The last time I did one of these, for Namco Bandai's Tales of Vesperia some couple years back, it was a passive-aggressive revolt of what it put me through. I figured I owed it to the developers of Level-5's Ni no Kuni: The Wrath of the White Witch to present a rare scenario where the achievements for a JRPG were done correctly. Though I have a few issues with the game itself, its trophies are a satisfactory mix of rewarding completionism, experimentation and progress, which is all you can really ask for from a console JRPG. Importantly, none of the trophies for Ni no Kuni were abject bullshit that forced me to play the game the wrong way for hours just to acquire that magical Platinum.
As always, I've left the story achievement names blank and avoided any spoilers throughout. Though many of these trophies were secret, very few actually needed to be. In fact, I'd say it was the one case where this game's trophy list tripped up.
Ni no Trophi
1.-7.
Story Achievements: Six Bronzes, and one Silver (for defeating the final boss). That's fair enough right? I like to have a few progress achievements sprinkled around a playthrough to keep me going (though the game itself is decent enough to do the job) but having too many means having little left over for rewarding the player for exploring the rest of the game. It's a tricky balance, but these ones are all perfectly selected for key moments in the game that are approximately the same distance apart, providing a steady influx of positive reinforcement.
8.
(Gold.) This is a little different to the previous seven, as it's an optional superboss that provides a little more background into the game and its characters. It's sort of an epilogue for those who have beaten the game and want a little bit more exposition to see them off. The superboss itself isn't so bad, honestly, though it does require you beat an enhanced version of every previous boss (including the final boss) beforehand. Then again, I was so ridiculously overpowered by killing XP-sponge Totoro monsters by this point that I don't really have anything to gauge it against.
9. Guildering the Lily Silver
As was the case with my previous Ni no Kuni blog from last week, my ulterior motive for writing this is to show off even more of the game's terrible pun humor. I'm not the only person who thinks this shit is funny, you guys. This trophy is for earning 500k in the game's currency, named the Guilder. Guilders are actually the former currency of the Netherlands, which makes me wonder if the in-game "real-world" locale of Motorville isn't set there. (According to Wikipedia, the Final Fantasy "Gil" is also based on the same currency.)
10. Man of Steal Bronze
What I tend to call the "hey, don't forget you can do this" trophy, Man of Steal asks that you steal 50 items using the resident thief of the party Swaine. It's not a bad plan if you're looking for rare ingredients for alchemizing, as almost every monster's steal/drop inventory is the same, and it's way easier to find items by stealing than simply hoping something drops. If you're already pursuing the much more involved alchemy trophy, below, then this trophy is pretty much a freebie.
11. Glim Reaper Bronze
Glims are little balls of energy that sometimes fly off enemies whenever they get hit (especially if it's a critical hit, which happens if you attack using elements they're weak to) that restore health or mana or occasionally let you perform extremely powerful abilities. The 2000 that this trophy demands is kind of a lot, but you'll quickly earn a passive ability from doing sidequests that draws all glims to you after a battle's over. It's one of those weird milestone trophies that either unlocks before you're done getting all the rest, or ends up being the last thing you have to grind out.
12. Little Battler Experience Silver
Likewise, this is for successfully winning 1000 battles. For some reason, a thousand always seems to be the standard for these battle trophies. You might not hit this total if you're playing this game like a normal person, but you almost certainly will if you're trying to get everything else.
13. Overfamiliar Bronze
So after the Ghibli connection, Ni no Kuni's perhaps best known as a monster raising RPG similar to Dragon Quest Monsters or Megami Tensei or Pokemon. If you keep feeding a familiar (what the game calls its collectible monsters) treats, it'll grow in stats. If you feed it its favorite treats, it'll like you more and you'll unlock various new benefits, as well as raising the cap for adding more stats. It takes a while to get to a full five stars, which is what this trophy requires, but you won't have to go too far out of your way.
14. Pedigree Breeder Bronze
This requires you to increase the stats of a familiar 50 times through treats. It needs to have five star familiarity with you before you can raise its stats that many times, so this kind of goes hand in hand with the previous trophy. It also teaches you the importance of raising stats this way, though the benefits get sort of minimal towards the late game.
