Ni no Kuni: The Wrath of the White Witch is a PS3-exclusive RPG developed by Level-5. Level-5 has essentially earned their reputation in Japan by making beautiful games and engines, and then they have a tendency to have oddly-designed mechanics or odd pacing in terms of battling/questing. If they do seem to hit big the first time, then they’ll create a sequel to it. My general impression was that Ni no Kuni looked like a visual spectacle— Studio Ghibli movie that you could play—thus the insurmountable interest in it. I thought it looked fantastic when we started seeing images for the DS version and the PS3 version. However, my interest slowly waned as we saw footage of the battle system. The battle system, even in pre-release footage, looked as though it was incredibly passive and one-note.
I generally give every RPG I can get my hands on a shot, so I did so with Ni no Kuni. While some people felt that the game was great at the beginning and lost its direction the further you got into it, I actually never felt like I liked it when I first started playing it. I felt like everything was too slow. Not in terms of pacing, because that beginning is what I’d expected, but in terms of design.
Ni no Kuni squanders all of its goodwill in terms of having Studio Ghibli-quality animation and character design, excellent visuals, and a Joe Hisaishi soundtrack by having bland game design and horrible execution. Long story short, if you’re looking for a game with a narrative that isn’t completely melodramatic and a game with a large world to explore, then yes, go ahead and play Ni no Kuni. You’ll more than likely enjoy it despite its numerous flaws. But if you’re looking at an RPG in terms of its systems, how cohesive they are, and good/interesting combat mechanics, you will more than likely be disappointed with what the game has to throw at you. The game would be decent if it weren’t bogged down by several different aspects and issues that make it less-than-stellar.
Ni no Kuni stars Oliver, a plucky—but incredibly clueless—13-year-old boy who falls into a depression after a tragic accident claimed the life of his mother. His tears awaken a doll in his room, which suddenly springs to life and reveals that he is a fairy with a delightful Welsh accent from another world. He is then whisked away to a magical land where he encounters gigantic trees, pig tanks, and pirate cats. The world itself is a sight to behold, as the visuals are incredibly fantastic, reminiscent of a Studio Ghibli film. But visuals and the lack of melodrama in the narrative are not enough to keep this scenario afloat.
Ni no Kuni has a myriad of pacing problems. There are many RPGs that share this issue, but it simply stuck out like a sore thumb in Ni no Kuni because of the way the game is designed. While the game begins in Ding Dong Dell where you must mend the King’s broken heart in order to strike up a conversation with him, this is okay because the game is just explaining base mechanics to the player. But when the entire game is composed of this, it simply becomes repetitive and poorly paced. Every single thing you do in the game is always going to be bogged down by an extra fetch quest. You need to apply for an audience to talk to certain dignitaries, but there’s something wrong with them so you have to fix that, then talk to them (and maybe solve another issue). As such, I don’t feel like the game respects the player’s time at all. It simply feels like it throws quests at you for the sake of throwing quests at you as opposed to making them feel especially meaningful.
Part of the problem is due to the dialogue. While I love Richard Honeywood’s (Xenogears, Final Fantasy IX, etc.) localization and the various speech quirks that the characters have, there isn’t a lot of things that could have been done to alleviate the fact that the dialogue spoonfeeds you, and there’s a lot of dialogue said during these bits. Simple game concepts and narrative concepts are explained to you at length, the plot elements are incredibly simple to figure out and even then, these elements are explained to you a few minutes thereafter. Drippy consistently tells you everything you need to do, even during boss battles. This makes narrative scenes, sidequest content, and even boss battles drag on (because you have to wait for the animation to go through so that Drippy can tell you how to gain an upper hand against the boss even though you’re already doing that). It feels like half the time you’re discussing how to save people and fix their hearts as opposed to spending more time actually doing it. This, in effect, creates poor pacing and wastes the player’s time. Even RPGs geared towards children like Keroro RPG don’t even do this.
Towards the end, the game moves into a phase that I like to call the “Direct to DVD” fraction of the game. The original DS game ended at a certain point that feels perfectly fine because the big bad was taken care of for good. The PS3 version haphazardly tacks on a final act that doesn’t even seem like it should be there, and simply seemed to have been tacked on to extend the game even further past the point where I felt that it had outstayed its welcome. I also feel as though Oliver’s companions don’t get that much growth after they join the party. These characters never feel like a band of brothers and sister. They just seem to be there for the sake of being a party of three for battles. Their bond of friendship just doesn’t feel very genuine because there is little room for growth between the three.
