How far did you get: Completed the game, finished all errands and bounty hunts that I am aware of, including post game
Due to this, reviewing Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is challenging for me. It very well may be the one and only good jrpg on this generation of consoles, so I'm a bit worried I'm going to oversell it, or I might just think it's better than it actually is. I've seen many reviewers take the hard route and come to conclusion that maybe Ni No Kuni is not quite as good as the fun time they are having indicates. I'm not taking that route. Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is one of the best games I've played in years.
Let's start with how the game looks. Ni No Kuni is easily in my top five best looking console games of the PS3/Xbox 360 console generation. The game itself is developed by Level 5, a company known for it's incredible looking cel shaded graphics (see: Dragon Quest VIII and Rogue Galaxy). In addition to this, the animated sequences are done by the popular animation studio Studio Ghibli, responsible for animated films such as Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle. Stuido Ghibili's animation is as beautiful as ever, and Level 5 does a fantastic job of making the in game graphics live up to their standard. The world presented here is much more colorful and vibrant than most games released these days. The character models are all well done too, though I do question what they were thinking with Drippy. As the most lovable character in the game, he is a bit plain looking.
Ni No Kuni doesn't have the most in depth or complicated story, but it isn't a bad one. In fact, I was relieved to play a jrpg where I didn't have to rack my brain trying to figure out what is going on. It's a simple tale of a boy who is drug into a fantasy world in an attempt to save his mother. You'll find yourself moving yourself through lots of jrpg tropes, such as a forest level, a fire level, a water level, etc. Not exactly the most creative choices, but it does give you a shot of nostalgia for the old days of jrpgs. You'll also find that the game is quite long. I thought I had finished it twice before I actually did. You can probably run through the story in about 40 hours, though it took me 63 to do the story and side quests. A platinum trophy would likely run you 80-100 hours.
The few issues I have with the game come in the gameplay, particularly regarding the battle system. The battle system plays like a cross between Pokemon, a Tales of game, and a little Final Fantasy XIII thrown in as well. You'll do a lot of your fighting by capturing the creatures you fight, called familiars, and using them to fight for you. Annoyingly, capturing a familiar isn't like capturing a Pokemon. The familiars will fall over with hearts over their heads at complete random, and you can serenade them into joining you. The randomness of it makes it so you don't really get to choose what you're capturing unless you fight in that area over and over until happens, and that sucked. The familiars all come with particular strengths and weaknesses, and you can equip them with weapons, armors, and skills. All of this seems to work pretty well. What didn't work too well was when I was about 3/4s through the game, my main character learned a lot of really powerful magic and I rarely used my familiars with him anymore. It made it feel like all the work I had put into leveling my familiars was all for nothing. Another frustrating aspect of the battle system was it's connection to Final Fantasy XIII. The battles continue moving while you're trying to shuffle through menus, and it was pretty aggravating most of time. Several times during the game, I needed to defend but could not shuffle through the menu fast enough to do so. There were a few buttons on my controller that could have been used to instantly defend, but this was not taken advantage of. You do have an "all out defend" button, but that doesn't work on the character you are controlling. I know this seems like a lot of complaints, but it's really not horrible. With the exception of scrolling through menus in active battles, nothing else about it is broken and it's still fun most of the time.
Outside of battle, the gameplay was much better. It has it's own version of fetch quests, but generally they're tied to their own fun little story. Thanks to the game having such a lovable cast a characters, doing these quests was a lot more fun. It also gives you the ability to take emotions and character traits from a non playable character that has more than they need, and give that emotion to another person that is in short supply of it. This was a really simple mechanic and could have been fleshed out a bit better, but it was still fun to do. The bounty hunts are a lot of fun and a good challenge, as well.
Ni No Kuni is the best jrpg of this console generation without question. If you like jrpgs and own and Playstation 3, you must purchase this game. Don't let the childlike appearance of it turn you away. The game can get dark and it's much too good for you to pass up for such a silly reason, tidy?
Rating: 90/100
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