NiGHTS into Dreams... XBLA Review

Here we are, delving into Sega's back catalog again. NiGHTS into Dreams... was originally released on the Sega Saturn in 1996. If you've read previous entries you'll know that I have had a soft spot for Sega due to the nostalgia derived from my early years playing the Master System and Mega Drive. I never had a Saturn so I never experienced this game when it was released. I know NiGHTS seems to have a decent following, and maybe I would have liked it more if I had played it back in the day, but as it stands I felt it was a decent game but nothing overly special.


Overview
NiGHTS sees you being terrorised in your dreams by all kinds of nightmarish monsters, luckily the titular NiGHTS comes along to help. The game starts out with you controlling Elliot or Claris as you make your way to the safety of the central hub where NiGHTS awaits. Once you make it there control switches to NiGHTS and off you fly to recover the 4 spheres the nightmares just stole from you. What they are and why they are useful I don't know, just get them back.

Controlling NiGHTS is the main gameplay as you fly differing routes across the map collecting things until you can break the shield that's preventing you from accessing one of the spheres you're looking for. NiGHTS can do loops which when completed collects everything you encircled. Once you collect the sphere and return to the central hub you are sent off for the next one until you have all 4 at which stage you move to the boss battle.

Every boss has a different weakness and strategy for defeating it, while some are quite easy a couple can be frustratingly difficult if you don't know what you're meant to be doing. After some trial and error you'll beat all 8 of the levels NiGHTS into Dreams... has to offer. They are not hard for the most part and you'll beat each level on your first go most of the time, with the boss battle being the more frustrating part. The replayability is in chasing high-scores, which depending if you're into high-scores can extend the life of the game tremendously.

Rational
I initially enjoyed the gameplay in nights, but after the first two levels wondered if it would be built upon. The answer is no, sadly, what you do in the first level is exactly the same as the last. Once I had a handle on what the game expected from me I blew through the rest of the levels but it was more that I wanted to see it through than having any real fun. The gameplay is very simplistic, and doesn't take long to master.

Once mastered the only thing remaining is aiming for A-Ranks and high-scores. Since I'm not too big of a high-score guy I would have normally stopped playing here but there was an achievement for getting all the A-Ranks so this is what I went for next. After a few frustrating runs I found the only thing stopping me from reaching these A-Ranks was a lack of knowing how to abuse the games systems, not skill.

Upon obtaining a sphere the game tells you to return, and points you back, to the hub to reach the next route for the next sphere. There is a time limit ticking away so I thought it natural to assume speed be a part in reaching a higher score, along with item collection and killing enemies, turns out I was wrong. The only real way to reach a high score is to do the exact opposite of what the game tells you and to dodge the central hub and collect as many items as possible. This leads you to do many circles of each run, speeding through trying to collect as many items as you can manage and just make it back to the hub with seconds to spare. The game never tries to communicate this to you, and after finding out how to go about getting an A-Rank I got them in each level within four or five tries.

No! You still have 65 seconds to go. Ignore the arrow and avoid the center hub!

Summary
NiGHTS into Dreams... is a weird game, very simplistic in design but oddly compelling to high-score junkies. I found it quite weird that to achieve the best scores you seem to go against what the game tells you to do, but once you've figured that out the game is quite easy. While decent and certainly playable the overall length of the game combined with it's rather shallow gameplay would lead me to direct people elsewhere unless they too are curious as to what all the fuss is about or have some sort of nostalgia for it.