Level-5 decided to go into a direction where they introduce game mechanics and menu options several hours into the game when you could have used them much earlier. You are not able to open your menu and check your stats until after you get your first familiar (a few hours into the game!). Even after you get your menu option, you do not get all of the menu options available to you as the game makes you acquire different menus hours into the game (ex: alchemy, familiar rearing, etc). You cannot begin capturing familiars until 6-10 hours into the game. Despite getting another party member 6-10 hours into the game, you cannot issue commands like All-Out Defense/Attack which have a better chance of actually working over the general and utterly sub-par AI options already available to you. Other things that would make travelling throughout the world and dungeons better such as Vacate, Travel, and Veil are not available to you earlier on in the game when you need it. Oliver’s walking speed is too slow even when you increase it later, so travelling the world map takes such an exorbitant amount of time earlier on prior to getting the Travel spell. While this isn’t much of a problem in other RPGs which have a world map emphasizing scale, in Ni no Kuni sometimes you’re required and/or encouraged to backtrack often to previous continents. If Oliver walked faster or if the Travel spell were given to you earlier or on a level-up basis, this wouldn’t be much of an issue. But it wastes so much time.
Even some of the spells function strangely. Some spells act specifically when you speak to a person, or there are other spells that are AoE but they’re timed. There is a spell called Nature’s Tongue which allows the user to speak to animals, for instance. In an area where there are tons of animals strung about to speak to, you must cast the 2 MP spell each and every time you engage in conversation with an animal. This game has AoE field spells, so I’m not completely sure why this wasn’t implemented for this spell at all. Additionally, some field spells like Chart Chests, Levitate, and Magic Lamp expend MP per use. But while they’re AoE fields spells, they only take effect for a limited time. In a dungeon where you need to see where you’re going in the case of Magic Lamp, having to cast it every time it runs out is a nuisance, especially when you’re spending MP during battles. It’s a complete hassle.
While you backtrack to previous continents, you will be a higher level and enemies will generally run away from you. There are some enemies, though, whose behaviours just force them to chase you around despite the fact that you are overlevelled. Because Oliver walks/runs so slowly, it’s hard to dodge these enemies, so you’re forced to fight these enemies for a period of time which you could have used to do something else. The game’s solution to this is to give you a Veil spell to prevent enemies from seeing you, but you unfortunately get it 20-30 hours into the game as part of a side quests. The game’s balance is built around some sidequests in that you have an easier time if you actually do them, and that’s something I’d like to commend the game for if it weren’t for the fact that the rest of the game was designed in such a faulty manner. Doing the sidequests ensures that you will backtrack to previous continents no matter what, so you need to do the quests for the sake of quests and also accomplish the quests for the sake of quests that the plot gives you in order to be able to go to the next game’s less-than-30-minute dungeon.
Dungeon design in this game is somewhat remarkably boring in terms of maps. They consist of corridors, branching corridors, and other areas that are just so easy to see. The maps—outside of one dungeon’s map—don’t do very many interesting things. There are a few gimmicks to the dungeon which I don’t necessarily dislike (ex: hex symbols being marked on the ground, poisonous areas, etc), but they don’t do anything as interesting as, for example, Final Fantasy IV did in terms of designing the dungeon for a certain level or skill. By the time you get to these dungeons, you have the sufficient tools to get through them, so they aren’t designed in terms of trying to test whether or not the player is strong enough to brave them by including design which would force them to have a spell to go through it. It’s just disappointing, really, because most spells are either simply handed out to you, or you have to do sidequests for them. It’d be great to have the player do appropriate (and meaningful) sidequests in order to design dungeons around a player’s aptitude for getting through the game.
Even the sidequests aren’t that great and they suffer from massive repetition. Generally, you’ll work for the same clients, finding their diaries or finding familiars for them. This is a nice attempt at a sidequest string, but it does it in a way where I find the side characters just plain unmemorable and I’m doing the same sort of quest for them as I did in the previous town. Compare that to something like Arc the Lad III where sidequest strings did have some sort of relevance for me, and I wasn’t always doing the same sort of quest for the same people all the time. It makes completing some sidequests just so incredibly boring, especially since the game spells out exactly what you need to do and where you need to go for it. There doesn’t involve any sort of critical thinking on the player’s part because everything is spoonfed to you! The final quest is also particularly insulting to the player, having to retrace every step they’ve made in the game in order to fight some of the most uncreative enemies imaginable. This is the very definition of “quests for the sake of quests”. It simply doesn’t make me as a player feel as though the quests are worth doing because there’s little attachment to the quests in the first place outside of filling out merit cards and getting rewards for these quests in general.
Even for sidequests, the game has a tendency for massive repetition across the board. Ni no Kuni emphasizes fixing people’s broken hearts. They can lack courage, ambition, love, belief, etc. Oliver has a locket where he may keep certain attributes after casting Take Heart in order to cast Give Heart to the appropriate person. It’s not a bad mechanic, but when it seems like half of the sidequests are dedicated to this, and most of the time the donor and receiver are in the same town, the quests themselves just seem so repetitive. There are so many text boxes to go through, and then you can’t just cast Give Heart to give the person the quality they need; you need to talk to them and wait for Drippy to give you the prompt for it when this aspect is unnecessary. It takes up too much of the player’s time for something so repetitive.