15. Viva the Evolution! Bronze
The third of three trophies focusing on micromanaging your familiars, this one is for allowing ten "metamorphoses", the non-copyright term for evolving creatures once they get to a certain level. Ten's nothing. Even if all you used were the handful of familiars that the game gives you rather than catching any new ones, you'd probably reach ten just evolv metamorphosing those. Still, it's a vital aspect of the game and worth implanting its importance early.
16. Familiarizer Bronze
Simply tame 20 different creatures. This includes evolutions, and also includes any familiars who are working for you already including those you were simply given to you by NPCs. Hard to miss once you pick up the second party member and can start recruiting the little guys.
17. Familiarologist Gold
Familiarizer is simply an aperitif to Familiarologist, perhaps the one trophy that requires the most work. Instead of 20 tamed familiars, we're looking at 250. Now, without including the super rare golden versions that only appear post-game and have insanely low capture rates, there are 300 monsters in the game that you can tame or evolve. Each monster's second evolution contains two paths as well, so there's a lot of dupes. A lot of these second/third forms can't be found in the wild, and need to be evolved from an earlier form. In addition, the capture rates for certain monsters are so low that you're better off grinding and evolving those earlier forms. So yeah, I think you're starting to see just how much grinding is required for this one. It's tiresome, but at least there are options beyond trying to farm the same rare beastie for hours. Most of the first forms have high capture rates in the wild, so you can always catch those and be raising them as you hunt for their more elusive evolved forms. Or you could just not bother with this one, like a rational human being.
18. Boy Scout Bronze
Simply perform 15 errands. Errands are the sidequests that are on the bulletin boards in every town. The game really didn't beat around the bush by calling these things errands, because the majority of them are very simple tasks that have you running around helping people and bashing monsters.
19. Humanitarian of the Year Silver
The more advanced version of the Boy Scout trophy, this one requires that you do 60 errands. Errands don't expire after story events and there's way more than 60 in the game, so what you have here is the game giving you a break, asking that you only do around 75% of the sidequests for the Silver.
20. New Sheriff in Town Bronze
Bounty hunts are simply errands where you're tasked with taking on a stronger than usual monster. These things are never too difficult if you're doing them as soon as they appear, and even less so if you decide to wait until the end of the game to clean them all up. For this Bronze you only need to do 10 of them.
21. Bounty Hunter Silver
Like the previous, only you need to hunt down 40 ne'er-do-wells. This will mean taking down a few of the enhanced bosses required for the superboss path as there aren't enough normal hunts to reach that total. It's still not particularly difficult though, and you still don't have to do every single one. It's weird how many of these trophies stop short of asking you to do 100% of a certain task. I mean, if you're going 100% trophy acquisition, wouldn't you also be the type to go for 100% completion in-game as well?
22. Super Hero Gold
Then again, in order to get this trophy -- in which you have to earn all the passive skill bonuses earned by doing errands and bounty hunts -- you actually need to beat every single errand and bounty hunt in the game to earn enough "merit badge" currency to acquire every passive skill. Well, a lot of the superboss stuff doesn't actually reward merits, but it still means doing every task in the game. Those passives are absolutely worth it though, as they can range from more XP and more rare drops to moving faster on the world map.
23. Pop Pop Fizz Fizz Bronze
Earned for alchemizing 10 different items. Level-5 lifted this system directly out of Dragon Quest VIII, giving you the option to create new items anywhere by dropping random objects into a cauldron and seeing what comes out. Since most formulas are impossible to guess, it's best to investigate every town and talk to every NPC to see if they have any recipes. Recipes are given out as errand rewards as well. 10 different items won't take long, though you do need to be about halfway through the game before you're allowed to make anything.
24: Mad Scientist Gold
Of the game's five gold trophies, three require an insane amount of work. Mad Scientist requires that you create 120 different items. There's 134 total so there's a little leeway, but unfortunately 16 of those requires that you farm incredibly rare ingredients from incredibly rare golden enemies. And they're rare drops. It's more farming, then, though it's not going to take hours upon hours like some JRPG trophies end up being. As most materials can be stolen from enemies easily enough by Swaine, the only annoyance comes from waiting for forage spots on the world map to respawn.
