I have no idea how to play, lol.

[USARice]

So uh, what's the point of this game? Just flying around in circles as the jester and collecting things? I recall playing some iteration of this game on Dreamcast and had good memories of this so I bought it based on nostalgia, but I don't think I even knew how to play then lol. So is there some deeper gameplay element that I'm missing here?

[USARice]

ayy lmao

[Raiden]

Originally posted by Squanchy:

I recall playing some iteration of this game on Dreamcast

So the Air Nights exist?


OH SHI-

You probably need manual for that, powerups, enemies and maybe other technical details aren't explained in the game. Back in the 90's there were other things that had to be on the disc instead of instructions which you should have together with the game. Maybe that ingame How-To has something, I don't know.

But basically, it goes like this:
- Fly fast
- Get more points
- Defeat the boss as fast as possible
- Profit

Small tip, collect those 20 orbs before destroyng the mare? Ideya?

[Guardian Pura]

There are only seven dreams in NiGHTS including the final level which Claris and Elliot share.
Each of these dreams has four 'courses' (think different routes or laps).

Each of these courses is played from a side scrolling perspective, so you really only control Up, Down, Left or Right along a predetermined path through the 3D level.

Each of the four courses will loop infinitely until you destroy the Ideya Capture for that course and return the Ideya to the Ideya Palace where you found NiGHTS.

You can explore the entire dream (outside the courses) as Claris or Elliot on foot, however this isn't the main focus of the game and is primarily valuable for getting a head start on collecting 20 blue chips before you begin your first course, hatching all of the Nightopian eggs in the level, improving the mood of your Nightopians, or just exploring the level for fun/curiosity.

You can explore freely, however after a short time a powerful enemy will appear (the Egg Alarm) and if you are first knocked to the ground by the light it shines underneath it and then pinned there, you will immediately be 'awakened' and ejected from the dream. There is no other way to lose a turn except to run out of time on the boss.

While playing as Claris and Elliot pretty much the only move you have is walking and jumping, however it is possible to double jump and triple jump and this is useful for reaching higher items or platforms or running away from the Egg Alarm.

You can also rotate the camera on foot with the L and R triggers on your controller (in 90 degree increments) or use a second joystick if your controller has one to rotate the camera freely around your character.

It is possible to momentarily take the Egg Alarm out of commission by jumping on the very top of it, however this is risky business since if you miss by a little, you may fall directly into its beam of light and soon find yourself being thrown out of the dream.

From the time that you dualize with NiGHTS, you are given 120 seconds to complete each course.

When you complete the four courses, your individual scores for the four courses will be added up and your average grade calculated, and you will transport to the nightmare at the end of the dream to fight the boss, which you have another 120 seconds to beat.

Depending on how quickly you beat the boss, you can multiply your score from the four courses in the dream by up to 2X.

Any time that you get hit by an enemy or a boss your timer for the current course or boss will have five seconds subtracted. This takes away potential score in a dream and makes things that much more desperate in a boss battle, since you'll lose all of your score and progress for that session if you die on the boss.

If, during, one of the four courses in a dream, your timer reaches 0 seconds, you will lose NiGHTS and either Claris or Elliot will fall to the ground with a cry of, 'Aptiva!'. This will lose you all of your score for the current course in the dream but you can still complete the course by collecting the remaining neccesary blue chips on foot, depositing them into the current Ideya Capture, and returning to the Ideya Palace (where you found NiGHTS). When on foot, you'll have a hovering red arrow by you to point you to that course's Ideya Capture and once it is destroyed, you'll have a blue arrow guiding you back to the Ideya Palace.

The only thing strictly necessary to pass each course is to collect 20 blue chips and deposit them into the 'Ideya Capture' on that course to destroy it and return your Ideya to the Ideya Palace to begin the next course (or in the case of the fourth course, go to the dream's boss).

You'll find your counter for how many blue chips you currently have in your possession in the upper left corner of the screen. The counter's background will begin to glow orange when you have collected 20 blue chips, letting you know that it is now possible to destroy the current course's Ideya Capture. If you have already deposited less than 20 blue chips into the Ideya Capture, then the background to the Blue Chip counter will begin to glow orange when you have enough to bring the total number of blue chips deposited into the current Ideya Capture to 20.

Backing up a little, you'll notice when you're entering a dream, you are surrounded by five different colored orbs. These are referred to as Ideya.

You'll also notice that at the beginning of each dream, enemies in the dream attack you and steal four of your five Ideya. Thus, the objective is to destroy each of the four Ideya Captures in a dream by depositing 20 blue chips apiece and take your recovered Ideya back to the Ideya Palace (where NiGHTS is imprisoned until you dualize. When all five of your Ideya (the red one that you began with and the other four) are returned to the Ideya Palace, you can progress to the dream's boss.


