Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch

A combination of Pokemon, Zelda, and Studio Ghibli should be amazing, and it mostly is. The combat can feel stale at times mainly because it doesn't really matter what creature you have. The story itself is so beautiful where you often get sidetracked into helping a new kingdom before you get more story of the main story. The music is encapsulating. The design is stunning. I also think that the incorporation of animated sequences done by Studio Ghibli is jaw dropping. If you like the themes, music, and design of Studio Ghibli, this is SO amazing. As a JRPG alone, it is quite stellar too.

Ni no Kuni is a game that has been on my radar for a number of years now, and I'm happy I finally got around to playing and beating it as I zoom through my PS3 exclusives that I've been putting off. A JPRG visually directed by the legendary Studio Ghibli (even if it was just a B Team) seemed to be a solid match for Level-5's recent successes with the Dragon Quest remakes. But despite this game being an inevitably positive and entertaining experience for me, almost every single thing about it is compromised in some way, and ultimately feels like something that could've been much greater.

Before I dig in, I need to mention the Wizard's Companion, which came with the deluxe version of the original Japan-exclusive DS release of the game, and it works as a beastiary, guide, artbook, and lore anthology all at once. It's present in-game in the form of a digital copy, but it's ridiculously hard to navigate, especially when required to solve a puzzle or follow a recipe. It really does feel like you're supposed to have the book on-hand in real life as you play through the game, and maybe that's a more satisfying way to do it, but the books go for well over a hundred dollars and, well, is in Japanese, so I didn't have a physical copy on hand for my time with the game. It's totally gorgeous though... so maybe one day.

The primary plot device sees Oliver, a perfectly normal young boy from a small Americana town called Motorville, transported to a magical world of fairies and monsters in a quest to become a wizard and save his mother, who passed away in his world but remains alive in the other. Every character in Motorville has an analogue in the magic world, so occasionally you'll have to interact with characters in one world to alter another. An interesting concept that surely ties into the ideas of magical prowess and all, but the trips themselves strip the player of critical thinking opportunities by outright telling you what you have to do at all times. Side quest to break a motor? Your Navi-esque companion will mention to you that there's a mechanic in Motorville, for example. They never leave any room for the player to explore this dual-worlds mechanic in ways outside of the immediately obvious - and that constraint unfortunately becomes a running theme of the game.

The pacing of the story is the first thing that jumped out to me as jarring. Ni no Kuni is an E10 rated game, so some compromises for the sake of a younger target demographic were to be expected, but holy fucking hell does this thing take a while to get off the ground. You aren't given another party member until 9 hours in, and you aren't even given a familiar to fight with until 2 hours in. The first continent, The Summerlands, takes about 10-12 hours to complete, but then the next two cities and their substories (The Fairygrounds and Hamelin) take a cumulative 5 hours. Around 12 hours in, as you prepare to receive your first boat, you fight three bosses in a total of 5 plot points, all of which happen with literal minutes between them. You also receive the fast travel spell and the on-command dragon to fly around the world within an hour of each other about 20 hours in, which felt immediately superfluous. It was little things like this that made the experience feel really unsure of it what it wanted to be - either whimsical gallivanting or this fast paced adventure, and often times it fell flat of either.

Oliver's quest to become a wizard is no joke - you'll learn something close to 100 spells throughout your journey - but close to half of them merely appear in your Wizard's Companion and are not usable in-game. In others, they are used a single time to further a plot point or solve a puzzle, and never touched again. A fairly non-interactable environment also means you couldn't play around with spells in innocuous ways either, like shooting a "Quicken Growth" spell at a flower shop to see if it is overrun. Every opportunity to use magic is scripted and doesn't reward exploration or imagination at all.

