Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch

Ni No Kuni is one of those experiences that engenders a love hate relationship. This is not a game that will convince anyone who has written of JRPG's as "not their thing" to jump on the train and start grinding out some levels nor does it push elements of the genre all that much further outside of it's fairly strict constructs. What Ni No Kuni does do, and what it does damn well, is take every element that has been in just about every JRPG ever and cram them into a cohesive package. From airships to cooking systems, to monster capturing, this game seems to include just about every iconic gameplay standard of the genre that you can conceive of. The truly incredible thing is not the fact that all of these systems exist in one game, it's how the game is able to make all of these systems relevant and work just as well as they do in other games, save for the Golden Sun-esque puzzle solving mechanic in which you use spells outside of battle to finish various fetch quests and puzzles. While all of these systems work in tandem, feel very meaty, and give a sense of accomplishment for mastering them, they also bear down on the game in such a way as to make the entire experience feel overwrought. There are many times in which I found myself veritably overwhelmed by the amount of things I wanted to do before moving on to the next story quest.

This kind of thing is usually all well and good, oftentimes we find that games are lacking in such rich and in depth motivators to allow for hundreds of hours of play, but the compounding of all of these systems with a grinding mechanic that demands countless battles can leave one feeling truly exhausted. You finish all of the pointless fetch quests, run around places finding things to mix in the alchemy pot for some sweet weapons or familiar upgrades, feed said alchemy mixtures to said familiars, take down some big ass monsters for bounty hunts, gamble some of your ever increasing cash supply, fight the same familiar twenty times in hopes of finally catching it, test your party strength at the Temple of Trials, ride whatever form of transport you currently have at your disposal to explore some new area, and then it's just about bed time. It's so much to take in. This is both part of what makes the game great, and is it's biggest downfall. By making a majority of these things have such fruitful rewards, you constantly want to do everything the game has to offer, so you find yourself feeling bad about neglecting that one familiar you wanted to see to the end, or not being super great at the Platoon mini game.

While the gigantic scope of this game makes it well worth your purchase and a game that will have lasting appeal in your collection for years to come, it also makes you feel as if you can never reach a satisfying conclusion, and a weak and convoluted ending to the main story does nothing to help that feeling. I know it may seem like I am being incredibly pessimistic regarding this game and perhaps doing a veritable "180" in comparison to my first impressions of the game, but to be clear, there are a ton of things that I love about this game. Pointing out the games flaws is important, if only because the game is such an incredible testament to the wonderful world of JRPG's. I could go on forever about what makes the game great, and the high points of Ni No Kuni greatly overshadow it's short comings, but you didn't start reading this to hear about all the things that make this game great. No, most likely you are reading this to know if this game is worth your hard earned money.

Alright, so let's talk battle system. As many of you may have heard Ni No Kuni's battle system is fairly unique. It combines the action style battle mechanics of games like the Tales series with slightly more turn based action strategy RPG mechanics that hearken back to Final Fantasy XII. The primary combatants in the game are Pokemon like creatures that are allowed bonuses from elemental and celestial sign match ups that are inherit to whatever specific familiar they are. You can also directly control the human playable characters (Pokemon trainers) that have captured these familiars during battle and use their special abilities, change the tactics of the team, eat provisions, and even summon powerful bosses that you have encountered previously for a one shot attack. Of course all of the characters gain experience points after a battle is concluded, but even the familiars that you do not use out of the three in your characters roster, (the ones still in their poke balls) get the same amount of experience. This will allow you got grind up a familiar that might be low level which proves useful considering that every time you evolve them into one of their three forms, they revert back to level one. This brings about a necessity to build a good roster which can be a bit difficult in this game. The familiars vary greatly from large tanks that take barely any damage, move slowly, and have terrible accuracy; to spell casters who move quickly and stay at the edges of the battle so as not to get hit and pew enemies with powerful spells from afar.

The diversity of play styles with the familiars definitely makes for some interesting class building, but this interesting mechanic is undermined by the majority of familiars being basically useless. Familiars build stats at a slow, normal, or early rate. The slow showing it's true potential only at ludicrously high levels (so high in fact you won't see much fruit to them until well after post game in the 70-80 level range), the normal losing stat increases somewhere in the late level range, and the early growing familiars who, as you may have guessed, stop growing stats all together in the higher levels. This leveling mechanic would be better served if it effected the lower levels because by the time you have already put around 100 hours into the game as I have, you are still seeing the early growing familiars gaining stats, and the slow growing familiars being absolutely useless because of their still slow to catch up stat totals. In fact, a great deal of the way the class building works only benefits those that are looking to build their familiars up to the very highest levels which is quite the time investment to say the least.

