My Opinion On This Game Did A 180
[Anecdote/Casual Review] The Sega Saturn's mascot 'platformer.'
The Sega Saturn is my pick for the most enigmatic retro console and is easily the most underappreciated in Sega’s portfolio.
The Master System may have flopped in North America but it was beloved in Brazil and Europe; the Mega Drive did well pretty much everywhere but Japan, however, the Sega Saturn did terrible everywhere and although it did outsell the N64 at home, it was by a pretty narrow margin. The PlayStation is universally celebrated as the vanguard of 3D gaming and the Nintendo 64 is home to a smaller library of critical darlings, great FPS games and innovative exclusives but the Saturn? Nobody outside of Sega die-hards, JRPG enjoyers and Shoot ‘Em Up enthusiasts talk about this console.
There are countless reasons the Saturn failed outside of Japan: it wasn’t just the lack of Sonic and the sting of high prices can be offset by deals and bundles but all of that has been covered to death online, if you really want my brief summary then it’s this: the Saturn fundamentally failed because it didn’t have the games people wanted, it didn’t have the games people wanted because Sega’s inner workings were comically disharmonious, the console was hard to develop for and the best games never left Japan. Arcades were going out of fashion in the West and this was a console built to bring that experience home.
Get back on topic, Lawrence… what I’m really here to discuss is my experience with what is arguably this console’s most defining title: Nights Into Dreams.
Nights Into Dreams is a rare breed: a truly unique video game that’s nothing like anything else I’ve ever played. I bounced off this title hard on the first try but having returned in the past few weeks, it really clicked with me. In many ways Nights Into Dreams is the Sega Saturn distilled into its essential essence: quirky, unconcerned with the direction of other mascots and only truly appreciated by the few, not the masses.
What Is Nights Into Dreams?
Nights Into Dreams is one of those games that doesn’t fit neatly within genre boundaries, as such, no label feels adequate to describe it.
In this game, you’ll avoid obstacles, master movement mechanics and fight bosses like a 3D platformer while you battle against the clock, build a score multiplier and aim to top the leaderboard like an arcade racer; there are also air combat/arcade flight combat game elements in here with Nights having to fly rings around enemies to destroy them and around projectiles to deflect them. I’d go as far to say Nights captured the appeal of skateboarding games before they really caught on as well.
Here’s the genre I’ll assign it: Nights Into Dreams is a Nights game.
The plot of Nights Into Dreams is that Nightopia -the world where dreams come from and where we go when we sleep- is ruled over by the tyrannical Wizeman who is conspiring to capture the essences of the human emotions: ideya in order to gain enough power to merge Nightopia with the real world and rule over it all. Meanwhile, in the waking world, two young kids: Claris and Elliot lay down to sleep racked with anxiety and are plagued by nightmares. Their courage: the one emotion Wizeman cannot steal, allows them a degree of autonomy in the dream world which they use to free Nights.
Nights is one of Wizeman’s Nightmaren creature-minions but Nights rebelled against Wizeman and was imprisoned; when Claris or Elliot unleash Nights at the beginning of each stage, the purple being is free to fly across the stage and destroy the Ideya Capturing devices to cleanse it of Wizeman’s control.
What I adore about this premise most is that to a child, Nights could absolutely be real.
Think about it: we’ve all dreamt about video games, haven’t we? If a child dreams about Nights after playing this game, where it is explicitly stated to be a creature that exists only in the dream world then doesn’t that mean Nights is technically real? The in-game lore aligns with the real life experience… damn it, I want a dream about this game.
I think anyone with even the faintest interest in this game should give it a go purely for the wonderful presentation’s sake but you should be warned that replaying the levels and aspiring to higher scores and an A-rank are where the magic happens. If you’re looking for a complex story, mountains of levels or thrilling combat then Nights isn’t the game for you. This is a deep experience, not a broad one.
How Is Nights Into Dreams?
Bouncing off Nights Into Dreams is almost a rite of passage for new Saturn owners at this point; my story isn’t unique online and judging by the game’s inability to entice new owners to the console back in the day, it isn’t unique to the general public either.
So, what do you actually do in Nights?
Ostensibly, the goal of Nights Into Dreams is to progress through the game’s 8 stages -divided between Claris and Elliot’s 4 dreams each, the latter’s being more difficult- and to defeat Wizeman and the Nightmaren. To do this you need to achieve a rating of at least C on every stage which unlocks the final boss. The goal of each stage, which is divided into a handful of courses, is to gather 20 ideya orbs and deposit them in that course’s Ideya Collector.
Once the Ideya Collector has been destroyed, all of the ideya orbs in the course turn gold and are worth double score; it’s at this point you can either finish the course by returning to the start point or continue to run against the clock and rack up a high score. Since each course has a 2-minute timer and simply destroying the Collector isn’t going to give you a rating above D, this creates a tense, speed-based game flow where you rush to destroy the Ideya Collector as quickly as possible then loop the course as many times as you can optimising the best routes for ideya collection and loops to fly through in an attempt to get the coveted A rank.
If you run out of time though, you lose it all so you have to be boosting with the B-button as much as you can.
It’s hard to explain this game without making it sound overcomplicated. The first 2 minutes of this clip show the gist of it.
