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NiGHTS Journey of Dreams
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There’s alot more I feel that could have been done with Journey of Dreams, and if there’s one thing I’m completely on board with in IGN’s rather harsh review is that this could very well reopen the franchise to better games in the future. An exciting possibility yes, but whether Sega would drive it into the ground like they have Sonic or whether it’ll simply fade back into obscurity is something unforeseeable.
However, after unlocking the extended ending my feelings about the game have finally settled and I’ve decided: it’s decent. I find it satisfactory as a big fan of the franchise. It’s never going to win game of the year, it by far doesn’t have the best design, but overall it can be charming and can be fun in places, and not to mention challenging. You can beat it fairly quickly, but with C or above scores you get a better ending (in the original game you had to beat all the levels with A scores, however since this one has 5 missions per level that you get graded on the C or above thing is merciful.) Playing around with the My Dream level can be neat, currently mine is full of Nightmaren and tree spouts, the ground is entirely covered in pink flowers and yesterday it was snowing there due to the flurries in my area. You don’t really have control over how it changes, but it just changes the more you do in the game (of course it doesn’t seem to register unless you go there after each time you do a level mission.)
Basically the premise of the game is this: Will and Helen are two unrelated 12-year-old children living in the city of Bellbridge who are going through some confusion and pain in the relationship with their parents. Will’s father is transferred due to his job and Will isn’t able to go with him, leaving him lonely and without emotional support. Helen is growing independent from her mother and is suppressing feelings of guilt. Because of this, both children start to have nightmares. However, they battle against them with the help of a creature named NiGHTS, who they can merge with and fly around in dreams. It turns out that aside from their own nightmares there’s a bigger threat, creatures called the Nightmaren that are attacking the dream world and trying to take over the realm of good dreams known as Nightopia. But "visitors" to the dream realm like Will and Helen posess a power of their own, manifestations known as "ideya" that represent different aspects of the human heart. Together with NiGHTS’ abilities they can defeat the Nightmares and save Nightopia, and solve the conflicts within themselves.
This was the idea behind the original game as well, that starred two older children named Elliot and Claris from the city of Twin Seeds. They too had to confront nightmares with their own power and the help of NiGHTS, but their worries more had to do with their futures. Claris wanted to be a singer but had gotten stage fright during an audition, Elliot wanted to be a basketball star but his pride was hurt when he was shown up on the court by some older boys. They have nightmares about their experiences that night and find themselves in the dream realm, saved as they venture into Nightopia the realm of good dreams. They too posessed ideya and the power to aid NiGHTS in the fight against the Nightmaren.
The main difference between the two was that in the original NiGHTS the characters didn’t talk, and in NiGHTS: JOD they talked too damn much.
But I’m oversimplifying. In the original game the premise was stated in the instruction booklet, which may seem old school but after that the story was shown in images alone, which actually worked very well. And what gorgeous images they were for their time and are still at least quite imaginative today. The sequel puts the story across in so much painful, poorly written exposition accompanied with sadly subpar graphical work, especially on the character models, of all things. The CGI cutscenes at the beginning and end of each child’s story, however, are quite pretty.
I feel so much more more could be done with the story, and at times it felt like the focus was more on mirroring the original game than any sort of storytelling necessity. The plot is no sweeping epic, and the dialog tends to be painfully generic and you really have to make yourself get into it in order to enjoy it, but it could very well entertain a younger audience. As an old-time fan I’ve enjoyed seeing the returning characters fleshed out, even as little as they were, and of course I just enjoyed seeing them again. I don’t think it was a mistake to try and expand on the story as video games are almost expected to have some sort of plot and even voice acting these days, and if it lacked this I think the complaints of it feeling old-school would only be amplified, but it was all just so half-assed. Maybe… next time? All and all you need to go into this installment of NiGHTS expecting a small, charming, mildly fun game with more than a few glaring flaws.
A word of advice, however, you may have constantly heard is to play this game with a GameCube or Classic controller. This is absolutely true and is a fairly large drawback for the game, I find it very disappointing that they couldn’t tighten up the Wii controls.