The worst case of this hand-holding comes with the Locket mechanic, which allows you to help mend broken hearts by taking traits like confidence or kindness from those who have lots of it and giving it to those in need. This give and take transaction comprises nearly half of all side quests in the game and is necessary to progress the main plot at many critical junctures, and in general it's a rather cute and charming mechanic. You might need to give a queen with a large appetite some restraint, or a bored ruler some enthusiasm, for example. However, to flesh out Oliver as a polite 12-year-old boy, every interaction with someone with a desirable trait - even when you might be on the fiftieth case - comes with close to a dozen lines of dialogue of Oliver working up the nerve to ask them if he could extract their excess heart, and Drippy directly telling you which spell to use AND which trait they are lacking. It feels infantilizing, removing any sense of thought to the situation, even if it is supposed to be in character.

Across your journey, you'll pick up three other party members, with a maximum party size of 3 at a time. All four party members can collect - and have preferences for certain types of - familiars, which are for all intents and purposes just Pokemon. They are captured at the end of battle if they like you a la SMT, and each party member has three to pick from, each with their own abilities, as well as unique spells and abilities when no familiar is summoned, which can lead to a wide array of versatility for one team across a battle. The combat is executed in real time, with pauses to select spells and items when the respective commands are entered, and also while selecting a target to attack. Commands are selected from a (very janky) wheel and are played out automatically followed by a cooldown timer. They can be canceled at any time, though, so you won't get stomped by an AoE attack from a boss because you were halfway through attacking instead of defending or evading. There are also a ton of rock-paper-scissors mechanics in play by way of elemental resistances and the familiar's "sign" - Sun, Moon, Star, or Planet - all of whom had different defensive and offensive properties when pitted against other signs. It's a lot to keep your mind busy, but ultimately the enemy designs are visually clear enough about these resistances that guesses are usually still correct.

The most immediate problem with combat is the lack of control over the party. As a Persona fan, I don't have an issue with only maintaining control of one party member at a time. The problem I do have is how thin the options are for party tendencies when they're left to their own devices. You can't order them to attack the nearest enemy (only your target and not-your target), can't order them to use MP conservatively (only all or nothing), nor can you order them to be careful about defending themselves without your input. In most fights, your teammates will take a shitton of damage from not defending and blow all of their MP on healing themselves. It works, ultimately, but nothing about it feels satisfying from a tactical standpoint. All of that said, it is very possible to take down creatures well above your level range with smart switching of characters, MP management, and simply staying on your toes and physically moving out of the way of attacks. Familiars with high movement speeds became crucial to my style of attack by the endgame, as the ability to run out of range immediately was consistently useful for the sake of survival. That of course means that my party never once took advantage of it by themselves, but I digress. I will say that the one saving grace of the combat is that, like in most other JRPGs, decimating weaker enemies with huge numbers popping up doesn't get old, and generally speaking, being overleveled is pretty fun.

From a purely aesthetic standpoint, there is very little to complain about. As mentioned before (and nearly every time the game is brought up), the visual design was handled in part by Studio Ghibli to great effect, with whimsical, pastel color palettes, a tasteful cel shading effect to mirror the look of their 2D work (which is exhibited in cutscenes a la Professor Layton), and a wide variety of interesting environments and towns. The world map itself that you traverse has some beautiful water and weather effects, and the masses of land (specifically the grassier hills) have a watercolour painting quality to them. The major characters also all had lovely Ghibli charm to them, with expressive animations and exaggerated regality. I liked pretty much every single thing in this game visually, with the exception of the familiar designs, which was more of a core issue of quantity. For some ridiculous reason, they decided that it would be a good idea to include 400 enemies in the game, all collectable except for the bosses. However, a strong emphasis on evolution (with splintering paths at the final stage) means that out of the 350ish actual familiars in the game, there are really just 85 or so base designs with some slight changes. Every familiar has four similar variants, and that can make a journey through the world feel a lot smaller than it needs to.