25. Treasure Hunter Silver
Some ways through the game you'll earn a spell that highlights chests on the mini-map, making it way easier to sweep through a town or dungeon and find all the semi-hidden treasures. There's also a second spell that works the same way, but for invisible chests on the world map. Oddly enough, at this point you'll have your airship equivalent and can quickly sweep up all 100 chests for a heck of a lot of resources. There's still a few landmasses that you won't be able to visit yet, so you'll be a few chests shy until you eventually reach that part of the game, but this is a little bit of busywork that pays a lot of dividends early on (and an easy Silver).
26. Globetrotter Silver
I'm not ashamed to say I used a guide for this one. Globetrotter requires you visit each of the game's "secluded regions", which are innocuous spots on the map that require that you walk over them, taking you to a new area. Most are in the middle of clumps of forest, Zelda II style. It's worth seeking these places out as they're often instrumental to errands and have chests lying around, but they're not always easy to find.
27. Raising the Stakes Bronze
There's a graveyard casino that opens up around the mid-point of the game that lets you play a bunch of casino games like Blackjack and Slots while surrounded by affluent skeletons. I don't know why every JRPG has a casino, but I suspect it has something to do with how gambling is all but illegal in Japan and having an outlet for that stuff can go a long way. It also helps your chances to have that extra revenue. It doesn't take much gambling to earn any of the low-level prizes, and you can always just exchange a few handfuls of your own money for the chips needed to buy one.
28. High Roller Silver
Post-game, the casino allows you to buy tickets to watch all of the game's cutscenes, which I swear they stole directly from Tales of Vesperia (and I'm glad that's all they stole. I definitely don't need another "Travel 100,000km" achievement. Yeeshers.) This requires a few more chips than you're likely to get by buying them, but fortunately the card game they invented for Ni no Kuni -- Platoon -- can be easily exploited. It's also kind of fun too, so I didn't even mind playing it a few dozen times. Much.
29. Solosseum Slugger Bronze
You earn the ability to recruit familiars fairly early in the game from a grumpy little squirt in a temple somewhere in the desert. If you ever decide to go back there, you'll notice that the pipsqueak has turned the place into an arena. The Slugger trophy is for simply beating the first cup, which you can do almost as soon as the place opens. Then again, you might as well come back way later and take on every tier with a superpowered team.
30. Solosseum Supremo Gold
This one's for beating the hardest tier in the Arena, which is a challenge akin to beating the superboss. The toughest part is that it means fighting four battles in a row without regenerating your health and mana, and you aren't allowed to use restorative items at any point. The individual battles themselves aren't super challenging, but they can grind you down some.
31. Magic Master Silver
There's one of these for each of the three playable characters, but only the one for the protagonist Oliver requires that you go out of your way any. Oliver's spellbook gradually increases as the game progresses, as the major NPCs he meets will usually provide him with a bunch of new spells. Oddly enough, a lot of spells seem like they have a puzzle-solving application (there's one that shrinks you down, one that creates a clone and another that lets you transform into a cat) that never actually end up being used in-game. There's also a persistent side-quest that is independent from the errands that requires you talk to a ghost of a powerful wizard in each new town you reach, and by solving his riddles you earn new spells. They're pretty much the only ones you don't find automatically.
32. Prima Donna Bronze
Fairly straightforward, you just need to learn Esther's (your second character) songs, which work like Oliver's spells and mostly provide buffs and healing. She automatically earns them all as she levels up, with the last one showing up when she hits around level 62.
33. Gunslinger Bronze
Likewise, Swaine (the third character) has a bunch of sneaky skillshots he can perform with his pistol. It takes a little longer for him to learn his last skill though, somewhere around level 68. If you're regularly bashing those Totoro things I mentioned, you'll probably just whiz right past it.
That's all of them. It's the mark of a good trophy list that you can really get a sense of a game and all its mechanics by seeing what is necessary for the Platinum. If done right, trophies give you the full breadth of what the game has to offer. If done poorly, you either get a few half-assed, overvalued story trophies or are presented with the most intimidating, grindy nonsense this side of the "10,000 Online Kills" Gears of War achievement. I've said it before and several times since, but a well-conceived trophy list is as good an indication as any that the developers actually care -- not just about trophies but about every aspect of their game. A crappy achievement/trophy is as much of a sore thumb of lazy design as a typo or a frame rate drop.
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