One thing I’ve been itching to mention as far as gameplay goes, is that IGN and other reviewers seem to have this confusing notion that if you get a "Night Over" in a level you have to go back to the beginning. I’m not really sure what they mean, it’s only the first of the five missions in a level that you have to go through the courses again if you lose the boss battle, and the second time around the cutscenes can be skipped. The other 4 missions, including the 2nd boss battle, are all self-contained, if you lose one of those you need only try again without going back to the 1st mission. Just in case anyone was worried about that, I’ve thought the way its been communicated is rather misleading.
Overall this game is worth it as a rental or a bargain bin purchase, it’s certainly worth it for young audiences or if you like cute games, but don’t expect it to be the best game you’ve ever played. Some worried it would be a rush job, and perhaps it was, or maybe Sonic Team really has just lost their touch and they’re just not trying very hard anymore. Or maybe it had something to do with the egotistic Takashi Iizuka, head of Sega USA and seemingly the least talented member of the original Nights design team as well as the man who is largely responsible for dragging Sonic down to embarrassing depths these last long years, heading this title completely. One thing, however, no one can say the game has problems with is music. The scores for this game are as, if not more, brilliant than the original which should come as no surprise as the songs were written and arranged by the same people who scored the first game. Even if you don’t like the game you just may find yourself acquiring the soundtrack, which sadly seems to have been composed for what was expected to be a much more epic game. The advertising blitz for this title reflects the same. Both the music and the pre-rendered CGI were produced in Japan, while Iizuka’s team in San Francisco just failed to deliver with the in-game presentation and gameplay leaving these elements rather starkly mismatched.
Of course, classic though it may be, the original never did that well either, but the artistry of it was unmistakable, the dedication of the development team undeniable, and the fluid feeling of flight in the controls unmatched, and that’s what made it special. However, in a way, I feel this one tried to stay too close to the original and that may have actually helped in hurting it. I don’t know what I’d expect if they ever made another game, or what I’d want out of it, but I think a greater departure from the structure of the original would be interesting. More levels? More story? Better writing for that matter? Never, of course, depart from the concept of dreams and the freedom of flight but perhaps take it in new directions. We’ll see what the future holds for NiGHTS, with the video game industry growing at rapid speeds it may find its place yet. Originally it was too ahead of its time, now its just too behind the times. But not every game can be a masterpiece, and somewhere between the high expectations, Sonic Team’s lackluster track record as of late, and opinions marred by nostalgia and reverence we still have a relatively entertaining game on our hands. And of course, in the end, due to being a hopeless fan I just can’t help but think: it’s still nice to have NiGHTS return.
I’ll probably get the game when it drops in price, since right now there is very little spending money D8.
Still it’s nice to see they revived the franchise without totally raping it. It’s hard to live up the the first game if it had an original concept, since the second time through it won’t be as original.
I also want SEGA to spend a little more money marketing this game. I have seen few ads for it outside of gaming websites and gaming magazines :
They didn’t totally rape it no, but they were pretty half-assed about it. But yeah, letting it drop 10 or 20 dollars before buying is a good idea. Though I don’t know how long that will take, it could still sell fairly well due to the nostalgia factor alone… which they were probably betting on, and here I am proving that point >_>
Although, truthfully, I traded in my GameCube, GBA adapter and a GBA game when I picked it up to knock down the price myself.
Ah, I wish I had been old enough to play the original… I was just a teensy weensy tot when it was around…
If I ever get my hands on a Wii, this is a game I’m probably going to pick up. But, that’ll have to wait until I get enough money. I need a job…
Also, I wanted to ask you about your thoughts on the Trauma Center franchise, so have you ever played it?
Well, you said you’d like to discuss things! So. First of all, what’re your thoughts on the secret ending? (Your interpretation, how you feel about it, etc.) If there’s a way to spoiler-tag this discussion for the folks who haven’t seen the full ending, of course. I’d love to discuss the secret video with someone, because wow. It caught me off guard and I’ve got far too many thoughts about it.
