A Suposedly Fun Game I'll Never Play Again
Ni no Kuni is a game that’s perturbing to write about. I would equate it to making excuses for an obnoxious friend who, under an excruciatingly annoying exterior, is good-intentioned and occasionally pleasant. Make no mistake. Ni no Kuni is a good game, but an amalgamation of grating issues keep it from being great.
The crux of my annoyance with the game, lies in the game world and its characters. I’m all for lightheartedness in games, especially in a time where all entertainment media is given a base-coat of cynicism and brooding, but Ni no Kuni takes childlike naiveté and whimsy to nauseating levels. The game’s narrative revolves around Oliver, a prepubescent child who, after a family tragedy, embarks on a journey that spans two worlds to bring his mother back to life. The concept of the story is brilliant. At its heart, Ni no Kuni is a story about how we cope with emotional trauma, and Oliver is a character that confronts these problems in very real ways; however, the obtrusive lightheartedness of the moment-to-moment narrative, combined with the more-than-occasionally, cringe-worthy dialogue, detracts from the emotional currency it attempts to build.
Ni no Kuni’s art direction also plays a role in castrating the narrative. While the graphics are astounding, and Studio Ghibli’s contribution to the beauty of the game cannot be overstated, I could not help but feel an overwhelming benignity in the majority of the game’s locales, characters, and creatures. The game was so cutesy, it robbed its conflict of any urgency. I never felt threatened at any point; I found myself far more drawn to the portions of the game that had Oliver confronting the emotional demons of his friends, random townsfolk, and himself. This was where the story shined, and I feel these portions were far too sparse in the game. Slow pacing, too, contributes to the lack of narrative steam, though the blame rests more with the grinding, sluggish nature of the gameplay than the script.
The gameplay in Ni no Kuni is a hodgepodge of Pokemon, Tales, Final Fantasy XII, Shin Megami Tensei, and World of Warcraft. Oliver and his party can move around the battlefield in real-time and attack, cast spells, and use items in WOW or FFXII fashion. Soon, but not all that soon, Oliver and his friends can employ the services of creatures—known as Familiars—to battle in their stead. Familiars share their human’s magic and health points, and each human party member can have up to three Familiars in his or her repertoire. Furthermore, the enemy Familiars you fight can be charmed into joining your party, though the opportunity to charm them is completely at random. This is one of the many niggling annoyances in Ni no Kuni’s gameplay that speaks to its unabashedly grinding nature. If you want to acquire a particular Familiar, whether to keep in your party or satisfy the requirements of a sidequest, you will have to battle that type of enemy repeatedly until you have the random opportunity to charm it. Allowing the player agency to initiate a charm attempt at any point, like its Pokemon influence, would have been greatly appreciated. Though, other than for sidequests, I wasn’t compelled to capture any new Familiars because they lack the charm that Pokemon or even Digimon have.
When I say the gameplay is a grind, I don’t just mean the mandatory grinding you must do to level up and acquire Familiars. This game is molasses crawling through a funnel on a July afternoon. Story progression, leveling up, and even traversing the game world are like waiting for paint to dry. If you don’t find something to invest in early on, the pace of the game is all the more excruciating. I could forgive all of this if I wasn’t convinced that the game’s developers did not purposefully make certain decisions in order to squeeze the maximum amount of time and patience out of me without inducing insanity. For example, it takes not an insubstantial amount of time to level your Familiars. Once they reach a certain level, they gain the ability to metamorphose. This requires you to feed them a certain item that evolves them to next form of their species. By metamorphosing, Familiars increase their level ceiling and stat potential, therefore, doing this is imperative in order to maximize your Familiars’ power. The rub comes when you see that your newly metamorphosed Familiar has reset to level one, which renders it useless until you grind it back to a competitive level. Oh, and did I mention you have to do this twice per Familiar?
World traversal is equally sluggish and sadistic. For the majority of the game, Oliver is relegated to traversing the vast expanses of the Second World on foot. Not only is it slow in and of itself, but the game requires plenty of backtracking and unnecessary traversal. One mission in particular required Oliver to travel from the inner sanctum of the town, Hamelin, to a little way out of town and rescue two characters. Not only are you required to escort the characters all the way back to Hamelin, which is completely understandable, but you have to walk all the way back to the inner sanctum. There are a few missions like this where the objective is to backtrack somewhere to talk to a character and you walk all the way through a safe area. Why not just cut to the specific area you need to enter and remove some unnecessary traversal? This may sound like a petty issue, but when the game is already as slow as it is, these small issues become huge annoyances. You do eventually gain the ability to fast-travel and fly around the Overworld on a much more expedient dragon, but these perks came so late in the game, I was already at my wits end.
Ultimately, that is my greatest criticism of Ni no Kuni. By the time the game became enjoyable, it was almost over. This means I spent a good fifty hours of a sixty hour playthrough not having much fun. This doesn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy my experience with the game, but Ni no Kuni required me to tough through myriad annoyances to reap any joy from it. Or maybe I’ve just developed Stockholm Syndrome.
It’s quite possible that other people won’t have the same issues with Ni no Kuni that I did, but it’s also possible that these issues are deal breakers with some. I can only issue an objective warning that this game is much more niche than it appears.