Extending from that, this game has a very specific formula which it follows. Every time you go to a new town, the leader or dignitary is brokenhearted. You need to fight a boss/go back to Motorville in order to get rid of most of his brokenheartedness. Then you need to find an attribute in which the leader is lacking in. But surprise! The person who helped you 5 minutes ago has what you need, so you need to cast Take Heart on them. Then you talk to the cured leader, get what you need to get, and then head to a dungeon to grab something. Then you go to the next town to repeat the process. This process occurs to introduce you to each of the 8 attributes, so it certainly gets tiresome by the 8th attribute.
Ni no Kuni outlives its welcome due to its repetitiveness and pacing. But can this be saved by a decent battle system? The battle system is probably the worst thing about the game! You have a party consisting of three characters, and can only assume control over one of them. Each party member has three familiars that they can control. The party member can either fight the enemy themselves, or use a familiar to fight. Familiars can fight as long as they have stamina, and they must switch them out prior to running out of stamina otherwise they’d just do 1 damage to the enemy. Every character shares HP/MP with their familiars. That’s perfectly fine and I don’t have an issue with that, provided that the AI programming is adequate.
Well, guess what?
The AI is completely incompetent. The AI is completely unable to do what you want it to do, even when you’ve told them to do what you want them to do whether it’s via the meagre AI options that the game gives you, or whether it’s by using All-Out options. I’ve seen characters go through their MP like candy using offensive spells when I’ve set them to healing priority. I’ve seen characters not defend when I’ve told them to All-Out Defend. I’ve seen characters switch familiars while their current familiar is in the middle of casting a spell? What in the world did Level-5 create here? It’s such a mess. A beautiful mess. You can only change tactics in-battle and while controlling one of the characters (ie: you cannot change tactics options while controlling a familiar; you may only do it when you go back to controlling one of the kids).
Even then, they don’t seem to prioritize familiar use very well. When you give people familiars intended to support or cast healing spells, or to stay far away and cast ranged attack spells, you can be guaranteed to see the user using their familiar as a physical attacker and use melee attacks against an enemy for 1 damage! Or sometimes, they won’t use their equipped familiars at all (despite being the genuses they like to use), and fight enemies themselves for 1 point of damage each shot. It’s not so bad when Swaine does it because he can steal and cast status effects, but when Esther does it, you wonder why because she’s mostly a support character. It says something when I feel like Final Fantasy XIII’s CSB is more adequate than Ni no Kuni’s excuse for a battle system that relies on character synergy. Ni no Kuni does nothing that CSB actually does right.
Because the AI simply inefficient at doing its job properly, you’ll have to do every single thing yourself. Either that’s by controlling Oliver only, or it’s by switching between characters and controlling their options manually. Essentially, nothing about the game’s battles is hard. They’re easily doable with one character doing everything while the other two are acting as bait, but that’s not exactly what perfect party synergy is for! It makes battles last much longer than they should, which means you aren’t efficiently taking care of the enemy, and you’re mostly wasting time trying to fix the mistakes of your party members, gulping down cappuccinos/coffee in order to keep casting spells, or drinking potions to recover HP yourself since Esther’s stupid and uses her MP on things that don’t matter.
That’s merely one fraction of what’s wrong with the battle system, though. The combat itself is rather terrible. Level-5 decided to go with an action-based/TB hybridization for Ni no Kuni. Being able to run around the battle arena—sometimes not even having enough room for yourself—doesn’t really seem to serve a purpose outside of dodging an attack. It doesn’t provide much of a strategic offensive advantage for your player. Sometimes it even detracts from that because of party collision issues (ie: sometimes familiars get in the way of each other from attacking, and one of them misses their attacks half the time because two of them are aiming at the same place).
There are even odd times in terms of attack order. When you finish a round of doing anything in battle, you have to wait a cooldown time. That’s fine, though sometimes I feel like it’s too lengthy. Sometimes you may find a golden sphere on the battlefield. These golden spheres allow you to execute strong “limit break”-like moves. Whenever you catch one, you or your familiar with take time to charge up an attack and release it. But sometimes there may be a case where your timing is substantially off, and an enemy ends up charging his attack before you finish charging yours. Sometimes your attack gets cancelled. Sometimes your attack doesn’t. It’s haphazard, and I wish it wouldn’t be so random.
