Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch
I’ve sort of lost interest in the Pokémon series. Game Freak rarely seems to want to expand on the series. They have their blueprint and have stuck with it for over 15 years. You get your first Pokémon from Professor “Tree”, where you choose either a Fire, Grass or Water type. You get a rival early on who chances are you’ll fight as the final battle. You’ll go through 8 Gyms with dungeons along the way, with Team “Something” distracting you with some diabolical scheme. You will then go through a very tough cave to face four elite trainers before you final battle with the champion. Essentially it’s all getting a little too predictable.
So why am I talking about Pokémon, this review is about Ni No Kuni? Well within five hours of playing Ni No Kuni you’ll see why. Ni No Kuni shows that it could be possible to take Pokémon into a radical new dimension and that is probably the best thing about NNK.
NNK is a JRPG from Level 5; known for their B to A tier JRPG’s like Rogue Galaxy and Dragon Quest 8. This time they’ve worked closely with famous Japanese Anime studio Studio Ghibli, who are almost like a Japanese version of Disney. From the first moment this shows, the characters are all polite and well behaved, the worlds are filled with Magic and Wonder and the light comedy is all made so that young children can understand.
But then at its core it does cover a very grown up theme, the death of a loved one and how you deal with it. You play as Oliver, a young boy who is dealing with the recent death of his mother. In his grief his tears bring his most cherished childhood toy to life. In a glorious Welsh accent his toy announces himself as Drippy, Lord of the Fairies, and that he can bring his mother back from the dead by travelling to his world and finding her “soul mate” (so pretty much in the denial phase).
This becomes a common theme for the plot as you travel between Oliver’s world and Drippy’s world matching soul mates between worlds and dealing with their broken hearts. Oliver becomes a wizard, with the intention of finding his mother’s soul mate and stopping the great evil destroying everyone’s hearts.
For the most part the story nicely blends the mature theme of handling a death with a world that is light and can be appreciated by a young audience. Although the final 10% is something different and feels more like extra story after a satisfying ending.
But enough about the story, NNK plays a bit like Pokémon which is why I brought it up. Typically you’ll come across many kinds of monsters which you can capture and train just like in Pokémon. While the way you capture and fight your “familiars” is different, NNK shares that Gotta get them all feeling Pokémon has.
You can either fight with Oliver’s magic or switch to one of three familiars. As you party expands you can select other party members and their familiars. With a full party you’ll have 4 party members and 15 familiars, of which you’ll use 3 party members and 9 familiars.
Movement is in Real-time, and you select commands to attack, each having their own cooldown period before you can use them again. Timing your attacks to attack your opponent before they can attack you cancels their attack leaving them vulnerable.
Like most JRPG’s an MP gauge stops you abusing the stronger attacks although this leads to one of Ni No Kuni’s biggest problems. Your AI teammates will happily abuse their stronger MP draining abilities, particularly Esther, to the point where they will soon be left with nothing. This becomes a problem with boss fights where towards the end you will be relying on their healing skills only to find they have no MP.
What’s more annoying is that their MP isn’t displayed on your HUD, which makes maintaining control of your party more difficult than it should be. Add to that the low frequency of MP recovery items and their high cost in the store means you have to carefully monitor your teammates MP frequently.
NNK’s other problem is how it handles monster collection. Unlike Pokémon monsters are caught by serenading them with a song. This can only be done when a monster is impressed by you skill. This is shown by hearts being displayed, but the frequency this happens is too low. Even when fighting the weakest enemies the ability to capture monsters become a test of luck and patience rather than skill.
On the plus side the Dungeons are a nice length and the side quests are really good. It is also probably the best use of Cel-shading so far only not as big a jump as it was to see Tales of Vesperia for the first time. The soundtrack is only merely adequate with only the boss theme being a stand out track.
Ni No Kuni is a lot of fun to play but it does have some problems. The way your Teammates burn through MP is a constant worry and a patch to increase the monster capture rate wouldn’t go a miss. The world is beautifully presented and full of life, with a good number of side quests to compliment the nicely paced main quest.