You mentioned IGN and other reviewers complaining about have to do everything over again if you lose a boss fight. I was also put off by some of the outright mistakes reviewers made; it seems like a number of sites did a poor job reviewing the game. I remember one review claiming that you cannot skip cutscenes, a claim which is totally false. All you have to do is hit start and you skip over cutscenes, boss FMVs, etc. That, and JoD was slammed for having “only 6 hours of gameplay”. But 6 is about the bare-bones minimum if you simply want to complete the story and pass with the lowest grade possible. If you want to get all A’s, collect all the items, unlock everything, and essentially complete the game, it takes a heckuva lot more time than 6 hours.
Anyway, back to the plot and characters. I also liked seeing the returning characters fleshed out more, and I agree that more could’ve been done with the story. Sega’s PR directly told the fandom about a lot of things that never appeared in the game, and I feel like those things (cutscenes and characters) would’ve added a more depth to the story and developed the characters to a greater degree. We never saw the so-called “Shadow NiGHTS”, we never saw the cutscene in which NiGHTS mocks Helen by controlling her actions, and we never met the “Great Mother” character we were told about. I was a tad disappointed that those elements never showed up.
I loved most of the bosses: they had amazing music and were actually quite challenging, moreso than the original NiD bosses. The one I liked the least was the chameleon. I feel like he made a poor and less dynamic replacement for Jackle. Cerberus, on the flipside, was a great concept and a bear to beat in his final form.
Oh man. The controls. I used a classic controller and still had trouble controlling NiGHTS– this coming from someone who’s played the old game for ten years. The continual framerate drops didn’t help, either. Sonic Team ought to have held onto the game for a few more months to iron out all the kinks.
JoD is a game of opposites. It’s great in some respects, poor in others. On the one hand, it seems like the developers tried to stay too analogous to the first game, but on the other hand, there are some parts where they broke away from the old formula big time. Like you, I also wish they’d departed from the original NiD more: that would’ve helped JoD stand on its own and elminated the ambiguity about whether JoD is a sequel or remake. Heck, one of my favorite levels was the entirely-novel Delight City. I missed having an ice level, but Delight City is full of sparkly neon goodness.
Yep. There’re some of my completely unorganized and rambled fannish thoughs.
**SPOILERS SRSLY**
Just make your own spoiler tags =P
Actually… the secret ending was no different than the secret ending in the original. In the original All A’s ending it also looked like NiGHTS was destroyed after the battle with Wizeman (especially from Elliot’s side of things), and then after the credits you see him perched atop the Twin Seeds tower. Aside from Elliot’s vision of him before meeting Claris you never otherwise actually see NiGHTS during the end of the game (which is why having his star trail skim over the final scene with Claris and Elliot facing each other in Nightopia is so touching.) They were just more explicit about this whole business in JOD.
“You mentioned IGN and other reviewers complaining about have to do everything over again if you lose a boss fight.”
That complaint isn’t valid to me because thats how the original is. You lose the boss battle, you lose the entire level. At least in JOD you don’t have to start from the first mission.
“I remember one review claiming that you cannot skip cutscenes, a claim which is totally false. All you have to do is hit start and you skip over cutscenes, boss FMVs, etc.”
I’ve tested this out, certain things can be skipped, but story/dialog scenes can’t. At least not the first time around. The second time around you can. This complaint does seem nitpicky to me though, cause you know what? You can’t skip cutscenes in the highly praised Mass Effect either, or a zillion other games.
“That, and JoD was slammed for having “only 6 hours of gameplay”. But 6 is about the bare-bones minimum if you simply want to complete the story and pass with the lowest grade possible. If you want to get all A’s, collect all the items, unlock everything, and essentially complete the game, it takes a heckuva lot more time than 6 hours.”
Yeah but it would have been nice to have more than 4 levels per child. I mean sure thats how it was in the last game, but thats one game aspect that makes no sense to stay loyal to. Truthfully I was expecting something much more epic out of a NiGHTS sequel, they could have easily canned the platforming levels and half the mini-games and just added more straight-up dreamworlds.
“We never saw the so-called “Shadow NiGHTS”, we never saw the cutscene in which NiGHTS mocks Helen by controlling her actions, and we never met the “Great Mother” character we were told about. I was a tad disappointed that those elements never showed up.”