The soundtrack - composed by Ghibli regular Joe Hisaishi - is also consistently pretty quality, with the rather large caveat that the entire soundtrack is less than two hours long and will repeat early and often throughout the duration of the game. It just doesn't feel like the themes were meant for mass replayability as much as they were for cinematic purposes. Without fail, every first encounter of a theme in its environment took me aback (such as the title theme in the main menu, Golden in Golden Grove, Drippy in the basement of Ding Dong Dell, or Yule in Castaway Cove) and made me want to just sit around in the environment. From an objective standpoint, the OST is well above average, I just wish the first minute of each theme was a bit gentler given how quickly you'll be changing locations to end the game. The sound design in general was stellar, with solid SFX and brilliant voice work (at least on the English dub, which was what I played with).

In all, Ni no Kuni is a game with a ton of problems that still gets a gentle recommendation from me on the condition that you have a lot of time on your hands and appreciate this brand of JRPG. It's got far too many bosses, doesn't really know how to pace its own story, is completely tedious in many cases, and has some unsatisfying combat systems in place - but it is still a relatively unique experience for a PS3 exclusive, and aesthetically is an enormous success for a 7th gen title. It's clear that an enormous amount of time went into designing this world and its inhabitants... they just forgot to really polish the game part of it as well.

I'm very excited for the sequel, as it looks to absolve just about every issue I had with this game that I can see. Hopefully Level-5 learns from their mistakes, but in the meantime, the original will holds its own contentious place in the 2011 gaming canon.

Ni No Kuni is one of those games my friends attempted to play but then we realized it would take us months to actually beat since we only met up once a week to play games. So I checked the game out at my library a few months after I graduated college, and well its a pretty fun RPG. It has a big world to explore, the graphics are beautiful, and the story is pretty simple and has a Miyazaki vibe. On the other hand the combat is pretty tedious and does drag the game down a little. The problem is it just gets repetitive and many fights simply consist of running up and attacking an enemy than running away and letting your bar recharge then repeating. I really didn't like the combat in this, not to mention, there are a few moments in this game that do drag out a little, but its still a solid RPG and one of the best PS3 exclusives. If some of the tedium were removed and the plot condensed a little, this could have been one of the greatest RPGs, and I think 2 will improve a lot, so lets hope.

Ni No Kuni is an RPG that dared to exist, ridden with flaws but somehow coming out a worthwhile experience. The game was originally released in 2010 for the Nintendo DS in Japan with the subtitle "The Jet-Black Mage." It told the story of Oliver, our small and frustratingly goody-goody protagonist, who travels to a parallel world after accidentally causing the death of his mother. In this alternate world, many citizens have been rendered walking vegetables by having their emotions sucked out. Since the developers had totally never played Kingdom Hearts, they call these folks the Heartbroken. Our hero must face the wizard behind it all, Shadar, who happens to also be holding the soul of Oliver's mother's alternate self. It's a good motivation that I think does well in justifying why a little kid would go through all the trouble. He cares as much about bringing his mother back to life in whatever way possible as he does saving the people of the world. In the DS version, the story ends after Oliver deals with Shadar. It's a logical, completed story with some heartwarming moments. Level 5 and Studio Ghibli both worked on this game, and aesthetically it's absolutely breathtaking. The game looks and sounds like a Ghibli film down to nearly every detail, and the quality never drops. Joe Hisaishi's music, while certainly not his best effort, fits the trailblazing spirit of the game well. I never had any complaints about Ni No Kuni from the audio-visual front.

Unfortunately, when the game was re-released for the Playstation 3 as Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, a second layer of the plot got slapped on: after defeating Shadar, Oliver must save the world again from the true villain behind it all, a witch who supposedly has a god-given ability to decide the world's fate. Outside of Japan, this is the only version we got, and oh boy does it sour the experience. This section is completely disconnected from the main story, and every scene involving the White Witch throughout the game feels tacked on and generic. Call it padding, DLC, or whatever you like. At the end of the game, I wished that the story had been allowed to end at its natural stopping point. While I have my issues with the original ending, at least the final hours of the game didn't involve developing a new character nobody cared about. George Lucas may have botched up Star Wars over the years, but he didn't add a brand new subplot at the end of any of the films.

