Ni No Kuni - Pokemon Ghibli

[Dracos]

Mmm, it seems a proper time to let that disk stop spinning.

A right six hundred hours ago I put in this strange game (Time in system, not playtime), drawn by the artists at Ghibli and constructed by the developers at Level 5 on the Dragon Quest 8 engine, it is considered one of the darlings of early 2013 and a rare traditional sight.  I guess anyway :)  More importantly, it is a team up between two great teams to bring to life an incredible world.  So how did they do?

Well, for the first part, the game comes in three phases, telling the story of Young Oliver and the Dark Djinn, Young Oliver and the White Witch, and Young Oliver and the Conductor.  The first of the three is by far the most well put together part and the world was largely woven around it as it was the entirety of the original DS game, which tends to show in the next two parts as they feel more awkwardly stiched on top.  I'll definitely note that it's perfectly viable to end the story at the end of any of these sections in a satisfying way, and at the most, I would suggest ending it at the White Witch (Which is the proper end of the game where it plays the credits anyway) as the gameplay tends to start having issues afterwards.

Visually, the game is a Ghibli treat, with the art really coming through throughout the entirety of the experience.  While I think they made a poor choice in having pretty much all non-boss monsters comparable in size to a 10 year old child, the monsters and characters of the world are colorful, interesting, and lively and generally it is another excellent example of the modern day capabilities to take hand drawn work and have it really come alive in a 3d playable world.

Narratively, the game is fairy-tale styled, with pulling most of its punches and an unwillingness to really commit to actual on screen villains being wrong or punished.  It's cute and enjoyable, but lacking a spark that would really allow it to stand well on its own two-feet by writing quality.  Simply, it's a story suitable for children more than an impactful fairy tale.  The characters play along with this, as the world largely acknowledges the protagonist as almost the only responsible or capable entity within the world.  Even the other playable characters or epic level sages are simply window dressing in a narrative sense.  They cannot win and often do not even participate in any event shaping the world.  For all their narrative dressings, it is Epic Hero in a world of mooks.  This wouldn't normally be a bad thing, except the game lampshades it too much, for instance indicating that all of the great sages were capable of dealing with one of the hardest challenges in the game, despite that it is throwing enemies at you fully capable of crushing many of the end game bosses and simultaneously having the characters act completely helpless in that regard.  Even the rest of the party (There's 3 other characters besides the main) acts completely helpless in the one instance in which the main is temporarily unavailable.  It can fairly be questioned if the story actually concludes in an ending message that resonates.  There are a few of them, and I don't think it really effectively ended in a way that clearly lays out a where things go from here or a solid feeling of closure.  This is strange given it does wrap up almost all of the threads it introduces.

One thing that does deserve poking is the Heartbroken mechanic introduced early and played with throughout.  The first villain is claimed to be causing people to lose parts of their heart, possibly to drive them to destruction or chaos or despair.  The hero goes around patching this with extra parts from other people's hearts.  It's a cool concept and fits well in the universe.  That said, there's little rhyme or reason to who gets heartbroken or for what reason.  Most of them are just sort of sitting in town and moping as a result, and some continual repeats get hit like 5-10 times, so it begs the question just why the powerful and mysterious villain is doing that which is not answered well at all.  The effect of it isn't really consistent either.  Some of them are simply written poorly to match up with the supposed emotion that they're missing.  Some have no issue with giving up part of their heart to help and others are clearly suffering from having too much of something and are saved by you taking it too.  That it handles everything in waves of emotion X or Y coming in big quest sweeps doesn't help either.  Overall, it seems like it went in there as a neat idea that wasn't thought through well.  Because of it, in practice, it's just a new variety of fetch quest.  "Get X from Y", with 4-5 people needing Y and 4-5 people needing Z each time.