I never heard this “shadow NiGHTS” business, but its best not to take the rumor mill to heart before any game release. There’s always someone whose a friend of a friend whose cousin’s brother works at what-and-what company who “knows” things. Not to mention that people make up all kinds of things on internet forums and websites, several attempts at creating a “Sephiroth clone” in my party in FF7 taught me that.
Yay, discussion!
***Spoilers! Turn away ye who care***
Hm. Good point about the original ending. For whatever reason my 11-year-old self never really thought that NiGHTS died in the original. I always assumed it was just a happy, sweet ending. XD Yeah, JoD makes it much, much more explicit (and sad, too). I wasn’t expecting it at all, especially because of how the rest of the game was a light, uplifting romp. Then BOOM, dead NiGHTS. It was like Bambi’s Mom version 2.0.
That complaint isn’t valid to me because thats how the original is. You lose the boss battle, you lose the entire level. At least in JOD you don’t have to start from the first mission.
Ditto on that. And you had four mares to deal with, not just three courses. It’s really not a huge deal to redo all the courses, either. Less than 10 minutes. Heck, compare that to redoing a katamari in one of the longer Katamari levels. I’m under the impression that redoing a level (or part of a level) after failing a boss fight/mission/task is typical of many games, or at least of the games I’ve played.
I’ve tested this out, certain things can be skipped, but story/dialog scenes can’t.
Ohhh, okay. So you have to watch them the first time around. That’s not something reviewers should be pitching fits about; watch ‘em once, then skip ‘em next time. They weren’t even long cutscenes by normal RPG standards. If the reviewers want to gripe about long cutscenes, they should take a gander at Kingdom Hearts II. It was basically a movie with some gameplay scattered inbetween (yeah, you could skip the cutscenes, but still, those things were massive).
Yeah but it would have been nice to have more than 4 levels per child.
I was hoping that as well. The developers may have run into problems trying to explain how NiGHTS could be dumb enough to keep getting caged more than six times. XD Though the more I thought about this level-number issue the other night, the more I realized that there could be ways to squeeze extra levels into the game without relying on the “Chase Mission” structure each time. What about having some levels with Mares, possibly coupled to Chase Missions? Like, beat a Chase Mission, then the next gate that opens up is a level that’s Mare-based. That way they could’ve kept Score Attack, too. All wishful thinking on my part, of course.
its best not to take the rumor mill to heart before any game release
Very true. I tend not to believe rumor mills — I’ve been in enough ridiculous fandoms to have seen loads of bull — but the reason the NiGHTS rumors held more sway for me was that Sega’s PR people spoke directly to the administrators of the nightsintodreams.com forums. So it was pretty much straight from the horse’s mouth. Then again, Sega PR also directly told the admins, in person nonetheless, that JoD’s release date would be globally delayed to late January. LIES!
Alas, Sega seemed kinda disorganized on the JoD PR front.
Yipes, I typed out a long reply… did it go through? It didn’t show up on the page. I’ll be glad to retype it if it gotten eaten by the Internet Wormhole.
Sorry, the word/spam filter held your post in limbo for some reason.
***SPOILERS YATTA YATTA ETC.***
“Then BOOM, dead NiGHTS. It was like Bambi’s Mom version 2.0.”
Well still, therein lies the mystery. You see him after the credits, so what happened? Who knows =P
“Heck, compare that to redoing a katamari in one of the longer Katamari levels.”
Auuugh, don’t remind me of that. Just missing the size by a few measly kilometers and running out of time on a 10 or 18 minute course is painful.
“If the reviewers want to gripe about long cutscenes, they should take a gander at Kingdom Hearts II. It was basically a movie with some gameplay scattered inbetween”
But that’s what games are becoming these days anyways, a storytelling medium, so a game without some cutscenes or some kind of a story are actually becoming rarer.
“The developers may have run into problems trying to explain how NiGHTS could be dumb enough to keep getting caged more than six times.”
They didn’t even bother to explain it in the original. Maybe if they had made the game more epic and made it take place during more than one night of sleep it would have worked better. Of course that may have only encouraged them to make even more boring platforming levels for the kids inbetween… THE EXCITING ADVENTURES OF WILL FIXING HIS BREAKFAST CEREAL!