At its heart, Ni No Kuni is supposed to be a big, epic adventure in a mysterious world. The game accomplishes making the player feel this sometimes, but falls flat quite a bit. One great moment stands out in particular for me: gaining the ability to fly around on a dragon. When I first took off and heard the brassy, triumphant remix of the world map theme, I almost shed a tear. It was as if the game was finally letting me do the exploration I wanted to. What's more, flying is like flying the airship in Final Fantasy VI. In so many modern RPGs, airships have just become menus that transport you from one place to another. Finally, I was able to fly around in one of these modern, humongous worlds like I flew around in RPGs from my childhood. The novelty never wore off, either--I would fly from place to place just to experience doing so at times, even though I had the ability to teleport. When Ni No Kuni stops holding your hand and feeding you tutorials, which isn't very often, it's honestly perfection. I loved exploring new areas in the world, discovering items with Oliver's spells, and facing new monsters in strange areas. Sadly, these moments don't last as the game's world is smaller than it initially appears, but I savored in them as the game unfurled itself.

The main puzzle gimmick in the game is Oliver's magic. Like in the Golden Sun games, you get a variety of spells that can be used on the map to move statues, burn stuff down, and so on. This would have been a great feature, except it's lazily implemented and doesn't trust the player to do things on his own. One of the only good things about Golden Sun was how the map magic worked: you cast the spell, Isaac performed it, you saw the animation, stuff happened. In Ni No Kuni, you select the spell from a menu, Oliver sits there, no animation usually happens, the screen fades out, and the thing you needed done is done. It reminded me of working on games with the OHRRPGCE. Before implementing animations, I'd do a similar fade out routine. It was meant to be lazy, or a placeholder. When I cared about making it look good, I'd go through some trouble to do so. Therefore, it bothers me that Level 5 didn't go through the same trouble. Oliver's character model had the casting animations from the battle system, so why couldn't he at least look like he was doing something? Of course, the larger issue is that the game never lets the player solve these puzzles. Your ridiculously annoying fairy companion, Drippy, tells you precisely what spell to use at every roadblock. At this point, I'm almost desensitized to these things happening in games, but it's never going to stop stinging. Challenge me a little, game!

Ni No Kuni's battle system is a mixed bag. On one hand, it's the real-time action monster battle RPG system Pokémon fans have always dreamed of. On the other, it almost seems like less work went in to the battles than every other aspect of the game. The most satisfying quality of the battles is that they are usually simple enough to finish. Attacking random mobs head on is often a good idea, and finishes them off quickly enough; you'll want to, as the game has way too many random enemies on the maps for its own good, many of them near unavoidable. The problem is when the system tries to go deeper. When I noticed how difficult it was to toggle between action commands while moving around and paying attention, I knew I was in for trouble. In fact, one of the reasons spamming attacks is so good is that selecting from menus is so annoying. The monsters (familiars) that the game gives you, first of all, are basically just three or four types of fighters with different models. You have your tank attackers, glass cannons, pure tanks, and magicians. None of the familiars I collected had any unique abilities or special traits. This is a problem with the game that doesn't become evident until very late in to it. Unfortunately, it also means that familiars can effectively be distilled down to just the mathematical best choices. There's no reason to use Familiar A over Familiar B if Familiar A has the same role but worse stats. For all its faults, Pokémon at least does a good job making the various monsters have unique abilities and moves. It's a big shame that Ni No Kuni couldn't do the same since the Ghibli art direction makes the monsters look so great.

However, the biggest problem with Ni No Kuni's battle system, and honestly the game as whole, is the ally AI. Eventually, Oliver will have two party members with three familiars each and it's up to the AI to control them. The AI doesn't know how to control them. It tends to throw out the familiar with the highest stat total without any regard to its function in the battle. I can't count the number of times I wanted the AI to attack, but it sent out a healer and started chipping away instead of using the heavy hitter I had worked so hard to obtain and prepare for battle. The AI also loves burning through MP. It will waste loads of MP on spells against weak enemies, or use a healing spell when you take just a scratch of damage. Buffs get used essentially at random. It got to the point where I wanted to just have Oliver solo the entire game, but that's not feasible when your familiar is up against mobs of three enemies until very late in. You will have to rely on the crappy AI and learn its quirks to finish this game, and it is definitely the one thing, despite every other complaint I have, that prevents me from recommending Ni No Kuni to everyone.