One of the reasons people tend to bounce off Nights is that they don’t get that this is what you’re supposed to do, for sure, if you mess around long enough then you’ll work it out and the loading screens drop you hints but this scoring system and gameplay loop is unlike any other game most have played. It’s easy to point the finger and accuse people of not reading the manual or playing tutorials but there lies another issue: nowhere in-game is anything explained to you in-depth and the jewel case edition of Nights: the one that the overwhelming majority of people own, has no manual.
Another reason many drop Nights Into Dreams -and the main reason I flaked off this game at first- are the horrendous boss fights at the end of each stage. These range from the incredibly easy Gillwing to the snore-fest that is Gulpo and some like Jackle are absolutely infuriating. The boss you get at the end of each stage is completely random and there are 6 of them in total, not counting Wizeman as the final boss. If you’re bad at fighting one of them there’s no way to practice and if you lose? Your entire run is down the drain, you get nothing.
I got an A rank on Stick Canyon once: the hardest level in the game and lost to Jackle after. I’ve never managed that A rank again, fuck Jackle.
Speaking of Stick Canyon and Soft Museum: stage 3 for Elliot and Claris, these pair are incredibly gimmicky and irritating, a pretty bad flaw considering there are only 8 stages in the whole game. Whereas the previous 2 stages for both kids reward looping the course over and over and test your reactions and ability to dodge enemies -who take away precious seconds of time rather than health in Nights- Soft Museum and Stick Canyon are over-long, tedious affairs. The former rations out ideya and can get you caught in bouncy hallways where you get stuck between springy objects, unable to escape quickly while the clock ticks ever downwards and Stick Canyon locks you into linear rail sections where you ride a grill-thing and collect ideya with no control over its speed. It’s hard to run courses more than once or twice on these stages so getting a high score feels difficult and ultimately kind of cheap; in a game where the liberating freedom of flight is a large component of the enjoyment, it baffles me that Stick Canyon ever made it past play testing.
The Turn Around
For many months I didn’t touch Nights Into Dreams again after my first attempt and I busied myself with Saturn Resident Evil and Sega Rally instead along with playing on other platforms… but this wasn’t my usual routine of deciding I don’t like the game and remembering only the irritating bits. As my time away increased I began to look back on my brief flirtation with Nights very fondly.
Say what you will about its gameplay, Nights Into Dreams possesses a top-tier soundtrack which would easily land in my top 20 if I ever had to compile such a list. Paternal Horn is such a joyful tune that it’s hard not to feel joyous when you’re hearing it, even if your current run isn’t going very well, Message From Nightopia is the first tune I think of when someone mentions this game and Suburban Museum is pure whimsy.
Even if you ended up not liking Nights you got a nice album to play on the dashboard… which the Saturn was the first console to implement by the way.
As frustrated as I was with Nights’ somewhat opaque scoring system and the design of certain levels, what really stuck in my mind was how enjoyable the act of flying through its better stages felt. I’ve read stories online of people never making it past the first couple of stages in this game because they were too busy just enjoying the sensation of flight in a video game as kids and really, is that such a strange thing? I never made it past Home Bay in Ecco The Dolphin as a kid -and it’s a good job I didn’t- because the joy of flitting about in the ocean was too intoxicating and this type of gameplay is what Pilotwings 64 is built around. I completely understand it.
Nights Into Dreams was bundled in with the Saturn 3D Control Pad and is generally thought of as the best way to play the game. I don’t own one yet but I already get a lot of joy out of Nights, I can’t imagine how much I’d love it playing with the optimal equipment.
To cut a long story short? With basically nothing coming up on the gaming calendar that I’m particularly excited for and the actions of Sony and Microsoft putting my enthusiasm for modern gaming at a ten year low this past month, I was called back to the Saturn and to Nights Into Dreams by the sweet allure of arcade fun… and it absolutely delivered. The frustrations are still there and Nights probably isn’t my favourite Saturn exclusive but top 3? Certainly and my heart has softened to its sense of vivid fun.
An Essential Sega Game
In my opinion, Nights Into Dreams is an essential Sega game up there with the likes of Sonic The Hedgehog, The Revenge Of Shinobi, Yakuza 0 and Out Run on the list of games from this console maker-turned-publisher that are must-plays. Not all of you will like this one and thanks to the state of game preservation and the ephemerality of digital ownership, I can tragically say that most of you will never even get to try it either.
A Japanese-only PlayStation 2 copy, the original Saturn version or a Steam game key off a dodgy website are your only options for playing Nights Into Dreams today; don’t count on emulation because the Saturn was notoriously difficult to program for, so that makes it a pain in the ass to emulate too.
Regardless of how, I think every gamer should give this -and not the widely panned sequel on the Wii- a try, it’s a slice of flawed joy in an industry that’s gotten so rotten and joyless that even providing physical copies of games is too generous to manage.
I miss games that were made to make you smile.
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Nights was the very first Saturn game I bought, with the console and the 3D controller, I wouldn't have thought of playing any other way. It's quite comical that all the games magazines at the time were grouping Nights, Super Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot as direct competition, because they all were released around the same time for different consoles. Like you said, you can't really define Nights, so having the official Sega magazine try and defend Nights over Super Mario 64 was quite funny actually.
I still enjoyed it though, take it for what it is. It tries to be something unique yet still sticks to Sega's arcade style roots focusing on high scores and speed/fluidity. Have you tried Christmas Nights?
Driving by to say this post inspired me to fire up Nights on the emulator last night and was absolutely charmed by it once again, just like I was when I was 12. I didn't have the 3D pad for my Saturn. Playing it with a modern analog controller was a revelation! Felt really good.