“I realized that there could be ways to squeeze extra levels into the game without relying on the “Chase Mission” structure each time. What about having some levels with Mares, possibly coupled to Chase Missions? Like, beat a Chase Mission, then the next gate that opens up is a level that’s Mare-based.”
They could have stayed with the original structure and the game wouldn’t have been that different, really.
“Sega PR also directly told the admins, in person nonetheless, that JoD’s release date would be globally delayed to late January. LIES!”
Well, people need to be certain who they’re speaking to is a member of Public Relations for the team creating a game. I mean game companies have other jobs, like desk clerks, graphic designers, advertising agents etc. Just because someone works at a game company doesn’t necessarily mean they have intimate knowledge of a particular game’s development. They may only hear rumors themselves or could mishear or misunderstand any details they hear about a game secondhand from someone else with second or third-hand information.
I mean NiGHTS: JOD wasn’t even made in Sega of Japan, it was made at Sega of America by the Sonic Team USA branch. Granted those developers are still, in the majority, Japanese, but the game was developed in San Francisco.
Could also be just loose ideas they were kicking around in the beginning and were never developed, but since so-and-so heard about it from another so-and-so they might not have been aware that the development team didn’t follow any of these paths. If they were ideas that were developed and later scrapped and a PR person assigned to the game had been openly talking about them, I’d think the big gaming news sites would have mentioned them.
I’d like to think he’s still alive. :*) HE LIVES ON IN THEIR HEAAAAAARTS~! Cripes, now I’m thinking of “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic.
Just missing the size by a few measly kilometers and running out of time on a 10 or 18 minute course is painful.
The King of All Cosmos is never satisfied by mediocrity. Katamari: When Your Best Just Isn’t Good Enough! What a picky father, really. Oy, redoing the longer courses was a huge pain. As much as I love making 1000-meter katamaris, they eat up time like whoa and are annoying to have to do over and over again just because your Katamari is marginally smaller than expected.
They didn’t even bother to explain it in the original
True. Then again, the original was a lot simpler and came from a legacy of games that Needed No Explanation (e.g. the Sonic Genesis games, old Mario games, etc.). Nowadays, with everyone expecting plot and coherent explanations in their games, I have a feeling Sonic Team wouldn’t be able to get away with caging NiGHTS repeatedly sans explanation.
Ahahaha the platforming bits. Will Fixes Breakfast, in which you have to navigate the maze of the fridge to free the milk in under five minutes! I didn’t hate all of the platforming bits — I liked the neon maze-puzzle thing in Delight City — but compared to the rest of the game the platforming sections lacked pizzazz. They needed, I dunno, more depth to them: either more moves the kids could do, more puzzles, better physics/dynamics, etc. Or they needed to not be there at all.
They could have stayed with the original structure and the game wouldn’t have been that different, really.
Agreed. I don’t hate the Chase Missions per se, but I don’t get why Sonic Team eliminated blowing up Mares, either. Big mistake on their part, since score attack was such a popular feature of the old game. This Chase Missions emphasize finishing as fast as possible, which decreases the amount of fun you can have exploring the course and circling it over and over.
They may only hear rumors themselves or could mishear or misunderstand any details they hear about a game secondhand from someone else with second or third-hand information.
From what I gather, it sounds like this was the case. Still a bit of a blooper on Sega’s part, but yeah, the information probably got all mangled as it went through the grapevine.
Could also be just loose ideas they were kicking around in the beginning and were never developed, but since so-and-so heard about it from another so-and-so they might not have been aware that the development team didn’t follow any of these paths.
Oh man, like Selph. XD Gotta love fandom mysteries.
I hope that Sega has the good sense to release the NiD PS2 remake in America. I’ll be importing it anyway (yay for modded PS2s), but it’d be good for the fandom to have a domestic release.
Your posts keep getting held in limbo! @_@ It’s probably the length.
“The King of All Cosmos is never satisfied by mediocrity. Katamari: When Your Best Just Isn’t Good Enough! What a picky father, really.”