While the battle system is deeply flawed, I should mention that apart from the whole White Witch thing, I think Ni No Kuni's story is well-handled. As one would expect from a Ghibli production, the world's very whimsical and doesn't get dark in a way that feels unnecessary or grotesque. For the most part, it's a feel-good adventure. I like to play games like this from time to time; it's one of the reasons I turn to Dragon Quest so much. The game has several mysteries involving characters, too. While it spells them out eventually, it was fun to try and piece them together as the game went on. I guessed who Shadar really was, but was happy when I learned I was correct. The story has Oliver return to the real world from time to time, sometimes to figure out what the alternate version of a character is having problems with or to interact with a few of Oliver's real friends. I liked these sections and felt they added a lot to the mythology of the game's universe. I do wish it went all the way and gave Motorville (the city Oliver lives in) some kind of resolution by the end of the game, though. In fact, until halfway through the game, I (and my friend SDHawk apparently) thought that the alternate world was a figment of Oliver's imagination and he was playing pretend to cope with his mother's death. I'm okay with the game not going that route, but it did feel like a major ball was dropped with regards to Motorville. Maybe if Oliver had met more parallel versions of characters, it would have felt better fleshed-out.

Oddly, I think my favorite aspect of the game is its sidequests. The quests themselves are mostly brain-dead: deliver an item, find something on the map, repair people's hearts, catch these familiars, and so on. Nothing you couldn't think of without playing the game first. What makes the quests good is that you get rewarded very well for doing them. The game gives you merit rewards that can be bought after doing lots of quests which do things like increase walking speed, cut the cost of spells in half, increase experience gain, and make familiars easier to catch. All of these things are simple, but they are nice rewards for the effort you put in. The more subtle benefit of quests is that they make a great substitute for grinding. Ni No Kuni's difficulty spikes quite a bit in several areas, but as long as you keep up with the sidequests, you won't have too much trouble. I am glad more and more RPGs are using quests in this way, as it helps the player feel like his efforts are worth it no matter how trivial they seem.

Ultimately, Ni No Kuni is a fresh, original RPG that came out when we really needed one. It has a multitude of problems, but it's a game that deserves to exist and I'm very glad that I played it. The problems I have are problems I mention because I enjoyed the game and wished those things were fixed before release or avoided entirely in some cases. You could say that that Ni No Kuni is a strange sort of "licensed" game, where a studio that doesn't make games came in to work with a studio that does. If this is the kind of quality we can expect from future licensed games, I'd be perfectly okay with it. My hope is that Level 5 recognizes the mistakes they made in this game's development and improves in the future. I cannot recommend Ni No Kuni unless the idea of a Ghibli adventure in RPG form with monster collection already appeals to you, but if it does, I think you'll enjoy most of the game; it's not perfect, but it's the kind of game I would have loved to play in my childhood.

Ni no Kuni is a game that has been on my radar for a number of years now, and I'm happy I finally got around to playing and beating it as I zoom through my PS3 exclusives that I've been putting off. A JPRG visually directed by the legendary Studio Ghibli (even if it was just a B Team) seemed to be a solid match for Level-5's recent successes with the Dragon Quest remakes. But despite this game being an inevitably positive and entertaining experience for me, almost every single thing about it is compromised in some way, and ultimately feels like something that could've been much greater.

