Recently a lack of press and sales of games in the JRPG genre for anything not called Final Fantasy has left many feeling like the genre has gone away or is lacking what it used to have. An RPG asks for more than most games do in wanting you to spend sometimes over a month playing one game. Is Ni No Kuni something that is worth spending that time away from other games?
In the game you play as Oliver a young boy who just like any kid lives a carefree life running around town with his friends in a perfect little American town. When his mother gets into an accident Oliver is left alone since his Dad didn’t care enough to stick around and the local authorities have no problem with an 8 year old living alone. Left with nothing but his life in ruins Mr Drippy a fairy with a welsh accent from a mysterious world appears telling Oliver he can bring his mother back by becoming a wizard. So the journey begins as you jump into a gateway to a brand new world.
The women don't even wear proper bikini's so fuck this game
As mentioned above the story is quite simple. Oliver must learn to become a wizard so he can bring his mother back. Sadly that’s the problem with the story and it lacks being an engaging epic story like many other RPG’s and doesn’t actually feel epic at all. You‘re told to go meet someone so that they can teach you some magic and after jumping over some obstacles to meet them they teach you a trick or two and give you the name of the next place or person you must go and see. The only time the story seems interesting is when we see the bad guys themselves rather than random enemies and dungeon bosses. It would have been nice to see more of them as they seem to only appear once every 5 hours and only feature heavily in the last few hours.
The main characters don’t do much to aid the story and are really rather boring. A few of them make good first impressions but soon fall back into just standing next to Oliver in cut scenes and pointing out the obvious. Conversations drag on for about 20 dialog boxes which consist of nothing more than maybe someone in town knows where we can find a key. When Mr Drippy first appears he oozes personality and charm but after 2 hours he becomes nothing more than a nodding head and being the third person to mention that maybe we should go to the next town. It may have helped a little if Oliver himself was a bit brighter but his role is to be confused by everything even when the player figured it out half an hour ago.
I thought drug trafficking was a strange side quest at first but it works
The worst people in the game are the NPC’s in town who need your help which makes up the side quests in the game. You will get the regular people who need you to go and find a hammer for them that they dropped in a cave or to deliver a letter but some are broken hearted. This is when a piece of their heart such as courage or ambition has been taken away and they walk around like mindless zombies. You need to go around town and find someone who has enough to spare so that you can share with the person who needs it. After doing this 50 times it gets pretty boring to listen to a guy who doesn’t have the ambition to tie his shoelaces anymore. I found myself skipping the dialog and waiting for the red highlighted word so I knew what I had to get.
Take away the NPC’s and you have a beautiful world. There where times when I would stop and think that in the distance was just a Studio Ghibi style drawing only to find I could go there. There’re 6 towns in the game which are all beautiful in their own right but it would have been nice to see more bright and colourful locations as after the halfway point of the game everywhere is very dark and drab.
Any game where you can name a creature Matt Damon is good with me
In this beautiful world are a kind of Pokemon animal which are called familiars which you capture and use in battle. Every member of your squad can equip 3 each to make a tag team system of 12 playable characters. Since you only control one character or familiar at a time you have to trust the AI with some instructions on what you want them to do. It’s pretty much impossible to get them to do exactly what you want leaving you a lot of the time as the only one with MP and not getting killed. A menu option like FFXII where you could give strict instructions outside of battle would have been much better and saved a lot of sighing and eye rolling. Outside of the battles the game lets you know when you’re ready for the next boss battle by enemies running away from you in the field. This takes away some tension that other JRPG’s have when you don’t if you have what it take to beat the boss, leading up to the boss you will walk through the dungeon like you own the place with enemies running at the first sight of you. The boss fights themselves feel a little silly as you control a small animal that would struggle to reach your knee with an even smaller sword as it fights a giant lava monster ten stories high that’s just climbed out of a volcano.
The music is something that is undoubtedly epic. Having surround sound makes it even more amazing as you walk over the bright green hills you feel like you have an orchestra in the room with you. One problem with the music is when it plays over some of the characters with masks making it sound like Bane if he had walked around with a violin player at all times.
I wouldn’t say Ni No Kuni is the thing to ‘save’ the JRPG genre as it falls short by quite a bit. It’s not a bad game but if someone was to ask for suggestions on games I would place it quite low on my list of suggestions even if it does offer 50+ hours of gameplay.
