Coming up on the Xbox 360’s initial release Ninety Nine Nights and Dead Rising were often used to highlight the number of individual animated units the system could generate on screen.

It was a lot.

The game has a sequel on its way and the screenshots are looking pretty swanky.

Ninety Nine Nights or N3 as it was sometimes called (probably by lazy people) was a Japanese take on a pretty conventional fantasy setting with the human characters battling goblins and trolls and general ‘forces of darkness’. To make things a touch more interesting the plot twisted things up a little so human characters such as big breasted champion Inphyy were a genocidal lunatics not adverse to cutting down women and children as long as they were goblins.

The game had seven characters with their own campaigns to be played through on both sides of the battle, although a lot of levels were recycled between the campaigns. Battles were thick with enemies and the game could get surprisingly challenging at times with some of the bosses putting up a real fight. The game was designed by a lot of the same team behind the brilliant Kingdom Under Fire strategy games but had more in common with the button mashing hack em up Dynasty Warriors.

While I loved the game and am even a little inspired to give it another bash after typing up this brief synopsis, it did have some pretty crippling faults. For one thing no mid level saves and the levels could take well over an hour to complete. Then some extremely annoying unblockable boss attacks that sent you right back to the start. It wasn’t challenging, just annoying; and for me personally the game was often enjoyed in bursts punctuated by extreme frustration. Your only choice was to replay old levels to improve characters abilities to a godly level before you moved on. Taking a wrong turn in a battle could also mean landing you in a big empty area that you’d have to back track from which got pretty tedious on some of the bigger levels. At least Dynasty Warriors had horses to get around quickly.

The reason I’m going on about the first game is because all we know about the second game is what you can see in these screen shots. I should also point out that the first game had an extremely colourful palette and a really beautiful art style. This was one of the main draws of the game for me, I’m a sucker for pretty pictures even with repetitive gameplay behind them (why yes I’m a Final Fantasy fan). That energy and vibrancy doesn’t seem quite captured here for Ninety Nine Nights 2. The game is still in development so hopefully this is only a part of the game showcased here and not indicative of the games overall look. But we'll see, it still looks like a pretty decent hack em up with some pretty spectacular special moves.