You should play Beautiful Katamari on the 360, not only do you have to roll fast and make it bigger than he asked for as usual, but in nearly every level you also have to pick up a vast amount of a particular type of item (which I’m not good at XD.)
I’ll think I’m doing good and then he gives me only 60 points for the level and I’m just like “WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME!?”
The King of All Cosmos is such an abusive father.
“Nowadays, with everyone expecting plot and coherent explanations in their games, I have a feeling Sonic Team wouldn’t be able to get away with caging NiGHTS repeatedly sans explanation.”
True but.. they seemed to forget they were MAKING A GAME ABOUT DREAMS. That leaves you up with alot of convenient plot devices and surreal nonsense at your disposal, which was really under-utilized. So they didn’t really have to struggle to explain so much. Granted they did come up with some creative ways to get NiGHTS caged, the Reala fight in Delight City being the most fun one.
“I didn’t hate all of the platforming bits — I liked the neon maze-puzzle thing in Delight City — but compared to the rest of the game the platforming sections lacked pizzazz. They needed, I dunno, more depth to them: either more moves the kids could do, more puzzles, better physics/dynamics, etc. Or they needed to not be there at all.”
Yeah, the kids had no sense of physics which was kind of bothersome, no matter if they were jumping or falling their torsos always remained unnaturally straight. There’s a million movement engines out there now, I’m sure the Wii could handle some of them. It is kind of like they only had a year and a half and built the whole game from scratch which… which is probably what lead to all the problems and mistakes.
The Delight City one took me like.. 5 tries to complete. Stupid Helen pulling some MATRIX shit and hurting her ankle. How do you even DO that in a dream? Luckily the awesome music kept me sane, it was so catchy.
“Oh man, like Selph. XD Gotta love fandom mysteries.”
Haha, right! Selph was probably something named but never really finalized or designed.
“I hope that Sega has the good sense to release the NiD PS2 remake in America. I’ll be importing it anyway (yay for modded PS2s), but it’d be good for the fandom to have a domestic release.”
I’m going to import too. If they do decide to release it domestically it’ll take at least a year and if that happens I’ll get the domestic release as well but… I know that game like the back of my hand, I’m sure I can play it in Japanse. There isn’t much text to be read anyway!
I’ve never modded my PS2 but here’s a pretty damn good reason. Oh also, the disc apparently is going to contain Christmas NiGHTS too. Joy~<3
Better limbo than vanishing into the Internet Vortex of Dead Posts! Which I’ve had happen to long comments on other sites in the past.
You should play Beautiful Katamari on the 360
Oh man, I’ve been wanting a 360 badly, if only for Beautiful Katamari and Assassin’s Creed. Perhaps sometime next year once my budget recovers from the chunk my new Wii took out of it.
I’ve never been good at the “roll up certain items” challenges in We Love Katamari, so I bet I’ll fail pretty miserably at Beautiful Katamari. I love the King of All Cosmos, but he clearly doesn’t love us or his son very much. XD
True but.. they seemed to forget they were MAKING A GAME ABOUT DREAMS. That leaves you up with alot of convenient plot devices and surreal nonsense at your disposal, which was really under-utilized. So they didn’t really have to struggle to explain so much. Granted they did come up with some creative ways to get NiGHTS caged, the Reala fight in Delight City being the most fun one.
Definitely agreed. While I enjoyed some of the crazy stuff they came up with (persona masks, roller coaster, etc.), they could’ve pushed the madness further. Hehe, I loved the surprise Reala fight at the start of Delight City. Sonic Team seems to like doing that… I remember one boss fight in Shining the Holy Ark where you turn a corner, totally oblivious and seeing no obvious “BOSS IS FORTHCOMING” indicators, and BOOM, out pops the Blader to screw you and your unprepared party over. The Blader was a fun fight, yes.
Yeah, the kids had no sense of physics
The kids’ movement engine also seems to whig out when they’re doing anything that isn’t running on a flat surface. For example, in my game Will keeps looking like he’s seizing as he gets teleported up those neon lifts in Delight City. It’s pretty funny, actually.