But above all Ni No Kuni shows not only is a full 3D Pokémon possible but offers it’s own way of handling things which I hope is inspiring Game Freak for future Pokémon games.
8/10
So why am I talking about Pokémon, this review is about Ni No Kuni? Well within five hours of playing Ni No Kuni you’ll see why. Ni No Kuni shows that it could be possible to take Pokémon into a radical new dimension and that is probably the best thing about NNK.
NNK is a JRPG from Level 5; known for their B to A tier JRPG’s like Rogue Galaxy and Dragon Quest 8. This time they’ve worked closely with famous Japanese Anime studio Studio Ghibli, who are almost like a Japanese version of Disney. From the first moment this shows, the characters are all polite and well behaved, the worlds are filled with Magic and Wonder and the light comedy is all made so that young children can understand.
But then at its core it does cover a very grown up theme, the death of a loved one and how you deal with it. You play as Oliver, a young boy who is dealing with the recent death of his mother. In his grief his tears bring his most cherished childhood toy to life. In a glorious Welsh accent his toy announces himself as Drippy, Lord of the Fairies, and that he can bring his mother back from the dead by travelling to his world and finding her “soul mate” (so pretty much in the denial phase).
This becomes a common theme for the plot as you travel between Oliver’s world and Drippy’s world matching soul mates between worlds and dealing with their broken hearts. Oliver becomes a wizard, with the intention of finding his mother’s soul mate and stopping the great evil destroying everyone’s hearts.
For the most part the story nicely blends the mature theme of handling a death with a world that is light and can be appreciated by a young audience. Although the final 10% is something different and feels more like extra story after a satisfying ending.
But enough about the story, NNK plays a bit like Pokémon which is why I brought it up. Typically you’ll come across many kinds of monsters which you can capture and train just like in Pokémon. While the way you capture and fight your “familiars” is different, NNK shares that Gotta get them all feeling Pokémon has.
You can either fight with Oliver’s magic or switch to one of three familiars. As you party expands you can select other party members and their familiars. With a full party you’ll have 4 party members and 15 familiars, of which you’ll use 3 party members and 9 familiars.
Movement is in Real-time, and you select commands to attack, each having their own cooldown period before you can use them again. Timing your attacks to attack your opponent before they can attack you cancels their attack leaving them vulnerable.
Like most JRPG’s an MP gauge stops you abusing the stronger attacks although this leads to one of Ni No Kuni’s biggest problems. Your AI teammates will happily abuse their stronger MP draining abilities, particularly Esther, to the point where they will soon be left with nothing. This becomes a problem with boss fights where towards the end you will be relying on their healing skills only to find they have no MP.
What’s more annoying is that their MP isn’t displayed on your HUD, which makes maintaining control of your party more difficult than it should be. Add to that the low frequency of MP recovery items and their high cost in the store means you have to carefully monitor your teammates MP frequently.
NNK’s other problem is how it handles monster collection. Unlike Pokémon monsters are caught by serenading them with a song. This can only be done when a monster is impressed by you skill. This is shown by hearts being displayed, but the frequency this happens is too low. Even when fighting the weakest enemies the ability to capture monsters become a test of luck and patience rather than skill.
On the plus side the Dungeons are a nice length and the side quests are really good. It is also probably the best use of Cel-shading so far only not as big a jump as it was to see Tales of Vesperia for the first time. The soundtrack is only merely adequate with only the boss theme being a stand out track.
Ni No Kuni is a lot of fun to play but it does have some problems. The way your Teammates burn through MP is a constant worry and a patch to increase the monster capture rate wouldn’t go a miss. The world is beautifully presented and full of life, with a good number of side quests to compliment the nicely paced main quest.
But above all Ni No Kuni shows not only is a full 3D Pokémon possible but offers it’s own way of handling things which I hope is inspiring Game Freak for future Pokémon games.
8/10
posted by Master hunter at 1:56 pm
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