Ninety-Nine Nights II, much like the original Xbox 360 game, is light on subtlety.
In both the original and the Feelplus-developed sequel players run around in a world of light and dark, smashing through shoulder-to-shoulder waves of goblins and demons to rack up absurdly-high combo counts.
My time spent with the sequel on the Tokyo Game Show floor last week gave me a chance to check out both a routine battlefield encounter and a super boss battle.
The combat feels fairly unchanged in Ninety-Nine Nights II. Players use two attack buttons, a jump and a dash button to chain together attacks, slicing through crowds of enemies and clearing screens as they try to keep their combo meter flowing.
As with the original, the individual enemies offer little challenge, instead it's when these lesser characters amass to attack you as an army that a player has to be wary. While clearing a section of a battlefield can feel rewarding, over time doing the same sorts of combos over and over again to annihilate hundreds or thousands of enemies gets quite old.
This sequel also suffers from the invisible boundaries that plagued the original game. Often awaiting hordes of enemies will stand by patiently while you work to clear out their nearby brethren, not attacking until you walk across some sort of invisible trip line.
While N3 II seems to be promising a different look from its predecessor, I didn't notice much of a difference. The night settings did little to change the feel of the game and the plentiful interior settings were so large, so cavernous that they might have well been outdoor settings.
So far, it doesn't look like Ninety-Nine Nights II is trying very hard to improve on the formula copied for the original N3. For better or worse.