Before I dig in, I need to mention the Wizard's Companion, which came with the deluxe version of the original Japan-exclusive DS release of the game, and it works as a beastiary, guide, artbook, and lore anthology all at once. It's present in-game in the form of a digital copy, but it's ridiculously hard to navigate, especially when required to solve a puzzle or follow a recipe. It really does feel like you're supposed to have the book on-hand in real life as you play through the game, and maybe that's a more satisfying way to do it, but the books go for well over a hundred dollars and, well, is in Japanese, so I didn't have a physical copy on hand for my time with the game. It's totally gorgeous though... so maybe one day.

The primary plot device sees Oliver, a perfectly normal young boy from a small Americana town called Motorville, transported to a magical world of fairies and monsters in a quest to become a wizard and save his mother, who passed away in his world but remains alive in the other. Every character in Motorville has an analogue in the magic world, so occasionally you'll have to interact with characters in one world to alter another. An interesting concept that surely ties into the ideas of magical prowess and all, but the trips themselves strip the player of critical thinking opportunities by outright telling you what you have to do at all times. Side quest to break a motor? Your Navi-esque companion will mention to you that there's a mechanic in Motorville, for example. They never leave any room for the player to explore this dual-worlds mechanic in ways outside of the immediately obvious - and that constraint unfortunately becomes a running theme of the game.

The pacing of the story is the first thing that jumped out to me as jarring. Ni no Kuni is an E10 rated game, so some compromises for the sake of a younger target demographic were to be expected, but holy fucking hell does this thing take a while to get off the ground. You aren't given another party member until 9 hours in, and you aren't even given a familiar to fight with until 2 hours in. The first continent, The Summerlands, takes about 10-12 hours to complete, but then the next two cities and their substories (The Fairygrounds and Hamelin) take a cumulative 5 hours. Around 12 hours in, as you prepare to receive your first boat, you fight three bosses in a total of 5 plot points, all of which happen with literal minutes between them. You also receive the fast travel spell and the on-command dragon to fly around the world within an hour of each other about 20 hours in, which felt immediately superfluous. It was little things like this that made the experience feel really unsure of it what it wanted to be - either whimsical gallivanting or this fast paced adventure, and often times it fell flat of either.

Oliver's quest to become a wizard is no joke - you'll learn something close to 100 spells throughout your journey - but close to half of them merely appear in your Wizard's Companion and are not usable in-game. In others, they are used a single time to further a plot point or solve a puzzle, and never touched again. A fairly non-interactable environment also means you couldn't play around with spells in innocuous ways either, like shooting a "Quicken Growth" spell at a flower shop to see if it is overrun. Every opportunity to use magic is scripted and doesn't reward exploration or imagination at all.

The worst case of this hand-holding comes with the Locket mechanic, which allows you to help mend broken hearts by taking traits like confidence or kindness from those who have lots of it and giving it to those in need. This give and take transaction comprises nearly half of all side quests in the game and is necessary to progress the main plot at many critical junctures, and in general it's a rather cute and charming mechanic. You might need to give a queen with a large appetite some restraint, or a bored ruler some enthusiasm, for example. However, to flesh out Oliver as a polite 12-year-old boy, every interaction with someone with a desirable trait - even when you might be on the fiftieth case - comes with close to a dozen lines of dialogue of Oliver working up the nerve to ask them if he could extract their excess heart, and Drippy directly telling you which spell to use AND which trait they are lacking. It feels infantilizing, removing any sense of thought to the situation, even if it is supposed to be in character.

Across your journey, you'll pick up three other party members, with a maximum party size of 3 at a time. All four party members can collect - and have preferences for certain types of - familiars, which are for all intents and purposes just Pokemon. They are captured at the end of battle if they like you a la SMT, and each party member has three to pick from, each with their own abilities, as well as unique spells and abilities when no familiar is summoned, which can lead to a wide array of versatility for one team across a battle. The combat is executed in real time, with pauses to select spells and items when the respective commands are entered, and also while selecting a target to attack. Commands are selected from a (very janky) wheel and are played out automatically followed by a cooldown timer. They can be canceled at any time, though, so you won't get stomped by an AoE attack from a boss because you were halfway through attacking instead of defending or evading. There are also a ton of rock-paper-scissors mechanics in play by way of elemental resistances and the familiar's "sign" - Sun, Moon, Star, or Planet - all of whom had different defensive and offensive properties when pitted against other signs. It's a lot to keep your mind busy, but ultimately the enemy designs are visually clear enough about these resistances that guesses are usually still correct.