In order to get the most out of these familiars you have to level each one of their evolutionary forms to the max, evolve it, start back at level one, and grind it back up all over again. This makes testing out new familiar combinations incredibly difficult and the game definitely does not reward you for doing so. During my first thirty or so hours I was constantly switching out familiars and evolving them to try and see which ones I would like the best. This led to me receiving the trophy for doing so fairly quickly, but beyond that I was getting crushed in battle pretty regularly. My losses, I later discovered, were mostly due to under powered familiars which was caused both by their low level and their lack of stat building through the treat system that allows you to customize their stats to a certain extent by raising certain ones with the different types of food that you feed them. Eventually I got the message that I needed to pick some familiars and stick to them. The game rewards you infinitely more for sticking to the same team instead of leveling up as many as you can in several ways, because not only is a high level third form familiar a formidable force, but constant focus on stat building said familiars allows them to have more move slots and therefore become more diverse in battles.

Ni No Kuni owes a great deal of it's battle system and creature capture mechanic's appeal to Pokemon. We are treated to a wide variety of creatures with unique skill sets and a rock paper scissors style of affinity for one another that is immediately evocative of the hugely popular Japanese franchise. The problems Ni No Kuni faces in it's familiar system stem from marks that they missed when taking from the Pokemon franchise. While the game does offer a very different mode of capture and party building than a Pokemon game might, this also leads to heavy focus on a certain group of familiars that, unless you are willing to put the time in and find out, may actually be severely under powered making your game a great deal more difficult than it needs to be. In Pokemon every Pokemon is potentially useful to some degree and most of the advantages wrought by them are through careful player decision, adherence to battle style, and paying attention to type match ups If Ni No Kuni had lent itself further to the celestial sign affinity mechanic before post game then the familiar system would have felt more accessible. It isn't a problem of depth that it suffers from or even one of engagement, the battle system is quite fun especially when your style of play is fully realized, but instead it suffers from pure design flaws that are at times pretty baffling. I can understand having a higher focus on selecting your party and sticking to it, unlike Pokemon which encourages you to be constantly switching it up, but if one is to build a system such as this it would seem prudent to make it so that everyone could potentially get use out of any combination of familiars so long as that combination was in line with the affinities laid out for the player. It's a shame that in the post game I'm going to have to get rid of my pirate cat in favor of some other creature who isn't half as cool just because said creature is still remaining relevant and building stats in the extremely high levels.

My next part of this review will have some minor spoilers included in it because I feel like it would be impossible to talk about any kind of narrative gripes that I have without giving you some frame of reference to understand where the story falls flat. If you have somehow kept yourself concealed from any internet chatter regarding the game in hopes of keeping yourself away from other peoples opinions on the story before you play the game then you may want to skip the next few paragraphs. I will include an obvious demarcation between where this part of the review begins and ends so you might avoid any spoilers.

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Coming into this game the major draw for me was that Ni No Kuni's art was done by the anime movie production outfit, Studio Ghibli. The game is absolutely gorgeous and will most likely garner some fawning over by passers by if you are playing this game on a nice television. For those of you who have always wanted to play a video game version of Spirited Away or Howl's Moving Castle, this is the game for you. It most definitely hits all of those aesthetic and narrative beats that the studio is so beloved for and does so very quickly. It begins in the main character Oliver's steam punk-esque world, where Oliver is basically just being a kid in a Studio Ghibli movie. He is an innocent child who is full of virtue and "pure of heart" (a narrative device the game has no qualms about directly referencing to several times throughout the game). In typical Ghibli fashion, his mother immediately dies from... uh... Heart failure? Her sudden death in the very beginning of the game is quite puzzling and is actually a plot point that is never reasonably explained. While from the outset of the game the characters come to a reasonable hypothesis to why she may have died, that an alternate universe version of Oliver's mother was imprisoned by an evil entity causing Oliver's steam punk mommy to suddenly keel over, that whole idea is sort of thrown out the window in the final hours of the game and her death is never truly explained. It makes little sense why she dies so suddenly at the beginning, is quickly explained fairly well and then that explanation turns out to be false, but the game makes no attempt to reconcile the fact that his mother just up and died for no reason.