HIGH SCORE

In most cases, collecting 20 blue chips, blowing up the Ideya Capture, and returning to the Ideya Capture should be very quickly achievable (I believe within a single lap through a course). The real point of NiGHTS, though, is to play for high score. If you complete a course as quickly as possible, you will rob yourself of the majority of possible score and will get a very poor grade.

As soon as you destroy the Ideya Capture on each course, all blue chips will become gold chips and worth twice as much score. Similarly, all other items will become worth twice as much score, so once you have passed the level once and begin playing to improve your score, your goal will become to destroy the Ideya Capture as quickly as possible and spend the rest of your time for that course speeding through as fast as possible collecting as many stars, gold chips, stunt ribbons, etc. as possible and then racing to jump back into the Ideya Capture at the very last second.

Note that to keep doing laps around a particular course, you will need to fly over the top of the Ideya Palace each lap after you destroy the Ideya Capture. If you fly into the Palace after you have the Ideya back for that Course, you will forfeit any remaining time you had and begin the next course (or in the case of the 4th course, the boss).


NiGHTS' Moves:

:: Air Dash.
Hold down one of the controller's primary face buttons to dash.
You'll see a meter in the lower left corner of the screen, letting you know how much dash you have left.

You can charge this meter up by flying through the loops you see throughout the level.

:: Acrobatic Stunts
Using the controller's L and R buttons, you can perform horizontal or vertical stunts in the air with NiGHTS.

The biggest cash in from this is when you find the course in a dream which has a Stunt Ribbon in it. You can combine either L or R with the eight different directions that a D-Pad or Joystick can move in to perform different stunts.

*Note that when you have the Stunt Ribbon, you can also score tricks by simply flying in different sized circles to get 'Small Loop', 'Medium Loop', 'Large Loop', etc.

:: Air Brake
If you press both L and R at the same time, you'll come to a dead stop mid-air.
If you currently have a Stunt Ribbon, this will kill your ribbon, losing you lots of potential score so be careful!

:: Paraloop
To paraloop, you just have to fly in a quick tight circle and you'll see that all items inside the circle you just flew are imploded inward and destroyed (or, in the case of items, drawn to you).

It is an essential skill to ridding yourself of enemies in your path and also critically important for defeating some bosses more quickly.

:: Linking
Linking is also a really important concept when you want to play NiGHTS for high score.
It basically requires you to collect items or perform stunts in an unbroken chain.
The more items you collect in a row, the more the score you're earning will grow.
You can use L and R stunts to fill in gaps between groups of stars/bells and blue/gold/rainbow chips, etc.

Some courses in the game allow skilled players to perform infinite links until the time for that course runs out.


BEYOND HIGH SCORE:

Dynamic Music and A-Life System
NiGHTS has dynamic music during dreams which is controlled by the current mood of creatures called Nightopians (these are the little cone-headed winged elves/gnomes that you see around the level and hatch out of the little eggshells that you'll see around the level on the ground) and Mepians (which are hybrids which result if you knock a Nightmaren enemy in a dream into a ball and they collide with a Nightopian).

There are four moods which your Nightopians can have:
Cheering
Happy (the default when you play the first time)
Content
Angry (if you cause them collateral damage while attacking enemies)

You can see how the music for each dream is divided into seven parts and how the mood of your Nightopians affects which the music when looking at the Melody Box present in the original Christmas NiGHTS for Sega Saturn (unfortunately Sega neglected to include this in the Sega Ages version for PS2 in Japan which is what got ported to PC, XBOX 360, and PS3.

Here's a YouTube playlist which covers the four mood variations of each dream's music:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC8EED5E73BA79831
Note that in the real game, each of these seven segments of the music track may be set to different moods, based on the 20+ Nightopians in each dream, which leads to considerably more combinations than just four per dream.

You can affect your Nightopian's mood as Claris and Elliot as well as NiGHTS and hatch any new eggs which result from either accidentally paralooping a Nightopian or creating a Mepian.

The original Christmas NiGHTS for Sega Saturn included a present called 'Nightopian Collection' which read your save file from the full game and would allow you to examine the mood of each of your Nightopians and Mepians in each level before so that you knew where to go play.

