I would’ve loved to be a fly on the wall when it came time to translate the title of Ni No Kuni for the American market, or, rather, not do so at all. I don’t disagree with the choice to leave the title untranslated; I’m just really curious about it. It’d be one thing if it was a character’s name, but it seems like the phrase has a number of serviceable options for an English translation, whether you believe it’s Second Country or Another World or what have you. I gather that perhaps a bunch of people sat down at a conference table, fought over the precise way to get all the nuance out of the phrase, had to be separated after duking it out, and then they all just decided to leave it alone. And then they were all paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for their services.

Whatever the case may be, Ni No Kuni’s a pretty good game. It definitely comes across as a Level 5 game, which I was a bit dubious about, having never been terrifically huge fans of their RPGs in the past. It was never as sloggy as, say, Dragon Quest VIII was (but then I recall few RPGs more interminable than DQVIII), even if there was a bit of grinding here and there to get me past the tougher bosses. But in the end it was Pretty Alright.

The combat system might’ve been the game’s weakest aspect, but even so, it rarely reached a level of true frustration. Most of the fights were passable simply by bringing out my Mitey familiar and tapping the X button incessantly, and that’s without even getting any of the familiars that I had to maximum friendliness. So it’s difficult to really say there was a lot of strategy involved, but then that’s probably always the case when you’re talking about a team of AI party members. I would’ve loved to see some kind of deeper AI settings like you had in Final Fantasy XII, where you could control what actions your teammates do based on the context of what’s happening in battle, but those options are pretty slim here.

Even so, your teammates are smart enough to not feel like they got in the way, even though I barely ever actively controlled them. Part of that is just functional AI algorithms (if char A is <75% health, cast a heal, etc.) that worked even without a lot of massaging; part of that is an avoidance of the enemy attacks that make AI teammates often so frustrating to deal with. Only one boss drops down fire that you have to move out of, for instance (which of course wound up killing my teammates multiple times); most of the rest of the enemies have attacks that are either big damage to one party member or manageable damage to all of them, both of which are pretty easy to adjust to so long as you have good healing options in your familiars. For a lot of the last section of the game, I just used Oliver, running away from bad guys and spamming Evenstar or Astra to wipe out entire groups of enemies or using heals while my teammates plinked away at bosses. Not thrilling, but fun enough.

I guess that would sum up the storyline as well. It’s not as well-told as most of Miyazaki’s best films which, even when dealing with children, are often startlingly mature and subtle in the way they deal with the interior emotions of their characters. Things are a bit more overt here, which is fine in its own way, but it did get a little tiring to see every Ultimate Bad Guy go through a lengthy exposition to explain that they were Really Not That Bad At All, to the point where the end boss, who’s killed probably millions of people during her reign, simply becomes good again after you fight her, says “now it’s time for me to help people,” and is turned loose to the world. An odd idea of justice, that.

I dunno! Ni No Kuni’s good, but it seems a bit inconsequential, too; I wouldn’t have cried if someone had made me stop playing after five hours, or anything. Finishing it made me realize that it’s been a very long time since I actually completed a JRPG (unless you count stuff like Dark Souls or Dragon’s Dogma; I personally don’t); I got pretty close to finishing Tales of Vesperia a couple of years ago, but not much has really caught my eye in the interim. I gave up on FFXIII-2 after a couple of hours, and barely made it through Lightning Returns’ demo before deciding not to buy it. I guess the FFX Remaster stuff is a week away or so, so there’s that to look forward to, at least. Let’s all buy a couple copies so they do the same thing to FFXII.

Hey, I have a couple extra copies of Ni No Kuni to give away! I'll give one away in the comments here and one sometime later. Just leave a comment and I'll select someone at random in a few days.