The most immediate problem with combat is the lack of control over the party. As a Persona fan, I don't have an issue with only maintaining control of one party member at a time. The problem I do have is how thin the options are for party tendencies when they're left to their own devices. You can't order them to attack the nearest enemy (only your target and not-your target), can't order them to use MP conservatively (only all or nothing), nor can you order them to be careful about defending themselves without your input. In most fights, your teammates will take a shitton of damage from not defending and blow all of their MP on healing themselves. It works, ultimately, but nothing about it feels satisfying from a tactical standpoint. All of that said, it is very possible to take down creatures well above your level range with smart switching of characters, MP management, and simply staying on your toes and physically moving out of the way of attacks. Familiars with high movement speeds became crucial to my style of attack by the endgame, as the ability to run out of range immediately was consistently useful for the sake of survival. That of course means that my party never once took advantage of it by themselves, but I digress. I will say that the one saving grace of the combat is that, like in most other JRPGs, decimating weaker enemies with huge numbers popping up doesn't get old, and generally speaking, being overleveled is pretty fun.

From a purely aesthetic standpoint, there is very little to complain about. As mentioned before (and nearly every time the game is brought up), the visual design was handled in part by Studio Ghibli to great effect, with whimsical, pastel color palettes, a tasteful cel shading effect to mirror the look of their 2D work (which is exhibited in cutscenes a la Professor Layton), and a wide variety of interesting environments and towns. The world map itself that you traverse has some beautiful water and weather effects, and the masses of land (specifically the grassier hills) have a watercolour painting quality to them. The major characters also all had lovely Ghibli charm to them, with expressive animations and exaggerated regality. I liked pretty much every single thing in this game visually, with the exception of the familiar designs, which was more of a core issue of quantity. For some ridiculous reason, they decided that it would be a good idea to include 400 enemies in the game, all collectable except for the bosses. However, a strong emphasis on evolution (with splintering paths at the final stage) means that out of the 350ish actual familiars in the game, there are really just 85 or so base designs with some slight changes. Every familiar has four similar variants, and that can make a journey through the world feel a lot smaller than it needs to.

The soundtrack - composed by Ghibli regular Joe Hisaishi - is also consistently pretty quality, with the rather large caveat that the entire soundtrack is less than two hours long and will repeat early and often throughout the duration of the game. It just doesn't feel like the themes were meant for mass replayability as much as they were for cinematic purposes. Without fail, every first encounter of a theme in its environment took me aback (such as the title theme in the main menu, Golden in Golden Grove, Drippy in the basement of Ding Dong Dell, or Yule in Castaway Cove) and made me want to just sit around in the environment. From an objective standpoint, the OST is well above average, I just wish the first minute of each theme was a bit gentler given how quickly you'll be changing locations to end the game. The sound design in general was stellar, with solid SFX and brilliant voice work (at least on the English dub, which was what I played with).

In all, Ni no Kuni is a game with a ton of problems that still gets a gentle recommendation from me on the condition that you have a lot of time on your hands and appreciate this brand of JRPG. It's got far too many bosses, doesn't really know how to pace its own story, is completely tedious in many cases, and has some unsatisfying combat systems in place - but it is still a relatively unique experience for a PS3 exclusive, and aesthetically is an enormous success for a 7th gen title. It's clear that an enormous amount of time went into designing this world and its inhabitants... they just forgot to really polish the game part of it as well.

I'm very excited for the sequel, as it looks to absolve just about every issue I had with this game that I can see. Hopefully Level-5 learns from their mistakes, but in the meantime, the original will holds its own contentious place in the 2011 gaming canon.