This glaring inconsistency, along with several other major plot points, are all dredged out incredibly quickly at end game, with an ending that seems like it was most definitely thrown together in an attempt to find some reasonable conclusion. Once the first major reveal was made for me near the end of the game, it was easy for me to kind of see the logical conclusions of all the other plot points and I basically just sat there for the last eight or so hours waiting for the game to tell me what I already knew. The ending is contrived, makes little sense, and the reveals seem like they are put there to conclude a story that the writers deemed too convoluted for a reasonable wrap up. I seriously enjoyed the ideas fleshed out in the end about the overall parallel world that Oliver is initially thrown into. The history of how Ni No Kuni's world came to be and what it will eventually become post game, are really quite novel and make the giant "other world" (there is no actual name for the alternate reality world that the game is actually set in) seem like the vibrantly colorful world that it was meant to be. The actual conclusions to the characters stories within said world however, fall flat, especially when taken in stark contrast to how lovable and full of personality these personas are. Given the incredible time investment that this game takes to complete, one would have hoped for a better ending. Perhaps if Level-5 had given not only the art direction, but also the story telling, over to Studio Ghibli we would have seen the truly great story that I came into this game expecting it to have.

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This is not to say that the game play at end game is in any way something to scoff at. Ni No Kuni is a game that, if anything, plays incredibly well throughout. The fact that the game requires such an incredible amount of leveling and combat all along the way, while still presenting you with challenging and rewarding battles, is really quite the incredible feat and what makes this game a true testament to what the JRPG genre can offer to those that love it. JRPG's are a time honored tradition for gamers. These sorts of games have an incredibly dedicated fan base that seeks out rich and complex game play. Ni No Kuni is the first game in a very long time that can offer the kind of depth that is so highly coveted by lovers of the genre. It truly represents a return to form, and is not subtle about flaunting that fact. It includes almost every element of the classic JRPG while somehow being able to mesh and use every single one of them for a meaningful, inspired experience that will stay with you long after the two hundred some hours you clocked to get that platinum trophy.

At this stage in the game I am already about eighty hours in and I have completed almost all of the errands that the game requires of you, most of which are meaningless and trudging fetch quests. It almost seems like a great deal of these quests were placed to try my patience while I drooled over a passive ability to catch familiars more easily or give Oliver a serious boost in health and magic. That being said, the other end of the errand system are the bounty hunts. These are neat and fun monster hunting missions that you can test your mettle on while earning some seriously powerful rewards and fighting some beautifully designed monsters. It's hard to say how much more of the game I will actually play, but I can definitely see myself picking this game up years down the road just to grind up some familiar that I was never able to see come to fruition.

I know a great deal of this review has been critical of Ni No Kuni's biggest flaws, but this is not because I think it could be in any way defined as a bad experience. I simply wish to highlight for you the things that may or may not turn you away from the experience. The game is truly a breath of fresh in an era where Square Enix has allowed themselves to become irrelevant through spotty story telling and weak game mechanics. For most of us, the lack of unique and exciting traditional RPG's is really a huge bummer. The slight disappointment that I feel which allows for the criticism within the review, is not because I was disappointed with the game as whole, but arises more from a wish within in me for that perfect gaming experience. I can say with confidence that Ni No Kuni is quite close to that experience. It could not have been so great without the slight risks that Level-5 took to create a unique game that was heavily ingrained in a very deep tradition and subculture that exists within gaming. It can be tough to come to grips with the fact that a game cannot be absolutely everything you want it to be, but as cheesy as it may sound, that's life right? We cannot see the new frontier without first exploring the avenues that will take us there and Ni No Kuni does a great job of starting us down those roads. The game would be commendable for accomplishing that feat alone, but it also lends itself enough into the tradition it is aping, as to allow it to be that truly nostalgic and blissful experience that we call playing a great game. So... Yeah... go buy this game.

Pros:

+ Challenging and deep battle/monster capture system

+ Engaging Characters

+ Rich game world with an endless supply of things to do

+ One of the most beautiful games on the market and will continue to be long after graphics capabilities have surpassed it.

+ Exciting and deeply rewarding battles

+ A testament of how to make a successful JRPG/ A modern classic

Cons:

- Strange, convoluted ending

- The inclusion of particular familiars that are just plain useless

- You can easily waste your time on Familiars or quests and not even realize how insignificant your actions were until after the fact.

- Constant grinding, coupled with fetch quests and other monotonous game play wears on the nerves at times.