Deserving of note by itself, It has one of the most fantastic in game lore and mechanics guides I've ever seen.  Truly a fantastic piece of work.  The Wizard's Companion is woven into the story, has rewarding benefits for reading it in as much as new recipes or hints or maps, and generally is a fantastic piece of mostly optional content.  It really does borderline render the use of the internet for additional information excessive.  Truly, it was a work of fantastic foresight and fantastic creativity.  It really is quite nice to see games with enormous piles of relevant information doing the effort to expose that optionally to the player at all times.

The game is a mixture of a traditional adventuring RPG and a pokemon game.  The small group of heroes moves town to dungeon to boss fight to town, righting wrongs and dealing with sidequests, but also collects the vast majority of encounters as recruitable monsters and fights in real-time battles.  It's based on the Dragon Quest 8 engine, and a lot of the strengths of it have been polished up.  There's lots of things to discover on the world map, resources to pick up, rare treasures to find, and the battles moves smoothly with colorful motion and animated monsters taking the stage.   The mapping system is more traditional and informative and the alchemy system is improved and instant compared to DQ8, but there's a lot of small touches that clearly show its heritage.

Sadly, perhaps the battle system itself is the second weakest part of the game.  As much as I do enjoy collecting things, especially optionally so, there are just serious problems with the core battle environment where this takes place.  Having seen pretty much every rough spot, I'm going to rant on them for a while. 

First of all, monsters have one of 3 types of 'guard' abilities (Technically there's a 4th but its so late in post game it doesn't matter).  Defend, Evade, and Psyche Up.  Due to the fact that all enemies and bosses of note have you play a defensive minigame to provide openings, avoid massive damage, and get special powerups, everyone that doesn't have Defend is crippled off the bat.  Evade can be used for those as well, but basically only Oliver's monster can have a chance of getting the timing right, because the controls for ordering it for your party members is just weak.  This means about 2/3rd of the monsters are handicapped in boss fights.  Sure some of them are ridiculously powerful so it doesn't matter, but mechanically, it's so important and that the system limits your option there based on type is brutal.  At the very least, every single character needs a monster that has strong defenses and can defend at all times.  Otherwise, they won't be able to play the defensive minigame in fights and they'll get mauled for it.

Each party member has 4 slots: Themselves and 3 monsters.  Each monster has a stamina bar that has to be maintained but the character can itself be put out there and has no limitations.  The intent is to encourage switching and also to let the player have a lot of abilities.  Problem?  99 percent of the time it is a pretty bad idea to have the character out, aside from abusing that Oliver is the most variable mage in the game.  Because of this, for the most part the use of the character abilities is awkward, and just generally it feels a weak part of the system.  Given that they give one fight before giving you a familiar, I would've just stacked the abilities of the main characters with their familiars.  It doesn't add much to have to swap them to use their spells or items and it just generally results in 80 percent of their abilities not having a good time to use (I could use switch to a character, rotate to spells, pick a spell, or...just use a monster's trick right now).

Pathing and AI during the battle is terrible.  One of the best 'defenses' enemies use is simply just having an enemy you're not targeting move in front of them.  Your characters have no sensible way of dealing with that and usually will get stuck and do nothing in that case.  Not even attacking the monster interfering.  The AI will simply spam away the entirety of their MP pool in a handful of battles.  Even if fighting things weak enough to be near instant finishers, its still a race against them using a super field attack and killing everything at massive MP cost.  The minimized move set list doesn't help them since it means that really they are often left with only one decent mp taking move, so it will be an expensive one.  Because of this, the game rigorously is encouraging to powerlevelers.  The clumsiness of the system becomes an irrelevant annoyance if you're strong enough to just handle it, where if you're actually a reasonable level, it can be really brutal.

The controls for giving orders or dealing with long sets of options suck.  Certainly, a lot of the battles are balanced with that in mind, but it'd be nice if wanting everyone to defend didn't require 3 button presses and then also having 2 of your party just sit there and wait the command out to have their normal AI take back over.  You have 2 quick team commands: All out Defend and All Out Attack.  Neither have a cancel while in progress option, aside from calling the other (and I think that has a cooldown).  Want a character to stay on healing when not doing the defend mini-game?  You've got to wait it out.

