Review #609: Nights - Journey of Dreams

 It's more of a lull than a journey, as it slowly lulls you to sleep

 As a Nintendo kid I've always wanted to play Nights into Dreams, one of the most beloved, and hard to play(since most ports are Japan exclusive) games from Sega's Saturn era. I was pretty excited when Nights Journey of Dreams was announced, but for one reason or another, the game just fell off my radar. A few years ago I managed to get a copy of the game, which had been collecting dust on my backlog until today. Some dreams are better left off as dreams.

 The story concerns Will and Helen, two kids who, upon suffering nightmares, find themselves in Nightopia, the world of Dreams and of the being named Nights. You can play as either Helen or Will, both have their own exclusive story, 12 stages as well as 3 boss fights. The story is boring and pretty darn lame. The worst part about it is that you can't skip cutscenes until after you beat a stage, and every single stage is preceded by an overly long poorly scripted dialogue between Helen or Will and Nights. The game would've fared much, much better if it had emphasized its gameplay over the story, the latter which has nothing worthwhile to offer.

 The game is very simple, the analog stick is used to move around, 360 degrees of freedom, while A is used to boost, as long as you have energy on your boost gauge. Nights is a flying being, and that's the one thing he does best, every stage in the game requires him to fly around stages, going through rings to fill his boost gauge and grabbing blue energy spheres for points. There are enemies flying around to, in order to defeat them you must either grab them and then throw them, by pressing A, or doing a loop(Called paraloop in the game) around them, the latter having a wide area of effect, as wide as the loop you performed was. You cannot die in the game, instead, you lose time and if the timer hits 0 it's back to the beginning of the level.

 Flying around feels great, but Nintendo's analog sticks have never been great since they use an hexagonal base as opposed to a circular one, like Sony and Microsoft. Most of the time you can do just fine, but sometimes you'll wish you had more precision. As you advance through the game you'll gain the ability to turn Night into a flying dolphin, a rocket and a dragon.  Transformations are fairly underwhelming, the Dolphin form is required to go underwater, the game turns you into it automatically, the rocket is faster and the dragon... is aesthetically cool? I dunno, but this should tell you just how little alternate forms matter unless you are interested in perfecting your scores on each stage.

 If the game was made up of just the 2-D flying I could have called it pretty good, but sadly, it isn't. Each world, of which there are six(3 per character) contains 5 stages, of which 1 is a boss fight. There's one Chase stage on each world, in which you must chase after key-carrying keys in order to unlock gates and then fight an easy version of the world's boss. These stages are just fine. But then the game offers a few other types which aren't as good. Any stage in which you must play as one of the kids is very slow paced and boring. There are others in which you must collect stuff around a circular area or save Nightopeans by flying circles around them. These stages aren't so much fun. Bosses are pretty hit or miss too, often times being a miss. For instance, there's this annoying Witch fight in which you must tilt a table of unusual gravitational properties to make stuff fall through holes. That one is a miss. There's a Spider fight in which you must hit the ceiling with the web-balls it spews, this one isn't poorly designed but just boring.

 I think Nights Journey of Dreams is a game that failed to capitalize on its strengths. The flying, while not 'amazing' or groundbreaking, is decent enough as to be pretty darn fun, but there's too little of it. Can't believe I'm gonna say this, but the game needed less variety in its stages. Also, every bit of story content should've been axed in its entirety, or at least allow the players to skip it on their first time through. At the end of the day, the game was decent, but boring.
 6.0 out of 10