be). It just sucks because the game I wanted is in there, it really is, it’s just the filler makes up the majority of the game and as a whole product it’s not good.
