Review: Ni No Kuni

I really don't know where to start. I have been waiting for Ni No Kuni to come out for a long time coming, even before seeing it at E3 last year. So when I say I'm satisfied with the game it doesn't mean there are no flaws to the game. It's really a love hate relationship, one minute I'll be enjoying the game and the next getting frustrated. My thoughts are a little all over the place, but hopefully I paint a good enough picture.

Positives

The thing that really got my attention when I first saw the game was the style. While there are a handful of games that share a similar look, none of them do such an incredible job as Ni No Kuni does. The visuals, along with the music in the game literally make you feel like you're playing a Studio Ghibli film. The soundtrack was written by Joe Hisaishi the man responsible for the soundtracks to most of the mainstream Ghibli films and the quality is fantastic. So in terms of looks and sounds, the game is extremely pleasing.

Even the plot itself is pretty standard Ghibli film, although Ni No Kuni get's pretty ridiculous at times. But overall the world that has been crafted is phenomenal. It's clear time has been taken to give the other world a lot of character and story. Just by looking at your magicians handbook this is apparent by the pages and pages of stories and detailed descriptions of all the familiars among other things. I found the plot to be quite refreshing because while the ending itself was fairly predictable, the route between was unexpected and fun.

Negatives

While I'd love to end it on that positive note, I have to discuss the game mechanics. There isn't a whole lot about the game mechanics that I can say is original, if anything. Ni No Kuni plays just like a generic JRPG, with the overworld exploring, enemies randomly populated and avoidable, down to the way it handles quests. Speaking of quests, there are a ton to complete but unfortunately they end up being extremely stale very quickly as they almost always devolve into the same basic types of quests.

There is a type of quest that involve restoring lost pieces of heart. This concept plays a fairly large role in the story overall, but the side-quests end up being almost pointless. I swear, you end up repairing the broken hearts of nearly every NPC in the game by the end. While I like the concept, I didn't like that literally half the time the person with the piece that you needed ended up being a few feet (at least on the same map) from the brokenhearted person. The fact that they are usually really close to each other makes the process more tedious than interesting. It probably would have been better if you could store multiple pieces of the same type and had the people with extra heart pieces spread out all throughout the land so you had to explore to find them all.

The other majority of quests involved defeating certain familiars and what not. There were a handful of unique quests, but it definitely felt like a chore by the end of the game to complete them all.
There's several things about the battle system that that really irk me as well. A lot of your battling can be done with familiars, or you can control the character themselves as they usually have some magic/abilities as well. There are a lot of things that are just done for you and it really bothers me. I don't understand why when I switch to another character and they have a familiar out, it instantly recalls that familiar. Just let me do it myself if I want to, what if I want that familiar out, now I need to throw it back out after it getting forced recalled.

Other things that were annoying about the battle interface include: Whenever a skill or spell get's cast with a quick cut-scene whatever selection I had selected in the action wheel would get reset to the start position (attack). You can assign roles for your currently uncontrolled player, but these roles reset after every battle. Any in battle cut-scenes from skills usually cancelled whatever action I was in the middle of performing, even when from teammates (such as, trying to cast a fireball, but teammate does another skill, come back from cut-scene and now I'm not casting fireball)!

I really despise the action wheel overall. I think the battle system would have been better off if they just assigned different actions to the 4 buttons like, Defend, Attack, Skills (whether it be magic, or tricks), and provisions. That way any action would be readily available as opposed to having to scroll through your actions with "trigger" buttons on the controller.

The overall interactions with people and objects was sometimes frustrating as well. I hate it when the game doesn't let you perform certain actions because it "isn't time yet". There was many a time I came across something and knew exactly what spell I should cast to read/open/do whatever on an object and it simply wouldn't let me or do anything because I "hadn't got to the right point". In certain circumstances I can understand this but it get's frustrating when every monument you come to you simply can't read because you're not doing that quest yet. And there's no cipher or anything that you're using to decode it, you just can't read it for whatever reason. I really disliked how the game would hold your hand as well. Many times an action could only be performed when the game "let" you do it. So you'd have to talk to someone and that would open your spell menu, as opposed to just letting me open my spell menu and choose what I should do.

A few other things: It bugs me that the game gives you spells that you can't actually use. That and the fact that a handful of spells that you are given are only used in maybe 2-3 cases. I don't like that there's really no challenge in knowing where to go next, even after turning off the guiding star the solution was usually really obvious.

Oh and, one word, Casino.

Familiars

The whole familiar and battle system is something akin to a real-time Pokemon battle. And with the sheer number of familiars that are in the game (400 I believe), that's not an unfair comparison. There is a ton of systems that go into the familiars and I feel like it's incredibly easy to not know what the hell you're doing. I'm pretty sure I have the worst familiar team lineup you possibly could. Playing on normal I found certain parts of the game to be incredibly hard, even after grinding a good amount and I fear this is because my team is horribly mismatched. This is a problem.

It'd be nice if the game gave you some indication as to how balanced your team and/or what you're missing or if you're under-leveled in an area. I would find that even in areas that I've cleared I would sometimes inexplicably lose to a random group of familiars that I'd beaten dozens of times before. Ironically I never had problems with bosses as they were predictable and block-able. But when you have multiple enemies and their battle interface isn't very friendly nor did it have quick response to input, it makes management a nightmare.