Now then, Ni no Kuni has a Pokemon aspect to itself. Each Familiar has an element associated with it, and an element that they’re weak against. Usually in Pokemon, when a Pokemon is aligned to a certain element, they are incredibly good at those elemental attacks. Not so much here. Sometimes if they’re a wind elemental, they’ll suck with their wind element attacks. Additionally, Ni no Kuni’s familiars come with other signs that denote the type of Familiar it is (Sun-type, Star-type, Moon-type, and Planet-type). Sun/Star/Moon function like RPS, so you have to keep that in mind when forming your familiar parties, too. And then you have genuses, and the kids like using certain particular genuses in their parties because that’ll increase their stats by a bit. Finally, familiars have different growth patterns, but the game flat-out doesn’t tell you what that is (even FF13-2 tells you about that stuff!).
Catching familiars is chance/percentage-based, but sometimes it feels completely random. Sometimes the chances are so slim that you’ll be fighting dozens of battles in order to catch one silly thing for a sidequest. This is where I would have appreciated a Pokemon-like simplicity: weakening an opponent and then when they’re weak, Esther plays her harp. That’s it. None of this time-consuming and insipid capture method that simply wastes the player’s time.
Familiar-rearing isn’t too bad. Each familiar has a type of food that they love a lot. You can raise their stats if you feed them food, and if you feed them their favourite food, the attribute that that food is associated with will raise more than normal. They will also have increased familiarity as well. The problem is with evolution. Because you don’t know growth patterns for certain familiars, you might pick the evolution that doesn’t yield proper stats. Though you might run into a case where you don’t have enough of the special stones to evolve your creatures, period. Many of the familiars seem to be associated with the Star affinity, but you’ll have to craft Jumbo Stardrops yourself, which means you’re wasting time finding alchemy materials in the wilderness to do that (and refreshing the area in order to cultivate more of those materials).
But in the end, it kind of doesn’t matter. Many of the end bosses don’t have these sort of affinities, and when it comes to elemental qualities, Oliver can take care of that himself with Light spells, and two accessories that boost his attack power no problem. I never got that one familiar that apparently broke the game for everyone, but even in my case, the game became incredibly easy just dealing with it as one character and letting my party members be the bait. There’s little to no strategy involved in attacking the enemy. Positional damage doesn’t matter. Moving away from the enemy to get out of his AoE range is okay, but outside of that (and gathering little balls that restore your HP/MP/allow you to use a special attack), I don’t see any need for the movement at all. It merely slows down the pacing to me because of the flaws in the system.
Alchemy is something that I didn’t really care for here. I love alchemy in other games like the Atelier games and the Dragon Quest games. Here, it’s introduced a little late in the game (6-10 hours in), but I don’t feel like the game handled it right. You get recipes for certain items when you do sidequests. But sometimes you can mix and match ingredients until you make something nice. Even if you mixed and matched successfully, that recipe is not stored in your alchemy book, which seems odd.
On the flipside, the game looks great. Level-5 tends to craft games with excellent art design. The background art is fantastic, though I wish the camera weren’t pulled back so far at times because I could barely see a thing sometimes (and this kept happening on the world map because I couldn’t see some enemies or places to land with my flying transportation). It’s just a shame that the game doesn’t put any of these backdrops to proper use in terms of interactivity. They’re just hubs for sidequests, and there’s probably only one or two towns that I feel appropriately demonstrate the fact that they are not merely setpieces for you to get quests in.
The music’s great. Joe Hisaishi has composed a wonderfully-bombastic score worthy of being in yet another Studio Ghibli film, played by the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra. Some of the music is rather Suikoden-esque like the map theme and the Ding Dong Dell music, which warmed my heart a little. With that said, I wish some themes would have looped properly like the battle theme. Instead of looping, it comes to a conclusion, and then restarts from the very beginning. For a game as visually and musically-polished as this, this is just rather jarring to hear, and I wish more care had been put into looping tracks properly. I also with the soundtrack were longer, because there is a case of theme repetition. Sometimes you hear the same music over and over, making some BGMs lose their lustre over time.
Ni no Kuni is a beautiful game and it sounds fantastic. But for every good thing it does in terms of visuals, its localization, and its music, the game mechanics simply leave much to be desired. These mechanics and flaws can easily be mended if a little more time and work had gone into their design. It’s difficult to look past these flaws when they crop up time and time again, and also when they’re so plentiful. While the game had so much potential, it’s just so inconsistent and simply doesn’t live up to the charm it has with its presentation. There are too many problems with its battle mechanics, its synthesis mechanics, its capture mechanics, its pacing, repetition, and its abhorrent AI. If you’re willing to overlook that for a game that’s packed with content (even if the content may be unlikeable to some) with a world map, great visuals, and a lighthearted adventure, go for it. Otherwise, if you’re going into this for an experience with tight battle mechanics and decent game design and pacing, I wouldn’t bother with it.
