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If I’m really going to embrace my earlier talking point- “It’s more fun to mention the things a game does wrong than the things it does right”, then Ni No Kuni gives me a bunch of things to mention.  These are things that you have read about if you had any interest in the Level-5 RPG released exclusively for the PS3.  The battle system for one, horrendous.  The story, shallow.  The Pokemon-esque collectathon, pointless.  The setting, somewhat evocative, but cloying.  Maybe I made that last one up.  Maybe I have no child-like wonder left.  The game is for babies, after all, right?  Wasn’t that the main criticism?

Ni No Kuni is a good RPG, probably a little better than Tales of Graces f.  I’m wracking my brain, but I can’t seem to think of any other PS3 exclusives that might enter the equation.  That doesn’t mean there aren’t any; I just don’t know if they left much of an impression on me.  I’ll remember a bunch of things about Ni No Kuni well after I leave it in my dust- the pretty storybook graphics, its unique fairy-tale world and cartoonish fairy-king character Mr. Drippy.  I’ll remember the Wizard’s Companion, a honking datalogue cum tutorial cum inventory checklist cum fills-out-the-world comic book cum decoder ring that the game throws at you and says “Look at this if you want, but you might not get all you can out of the game if you don’t”.  It’s pretty humongous- I think it has over 200 pages of descriptions, annotations and illustrations, giving most of the game’s pertinent information alongside cute and clever scrawls that can be deciphered for little easter eggs.  It’s thoughtful and apropos to the title’s whimsical setting, a wonderful addition to a game that is trying to manufacture atmosphere.  You can even buy a hard copy (probably leather-bound or something suitably evocative) online for like $150.  The fact that I looked for the damn thing on Amazon is a testament to my immersion in the game. 

Can't Complain about the game's presentation.

But none of that is any fun to read about, right?  Most of us knew from the major reviews whether or not this was the type of game we wanted to play.  This isn’t going to tip the scales one way or the other for you.  So let’s just get down to what’s shit.

Ni No Kuni has perhaps the worst computer AI I have ever encountered, relative to the year in which it was released.  This was a 2013 title, it came after Xenoblade Chronicles and Final Fantasy XII.  I mention that, because those are two games in which I was similarly unable to control every action of every party member, and never once during the playing of those two games did I want to fly to Japan and beat the shit out of the developers for subjecting me to such easily-remedied frustrations.  Why do my computer-controlled teammates spam defensive magic and speed boosts, wasting literally all of their MP within two fights after leaving a town?  Why do they fail to heal even when set to “Keep my party healthy”, and even after I’ve disabled every single other spell save those that restore HP?  Why do my stupid critters run into each other, exhausting their allotted attack time attempting to navigate each other’s circumferences?  My main attack monster will make a bee-line for his intended target, only to run smack into my other’s character’s fat familiar as he runs in the opposite direction.  Who knows what the hell the fat familiar was trying to do; mostly he just gets caught on my own character on the way to whatever rendezvous he had planned.  I don’t mean to be sexist, as some of the monsters you will capture and train certainly seem to be female.

You know your battle system is a bit busted when victory’s best strategy is, “Hope your other characters die before they waste their magic points, and then solo the remaining enemies.  Also, hope the enemies don’t cast instant death.  Also, hope that your main character’s familiar doesn’t run out of stamina or turn to stone.  Also, hope that if you are fighting a boss, that your other characters will listen to your command to dodge or defend, so they don’t die.  Also, hope that…..”.  There’s a lot of hoping involved there, and though I’m exaggerating just a little bit, the battles really are pretty infuriating.  As you may have figured out from my mini-rant, they are half turn-based, and half real-time.  It’s a strange mix that doesn’t really work, as you never have true control over what occurs in the battle, and they system does not reward skill.  Sure, if you time jamming the action button just right, you might get some crappy bonus, but the risk isn’t worth the reward, as battles are more expedient if you just spam attacks and eat a pizza pocket while watching the chaos unfold.  Of course, in addition to the lack of real control over your main character, this real-time element comes with the sacrifice of control over your other two party members, often resulting in the aforementioned clogged battlefield and other unintentionally frustrating hijinks.

It gets worse.  As mentioned earlier, the friendly AI s atrocious.  The computer will have your party members casting “attack up” and “magic defense” during battles against enemies who have no spells and cannot be damaged by physical attacks.  Sometimes the female character will spend an entire battle attacking a single enemy with her harp, an action that results in literally one damage per shot.  You can “customize” party AI by choosing one of four or five options; spoiler alert, none of them even come close to being acceptable.  If you set them to “do what you want”, they will have physical characters draining MP (which is shared by familiar and host, so by extension, this drains the host of any MP) and magic characters running in circles while trying to attack.  Set it to “keep us healthy” and watch your main character’s HP fall to zero as your healers sit around casting pointless support spells.  Most of the time you have to set them to “Don’t do a goddam thing”, and they still mess that up, managing somehow to get in your way and disrupt the flow of battle.  It’s utterly baffling, and the programming code seems to prioritize nonsensical action over any sort of logical attack plan. 