EDIT: Note that there is a menu option called 'Nightopian Collection' in the Sega Ages PS2 version and its ports to Steam, XBOX 360, and PS3, however this is not the same thing. Rather, in this remake of the game, 'Nightopian Collection' means the wallpapers of various characters in the game. These renders were also unlockable in the original Christmas NiGHTS on Sega Saturn, but under individual gifts with specific characters' pictures (NiGHTS, Elliot, Claris, Nightopians, Gillwing, etc.)

Here's a YouTube video of it, since it isn't included in this version of the game either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niWfwtH1nfs

Also note that by maintaining your Nightopian population's mood, you can breed a King 'Pian who will build a tower in that dream which is just a bit of a cool badge of accomplishment for anyone who is familiar with the game to recognize when they see you play.

Here's a YouTube video example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie-Ypm_Ih7s

There are also other omitted presents from the original Christmas NiGHTS such as Time Attack and Link Attack which can really help you hone your skills before diving back into the full set of dreams again, but ultimately it's going to just take you memorizing the layout of the levels.


All things considered, NiGHTS: into dreams... is an arcade-style game.

If you're the type of person who really enjoys Sega-style skill/reflex-based arcade gameplay where there aren't too many levels, but all the effort is poured into making a handful of really enjoyable levels where your skills will be put to the test to compete for high score (and you can enjoy playing older 3D games and look past their lower polygon counts to better understand how the industry grew to where it is today) or you'd just like to see what else the fine folks who created Sonic the Hedgehog dreamed up, then you'll be able to get some good satisfying hours of gameplay out of NiGHTS, especially if you have one or more friends who enjoy competing for high score.


As to your memories of playing NiGHTS on your Dreamcast... I think you're probably remembering the NiGHTS-themed pinball level in Sonic Adventure or the large NiGHTS head statue in Shadow's level in Sonic Adventure 2 or (possibly) the NiGHTS cameo in Sonic Shuffle, but you wouldn't remember actually playing any NiGHTS game on Dreamcast, because there was never one released.

[Raiden]

Nightopian Collection IS available in the PS2/X360/PS3/original PC?/PC version, after completing both original and Christmas NiGHTS.

About older 3D games, Saturn also had quads instead of triangles for polygons, aka problematic matter, and the entire system seems to me as the case of "they wanted it to be good, but came out as usual". (I recommend playing the game on the real system with 3D controller, dithered transparencies and lighting on the loading screen are the part of the experience.)

[proton_decay]

Thanks Pura, you should make this a guide =)

[SpellSword]

Thanks for the info Guardian Pura & Segata Sanshiro. ^_^

Originally posted by proton_decay­­­­­­­­­­:

Thanks Pura, you should make this a guide =)

Agreed. ^_^

[Wanda]

How to play Christmas Nights?
I fell in love with the game (I was more of a playstation guy when it came out), just completed the 6 dreams in one sitting but now I see that there is a hidden one too.

[Wanda]

Also thanks for the guide, you should copy/paste it as an actual guide so it has more visibility. It's gonna be a huge help for getting those A grades.

[Raiden]

There are eight dreams, not six (not sure if those two are technically dreams). Any rank qualifies, the best ones are only for your satisfaction and achievement.

Edith: Whoops, actually rank matters. You need to get rank C or higher on previous six dreams to unlock the final (not hidden as in secret level) one. If you use the techniques from that guide you should get C without any problems.

[Hanabi]

to put it as simply as possible you need to get 20 blue chips as fast as you can, fly to the ideya capture, and then when "bonus time" starts keep going in circles around the stage racking up as many points as you possibly can until time is almost out (best way to do this is to keep chains going as long as you can, grab any gold chips you see and fly through any rings you come across), then enter the little hub to start the next course.

The most important thing to a level's score though is the multiplier you get from beating the boss as fast as you can. They all have various tricks to them, just make sure you don't dawdle around and take them out ASAP for that A rank. You're gonna need it if you want to get the true ending.

Originally posted by monowanda:

How to play Christmas Nights?
I fell in love with the game (I was more of a playstation guy when it came out), just completed the 6 dreams in one sitting but now I see that there is a hidden one too.

You unlock it after beating the game (I believe with both Claris and Elliot), and there's two extra levels. You need at least C ranks to unlock them.

[LJChronx2]

Nice guide. I just got the game in the Sega Bundle and was confused about it myself. There is a manual for it on Steam but it doesnt explain it as well as you just did. Thanks so much!

[Anthony817]

Dreamcast? This game was only on Saturn lol.

[Cube]

if you are playing as the kids then you are close to death simple as that. it is like being shrunk down and losing powerups in other games. that is not the point of the game it is not super mario 64,

you link and get combos flying as nights as fast as you can on the courses. if you have extra time do not fly to the goal until time almost ends keep getting links and combos.