Capturing enemies seems sensible.  An enemy who would lose their last hp gets knocked away and the second character can recruit them then by using her harp.  Your allies generally won't attack the monster to give you time to chose.  Problem?  Well, aside from that it makes that character have a permanent party slot (She's the only one that can tame) and need to be alive to do taming, there's still several ways that this can fail: If you kill the last enemy and switch targets, you can end up attacking your new friend (killing them instantly).  If the game decides you don't switch targets when you decide to, same thing (That's a common bug that it won't switch even when you select a new target).  If any of your AI companions use a Field attack, instant death.  Basically, all things that could be mostly fixed by just making them invulnerable for a short bit while they're in Ready to be Tamed mode.

Moving on from the battle system...there's the raising system.  Some monsters, particularly rare ones, are better than others.  There's a lot of particulars about which monsters can do what.  For the positive: Almost any set provided enough levels can beat the entire game through to the credits (if  not the post game).  Bad?  There's just not enough information given.  A lot of the important parts of monsters aren't shown until you've sunk a lot of time into them.  Are they good?  Are they worthless?  Sure, you can find out, but it'd be nice to know if they had ranks, what spells they could learn, and where they tend to gain stats (Early, Normal, Late, Late Bloomer).  Since the differences between the strongest and weakest monsters at level 99 is about 500-600 stat points, its not an unimportant question either.  Some monsters are simply so much better that they alone could blow away entire teams.  Some monsters take outrageous amounts of XP to level or have shorter level caps.  All of this is something that's just invisible to the player not FAQing things.  When evolving, you get 10 percent of your current stats.  Therefore whether to sink another hour into a monster or not before evolving them is a really good question.  For an early riser, that's hardly ever wise.  For a late bloomer, every level could be a sudden sixty point gain.

Worse?  There's this convoluted feeding system.  It's a complete pain and major time sink.  And if it wasn't needed to unlock the last ability slot (giving 4 instead of 3 ability slots), it'd be a total waste of time since it only contributes between 2-4 percent of final stats for a monster.  It is a massive time sink and button mashing sink, and worse, not using the higher tier stuff only makes it longer and harder...but at no point in the game (not even in post) is making anything above tier 2 fast and convenient.  You get enough so that managing to get 6 monsters fully up is not a big deal.  But there are 200+ more.  And given experimentation is needed to find good ones, it's very frustrating that the feeding system is so poorly designed.

Anyhow, despite those complaints, it is a good game.  Just sadly, not a great one.  The atmosphere of it is truly strong and carries it well when its foundation remains pretty weak.  Just stay away from the post-game.  They unnecessarily make all of the top tier gear an outrageous grind to get and also make a quest to do just that.  Pretending you don't actually get to do all the quests or all the merit stamps is just the wiser move.

[Kt3]

Everything is spot on with my own experiences with the game.  Couple of things I'd like to note here though:

While I think they made a poor choice in having pretty much all non-boss monsters comparable in size to a 10 year old child,(...)

I think this was actually the right choice based on what they were trying to achieve.  Everything in the game just seems to be engineered towards 10-year-old children playing it (or thereabouts), with the general simplicity of the plot and character designs, as well as the overall mood.  So having common monsters be roughly the size you described I think resonates a lot more with younger players, because they will be identifying heavily with Oliver and crew - it should be a much more immersive environment for them.  Child psychology, basically, even though I'm nothing of an expert in the subject.

On another note, you didn't remark on the music whatsoever!  For shame, Dracos.

The music was gorgeous, really, and actually felt really matched with every aspect of the game.  Except for when you're battling, there it felt (much like a lot of the other things about the battle system) good, but it didn't quite click.  To reiterate, the battle music wasn't bad, but it just didn't seem to fit.  Maybe if it was more of a march?

[Dracos]

Mmm, the music was pretty nice.  I played so long I sort of started tuning it out.  It didn't make me want to rock to it, but that's just taste.