Compound these frustrations by other little niggles present in the battles.  When an enemy casts a spell, the action pauses and the camera focuses on the baddie as a short animation plays.  This animation will interrupt any action your character was attempting, forcing you to input the command again.  What’s worse is that many actions are set to a timer- you cannot just spam spells or items, you must wait for a meter to recharge each time you cast or use.  If your character is stopped in mid-action by an enemy attack, the game forces you to wait for the recharge timer, even if you didn’t get the spell or item off before the animation.  This may seem trivial, but it was literally the cause of my party’s death on the final boss of the game after whittling his hitpoints down to about two percent after a fifteen minute battle that followed two other ten minute battles.  The boss used his big attack, forcing me to bust out my ultimate “heal-all” item right afterward.  I set my party’s orders to defend, and took the two seconds required to scroll over to my bag to use the tonic.  While my idiot main character’s item animation played, the boss followed up with another big attack.  Of course, my party chose this moment to ignore orders (which shouldn’t have surprised me, as they often fail to defend, even when told explicitly to do so), resulting in two corpses and my protagonist with fewer than 100 HP.  As the attack knocked my character down, I sat on my couch with a feeling of dread while waiting for my character to rise, only to see that his item recharge meter had reset.  In the intervening second, while waiting for that fucking item command bubble to light up and indicate availability, the boss raced over and finished him off with a physical attack.  I had absolutely no control over the situation.  I had an overlevelled party and had input all commands that would have ensured victory.  I had attempted to heal when needed, and even ordered my party to defend the boss’ attack.  I was done in by the crappy battle mechanics and nothing else.  Unacceptable.

This guy will spend a lot of time running in circles.

So the battles are the main thing, but they are not the only thing. The story is nothing to speak of.  It starts off promising, with a family tragedy that cuts deeper than most of the kind, and the simple fantasy trappings of a traditional fairy-tale world.  There are hearts beings stolen and an evil witch and a desert town with desert people and a dragon and insert RPG cliché here.  By the end, the boss was once again talking about the darkness in people’s hearts and how she wants to destroy the world because it is imperfect and all that common RPG fluff.  After I defeated her, my ten-year-old protagonist was like “the human heart prevails, blah blah blah, you have to live and see the joy in the world and blah blah we forgive you and let’s be friends even though you literally just killed thousands of people in the last cutscene.”  And the boss, who had just spent thousands of years in a self-pitying, solitary hate cocoon that left her devoid of all humanity, was like “Oh, I see your point.  Yeah, the world is pretty cool.  Let’s go swim in a mountain stream or see the wonder in a child’s eyes right after we finish off this eleventh hour threat together.”  There was also a ghost ship in there somewhere, for those of you who thought there’d be a single RPG trope unplumbed. 

I can forgive a generic story if the game is rich in atmosphere, and I suppose Ni No Kuni has atmosphere.  It’s supposed to be a fairy tale brought to life, and the visuals and audio do good jobs of making you feel like you are playing some throwback cartoon.  Everything and everyone is quaint, and the dialogue is kept intentionally simple and pointed as to deliver whatever moral the fable was attempting to get across.  Characters have names like Little Timmy Stout and Cassiopeia and Doodle Doo and Carnivorous Rex.  There is a town called Ding Dong Dell, and another called Yule.  Guess which one is the Christmas-y town?  Enemy names are all puns, some of which are amusing, most of which go the way of every other pun- eye rollingly vomit-inducing.  Seriously, I’m all for a little bit of whimsy here and there, but if you can interact with a character named “Little Timmy Stout” without wanting to punch a kitten in its cute little face, then I guess you are a less jaded gamer than I. 

A lot of my frustration with this game comes from what I believe to be its wasted potential.  You have this humongous Wizard’s Companion that tells fantastic stories to flesh out the setting, and yet the world consists of five towns and about ten dungeons.  The towns are all roughly the same size, and the dungeons get no more challenging as the game progresses.  You are given a massive array of spells, half of which serve absolutely no purpose throughout the entire game, and a bunch of others that are used only once or twice.  You have a bridge spell that allows you to cross land gaps, but it can only be used at select hotspots.  You can take the essence from a person’s heart to give to another, but only when the game says you can.  There are hundreds of people in need of assistance for whom you can perform various tasks, but these tasks are all variations on classic fetch quests.  There is absolutely no freedom to explore the boundaries of the game world- everything is spelled out as plainly as can be, and while it appears you have all these options, you are actually more confined than in many games of the like.

There's a ton of spells; you'll only use a fraction of them.

I know that this game is supposed to be a throwback, and it’s intentionally simple or evocative of simpler times, but dammit does the whole thing feel manufactured!  I give it points for setting and presentation.  As a matter of fact, one of its saving graces (in my book) was how it often reminded me of one of my favorites, the extremely similar (for good reason, considering the creators) Dragon Quest VIII.  I’m all for following a well-set guideline to mine genuine emotion by evoking great titles of the past, but could Level 5 do anything with the formula?  Could it stray from the script even the slightest bit?  I suppose if it did, it wouldn't achieve those critical levels of whimsical nostalgia that appeal to those whose hearts are still full of wonder.  But pshaw to all that!  The game is worth playing, if only to experience a true JRPG that will remind you of other great JRPGs.  It seems that the power of the human heart prevailed in the end, as it always does.  

OVERALL SCORE: (31/40) Fairly Good Tale