Took me a little while to figure out the switch system in Delight City, but after that it was straightforward. I wish they’d put some harder, slightly less linear puzzles in the kids’ sections.
Stupid Helen pulling some MATRIX shit and hurting her ankle. How do you even DO that in a dream? Luckily the awesome music kept me sane, it was so catchy.
AUGH. You just hit on one big gripe I had about JoD’s storyline. I may be overreacting, but I felt that JoD played up female stereotypes just a leetle bit much. There was too much “Helen (the pink flouncy female) being weak and relying on the stronger Will (the soccer-playing sporty male) to help her out!” for me. Though Claris and Elliot did have a few gender stereotypes going on (Claris’ orange-pink outfit and her singing, and Elliot’s blue outfit and his basketball-playing skillz), Claris acted independently of Elliot, not needing his aid, until the final battle and the secret ending. And even when Elliot “helped” her in the secret ending, all he did was, er, move her unconcious body? XD A bit stereotyped, yeah, but not nearly as much as Helen hurting her ankle, or Will having to rescue Helen because Helen lost her Red Ideya and fell.
Helen’s levels were also decidedly more girly than Claris’. Jewels and carousels and picnics, oh my! For example, as fun as Memory Forest was, Mystic Forest was more gender-neutral IMO (Mystic Forest had cars! And urban decay! And fog!).
Selph was probably something named but never really finalized or designed.
From what I understand, Selph was only named and had music. And apparently there was one render of an object that fans extracted from the Selph file on the Saturn disc, but yeah, that’s it. Iizuka himself said that Selph was just a discarded concept. Let the fandom speculation fly!
I’ve never modded my PS2 but here’s a pretty damn good reason. Oh also, the disc apparently is going to contain Christmas NiGHTS too. Joy~
I recommend the swap-disc/slide-card combo. It doesn’t void the PS2 warranty because you’re not actually tinkering around with the “brains” of the machine, and all you have to do mechanically is take off the disc door and do something to the door spring . Pretty simple, and it’s worked fine for me.
I’m psyched that it includes Christmas NiGHTS. So cool to have all of the old NiGHTS stuff in one updated packaged.
Took me a little while to figure out the switch system in Delight City, but after that it was straightforward. I wish they’d put some harder, slightly less linear puzzles in the kids’ sections.
It took me a few attempts to figure out Helen would follow along underneath the grating during that one part, hurrrh. The first time I did it I also immediately plummeted Will into the abyss because I ignored the on-screen instructions.
“AUGH. You just hit on one big gripe I had about JoD’s storyline. I may be overreacting, but I felt that JoD played up female stereotypes just a leetle bit much. There was too much “Helen (the pink flouncy female) being weak and relying on the stronger Will (the soccer-playing sporty male) to help her out!” for me.”
Yeah, I mean, I thought WILL was a wimp, but HELEN. She’s 12 and still afraid of the dark. Pssh.
Though the “ow my ankle *dramaqueen*” crap was probably just because they couldn’t figure out how to give her good enough AI so that she’d just FOLLOW you across jumps. Or they wanted to make it more puzzle-y. Either way it was dumb.
“Though Claris and Elliot did have a few gender stereotypes going on (Claris’ orange-pink outfit and her singing, and Elliot’s blue outfit and his basketball-playing skillz)”
It makes SENSE with Claris and Elliot though. Think about. Pink + Blue = what? Purple. Ha!
“all he did was, er, move her unconcious body?”
How can you be unconscious in a dream for that matter? There must be something wrong with the girl characters in NiGHTS, lol.
“I recommend the swap-disc/slide-card combo. It doesn’t void the PS2 warranty because you’re not actually tinkering around with the “brains” of the machine”
XD I don’t think I need to worry about voiding the warranty on a 7 year old machine, but it does sound like less of a pain.
The first time I did it I also immediately plummeted Will into the abyss because I ignored the on-screen instructions.
YES. I ran straight off the platform too. The next time around, I accidentally jumped over part of the railing while trying to chuck blue chips at a switch. Oops. Took me awhile to get over my falling problems.
Yeah, I mean, I thought WILL was a wimp, but HELEN.