Honestly, I don't think they really needed to have 400 familiars in the game. You only end up with a handful of them and they kind of end up in the background anyways and are not an integral part of the story other than being used for battle.

Conclusion

Despite all the games shortcomings and frustrations it's still a game that I enjoyed. The characters were likeable, the story was interesting, the world was developed, the visuals were appealing, and the music is fantastic. Unfortunately, I feel the game has a myriad of problems that if fixed would have made the game to be much better. It may seem like the cons outweigh the positives but that's only because I was nitpicking a bit and had more to say on them. Still, Ni No Kuni is one of those games that is different and goofy and you should probably have it in your library or at least play it for the experience.

Update

Its been a while since the last post and well that's because I've been really busy. Well that and lazy. In other news I've moved up to Reno, Nevada, and will be starting to work at IGT. No idea what I'll be working, but they make slot machines, so pretty sure it'll have something to do with that. With that said, Reno is COLD. What worries me is that people I talk to that live up here say this is a mild winter. In all honesty though, its not that bad. The area is pretty nice, most everything was recently built and I'm rooming with a good friend from Full Sail. The pay is pretty good as well, so that's a plus. But I guess, I'll try to be updating here more often with game reviews or more stuff relating to the gaming industry or something.

Oh, and I'm going to GDC with a few friends from college this March.

Spike TV's Video Game Awards

Rubbish. That's all I have to say about them.

Fine, if you want me to say more, then continue reading.

It's a popularity contest, and no more. They don't look at the technical merit of the game or the gameplay elements of it, they just look at the numbers. Also, the nominees to some of the categories totally got shafted on some of them because they didn't even get mentioned (Dark Souls, Dirt 3, ect...)! I mean really, what's the point when the popular games that are ALREADY popular just get more attention.

The format of the awards was horrible as well, as they kept saying "Game of the Year (insert game here)", not Game of the Year Nominee, and these were sprinkled throughout the entire 2 hour block until they actually announced who it was. And I'm not even sure what categories they actually DID on stage, it seemed like many of the winners to some of the categories were mentioned in a one off somewhere never to be heard from again.

And beyond that Spike TV just sprinkled world premiers and silly pranks and games to make it somewhat bearable and worth it to watch. It's clearly tailored to the gaming community which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it makes it seem very juvenile and very distasteful at parts.

Needless to say, I was very disappointed with it and don't plan on watching them next year.

Dark Souls

So clearly I've kept up with what I intended and am writing regularly on here. With that being said, I'm going to talk about Dark Souls! The game that ate my life the last few weeks.

In short, it's a fantastic game that I would like to recommend to everyone but know that the game is NOT for everyone.

The game is brutal and has a really steep learning curve, so already, we can see why this isn't for everyone. That being said, Dark Souls has so many fantastic features that warrant a look themselves.

The first thing to talk about is scope and cohesiveness of the world. Dark Souls continually impressed me with how large it is and how well designed the world is itself. There are shortcuts back to places that make you realize how interconnected all the areas are. It's so impressive that 90% of the places you can see that have some form of geometry are reachable sometime in the game. There were several times during the game that I had been going for a while and said to myself, "well the end of this area should be ahead" and usually I was right, only to be put into another area that went even deeper.

There are so many other small things that make the game stand out. The NPC's themselves are pretty interesting (you can even kill any of them if you want to, but I wouldn't recommend it...) and most have a few of them have storyline and quests associated with them that are really interesting. Another piece of the game that is amazing is the amount interesting and unique weapons and armors that you'll come across. The number of unique weapon animations astounds me and I loved coming across a character animation I hadn't seen before. You'll play through the game more than twice just to collect all the gear.

The bosses are fantastic as well, all of them extremely unique. All of the enemies in the game have certain tells to their moves and you have to learn them to play well. Even on my 3rd playthrough bosses were pulling moves on me that I had never seen before.

These are just a few of the things that make the game so great. With that being said, the game also has some really unique pvp and co-op play as well as some interesting lore and legend to the world. That and it has a new game plus feature that lets you keep your character with its current stats to continue going through the game over and over so it gives you a lot of replay value. Plus its really interesting to watch your friends play the game when you know what's coming and they don't!

So recapping everything, the game is hard, but after getting beat down hundreds of times you learn to love every minute of it because it is such a fantastically built game with so many interesting aspects that I believe it to be a must have in any serious gamer's collection.

Jobs Jobs Jobs

Back from a weekend trip and a bit more energized to begin my job search. Been doing a lot of research on the companies around the Los Angeles area and have been blown away with the number and variety of them. Found out a few of my favorite studios are in the area and a couple dozen others that looked like I would be a good fit. Need to research them all a bit more individually and play some of the games that I haven't already before I write my cover letters and apply to jobs. I find it funny that some of these companies I'm finding are responsible for some of the more obscure games from decades ago that I enjoyed. Should be a busy week, especially if I don't put down Dark Souls (fantastic game by the way, review later!).

Looking Good

Site is coming along nicely, just a few minor things missing now! I would love to start getting some game reviews and comments on some gaming news up on here in the future to let you all know about my opinions.

And I'm Back!

As all two of you know, my website has been down for a pretty long time. I have now since remedied that problem and am no longer hosting it on my own web server, but through blogger now! With that, I hope to update this blog on a more regular basis, so expect to see more here in the days and weeks to come. Now I need to configure some things and figure out how the rest of this works...