Review: Ni No Kuni

Ever since I heard Level 5 and Studio Ghibli were teaming up to make a game, Ni no Kuni, I got ready to dust off my PS3 and spend a good 60-80 hours in an incredibly beautiful world with plenty of quests, monsters, and adventure.  I even got the Wizard's Edition that came with (among other things) a physical version of the Wizard's Companion found in the game and a Wizard's coin.  The game certainly did not disappoint.  As expected, the art of the game is beautiful - some cutscenes are hand drawn like any other Studio Ghibli movie, while most of them are in the cel shaded style of the gameplay.  I will admit it would have been nice to have more hand drawn cutscenes, but that's probably because I want to watch another Miyazaki movie.

Gameplay-wise, there is plenty to do just like every other Level 5 game.  If you focus on just the story, you may be introduced to all the types of optional aspects of the game after 5-10 hours.  Between helping people on random errands, hunting bounties, capturing, training, and metamorphing familiars, crafting items with alchemy, finding hidden treasure chests, and competing in a tournament, there is certainly a lot to keep you occupied.  Fortunately, the game does a good job of helping you keep track of these things.  People with errands or things to offer you highlight on the map.  Your journal is very clear about where to go next for every side quest.  Your Creature Compendium lets you know what familiars are in what habitat (once you've fought them there), so it's easy to tell if you've caught all the familiars in a given place.  There is also a progress report on most tasks to tell you how far through you are.

The game is not without its flaws, though.  During your adventure, you will find other companions to travel and fight with you.  Each person has three familiars to choose from at any time, but for some reason the other AI players never use all of their familiars.  They also have a tendency to charge enemies with the familiars that are weak but strong with magic and use up all their mana by obliterating weak enemies with their most powerful spells.  Sometimes I just could not understand why my teammates were as stupid as they were.  Also, anytime anyone casts a spell that affects multiple targets (or a lot of times when I told my familiar to cast anything), it interrupts every spell your team is casting.  So if you're trying to heal your nearly dead teammate and they decide to cast a mass target spell, chances are good they're going to die by the time you manage to pull that heal spell off.  Also, my previous post about Instant Death was caused mostly due to this game.  Not only do random normal enemies have instant death abilities (a lot of them in the last few areas of the game), but apparently some of them have that ability in a tournament where you're not allowed to use items.  Since items are the only way to bring people back from the dead, that means there's a chance that you could instantly get killed in a tournament with no way to defend yourself.   Other than that tournament example, though, it's not so bad because if you survive the combat, any previously dead teammates will be alive with 1 hit point so you can just revive them again.