Seriously. There was one part at the beginning where I was all “YAY HELEN” as she rushed wily-nily into Aqua Garden to help NiGHTS, but she became more and more pathetic over the course of the game.
Either way it was dumb.
Yep. Whatever the reason, it was so cliched it made me sad.
Think about. Pink + Blue = what? Purple. Ha!
True! And I liked Claris’ color scheme, whereas Helen’s pink and frilly doily costume was waaaaay too much for me.
There must be something wrong with the girl characters in NiGHTS, lol.
Yeah, the girl Visitors all seem to suffer from chronic dream-injury problems. At least the “female” Marens were pretty sweet… Queen Bella’s theme was rockin’. That spider had class.
XD I don’t think I need to worry about voiding the warranty on a 7 year old machine, but it does sound like less of a pain.
Haha, true. I forget how old PS2s are sometimes. Also, I think the card/disc combo is cheaper than sending it off to be modded. You just order it online and it gets sent to you; you don’t have to pack your PS2 up and send it off into the unknown.
I’ve had Queen Bella’s theme stuck in my head for 2 days straight, its just so… so… rock and jazzy. Of course the people who did the music for the original NiGHTS have had a decade to improve their craft so of course the music was going to be extremely damn beyond awesome.
“Haha, true. I forget how old PS2s are sometimes.”
I got the PS2 back in 2 triple-zero, whipper-snapper! Back then it was hi-tech! And expensive!
I know a friend of mine once gave me a DISC I could just put in there to override the region but I never tested it out. Considering I can pick up another old PS2 for about 80 bucks I guess I can consider risking mangling mine now, still, old girl’s served me well.
I love hers. Definitely buying the soundtrack when it’s released!
I got the PS2 back in 2 triple-zero, whipper-snapper! Back then it was hi-tech! And expensive!
Hehe… Between the Saturn and the Wii, my sister and I got slow on the console uptake. It took us quite awhile to finally get around to buying a used PS2… must’ve been 2003-2004 or so when we did. My sister only just bought a Gamecube last year.
I think the disc has to be used in concert with the card– you put the disc in first, it overrides the region, and then you use the card to hook the disc out while the PS2 still thinks the disc is in it, and replace the disc with the game. But yeah, it wouldn’t be a huge loss with what PS2s are priced these days. X)
I really liked the game a lot, of course I haven’t played the original (never had a Saturn) but I thought the game was charming, I liked the characters a lot and it really made me want to play the old game, I am working on getting a Saturn and an original NiGHTS copy so I can experience what everyone has been saying is amazing. Before this game, I don’t remember ever hearing of NiGHTS, but I’m so glad I got into it. Recently I haven’t been as into games as I used to, though I can probably say that’s cause I work at a GameStop and am surrounded by games all the time, I can honestly say that I haven’t played a game that I have liked as much as this since I can’t remember (though the controls ARE very bad and some of the game was very frustrating and angering for me) and I’m really looking forward to playing the original. Oh and I’m probably not supposed to say this here but I enjoy your art a lot too, I loved your NiGHTS:JOD comic (haha I laughed so hard when I saw NiGHTS face when he saw that damn Octopaw) I also have a deviantart account so if you ever cared enough to check out my crappy work heres the link
http://moonlitblood.deviantart.com/
sorry for all of my long useless rambling
>_> Oh I’ll let you leave your link up, the spam filter caught it though haha.
Well it’s good you enjoyed the game, it’s not a terrible little game overall, but as an oldbie fan of the franchise I can’t help feeling a little bitter that they didn’t do a better job on it.
Of course why the original was amazing is a factor of nostalgia and the time it came out, but it really was a unique game. It is being re-released, both the original, the original with new graphics, and the Christmas NiGHTS stand alone demo/expansion whatever it was (no one can seem to agree) all on the same disc for the Playstation 2. Right now it’s Japan-only, and considering JOD flopped in sales who knows if it’ll ever make it outside of Japan, but it’s something to keep in mind.
Of course it’d be in Japanese if you got it and modded your system, which is fine by me cause I know the game like the back of my hand so it doesn’t matter what language the text displays in.