That aside, what is it about killing large hordes of ugly, random creatures that keeps us coming back for more? If I could answer that question, I'd be making the games myself. Okay, perhaps not really making them, but I'd be thinking about how gullible some of we gamers seem to be when it comes to winning game formulae. It's so simplistic, it's almost embarrassing to admit that you paid X amount of dollars to kill a whole lot of random creatures, over and over again. It may be simplistic but it's extremely addictive fun.

So, with that logic all typed out nicely and neat on this here review page, why do so many games such as Ninety-Nine Nights tend to fail in the same area every time? Again, to answer this requires no mean feat of intelligence. With the same breath we can tell you that killing bad guys over and over is definitely a recipe for fun but it can also become rather repetitive. In the end, that fleeting fun-filled experience we were raving about only seconds before has somehow just dissipated, leaving us with a strangely empty feeling. How can something be so much fun and yet be so blatantly repetitive?

Winning and losing game formulae tend to be as fickle as the audiences they were designed to please. Gamers in general are a tough bunch of customers to satisfy. What we can say is that Ninety-Nine Nights definitely has the goods to satisfy those who cherish the beauty of gorgeously developed visual effects and lots of killing random creatures with fantastic weapons at lightning speeds.

On that note, visually, Ninety-Nine Nights really is a dream. There is nothing that can compare to seeing something as detailed as the changing of skin tone on a character's face when he speaks, or watching a drop of water land in a pool where the ripples look so real, you're fighting the urge to reach out and touch them. Ninety-Nine Nights will have you salivating over the graphical content, there's no doubt about it.

And that's exactly what we would expect from the likes of Tetsuya Mizuguchi, creator of Lumines and the Korean developers at Phantagram, famous for the popular title Kingdom Under Fire. The animation alone has a very anime look and feel to it but perhaps is more reminiscent of the animation used in the Final Fantasy movie. No matter what your preference is, the animation in this game is simply stunning. And we'll stop dribbling now.

And with the good there is also the not-so-good. Ninety-Nine Nights has one niggly little issue that we can't ignore. This is covered within the sound department. Two words: voice acting. A game like this that relies on the character interaction to counteract the repetitiveness in the game really should have the option to change from English voice actors to native Japanese and in this case, even Korea since the developers are from both Japan and Korea.