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Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch
PlayStation 3
Dat Kuni Game
3/5 stars
“Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch” (“NNK”) is the latest RPG attempt by developer Level-5, an outfit more well-known for their work on ‘Professor Layton’ series of DS Adventure titles than their work on RPGs. However, Level-5 DID make one of the finest RPGs of the 6th Generation – “Dragon Quest 8” – in collaboration with Square Enix. Unfortunately for fans of that struggling genre, without the help of Square Enix, Level-5 seems far more likely to produce unenjoyable swill than anything resembling a good game. With Namco Bandai taking the place of Square Enix in the development and publishing of “NNK,” I thought Level-5 might be provided the guidance and framework needed to avoid tripping over themselves… but then I remembered that Namco Bandai is responsible for the ‘Tales of’ series. Still, with further collaboration from Studio Ghibli – a premier studio that creates anime feature films based on traditional fables drawn from largely Western sources – “NNK” really had as much chance to succeed as possible.
Presentation
“NNK’s” presentation is easily the high point of the experience. The fully-polygonal graphics engine combines beautifully-detailed, high-resolution fantasy environments with cell-shaded characters that look like they could have popped out of any Studio Ghibli movie. Of course, Ghibli character designs are kind of a love/hate thing, leaving plenty of NPCs and even major characters looking kind of strange. The Ghibli style is far more suitable for monster designs, and is used to great effect in creating a large roster of battle-able (and recruitable!) beasties that fall into the current Japanese fad of ‘so ugly it’s cute.’ Occasionally the game engine gives way to pre-rendered anime cutscenes, further cementing the Ghibli style into the game’s assets.
Not everything about the game’s graphics is perfect, however. I found that the animated cutscenes were a bit choppy. Likewise, many of the NPC character models (even important ones) suffer from stiff animation.
The soundtrack in “NNK” is a powerful collaboration between composers Joe Hisaishi (of Studio Ghibli fame) and Rei Kondoh (of “Okami” fame), performed by the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra. There are plenty of catchy melodies and recurring themes throughout the soundtrack, tying the game’s musical experience together with a nice cohesive bow. The main theme, in particular, is quite pleasant and finds use in a number of locations in the game, including a vocal version for the end credits. While I found the soundtrack to be incredibly impressive, at times I couldn’t help but wonder if such a majestic soundtrack wasn’t an ill-fit for the otherwise less-than-grandiose feel of the rest of the game.
The voiceacting in “NNK” is a mixed bag, as per usual with videogames. I didn’t recognize any particularly noteworthy actors by their voices alone, nor did I pay close enough attention to the end credits to spot any familiar names. The odd thing about “NNK” is that the ‘real world’ characters are all Americans living in small-town USA, while the ‘fantasy world’ characters are inexplicably British. The main character wavers unevenly between having an English accent and no accent. Most of the character performances are of acceptable quality, but a few come across as particularly cheesy and/or poor. The Cockney Fairies, however, are the only real stand-out voice roles in the game, providing a consistent accent across their entire race.
One final note on presentation: I was overwhelmingly impressed (actually mindboggled!) that “NNK” was the first PS3 game in years to find its way into my dusty, black monolith that DIDN’T require me to sit around waiting for it to download some kind of gigantic update. Even the majority of my single-player games have fallen prey to this abomination of the 7th Generation. So I must at least give Level-5 credit for building their game correctly and making sure it was done before pressing copies to disc.
Story
The title “Ni no Kuni” means “Second Country” when translated from Japanese to English. Unfortunately, having studied Latin a bit in college (and frequently hanging out with a buddy from grad school who studied a LOT of Latin), I know that ‘cuni’ also means ‘female genitals.’ And since my grad school buddy is a harried workaholic, he could never remember the title of “NNK,” and instead just referred to it as “That Cuni Game,” at which point we would chuckle immaturely about the crude homonym.
The titular Second Country, however, is actually where the vast majority of the game takes place. The main character, Oliver, is a young child (somewhere between 8 and 10 years old, making him one of the youngest RPG protagonists ever) living in Motorville, an idyllic 1950s small town in the United States. His bland, peaceful life is shattered, however, when his single mother, after saving him from a mysterious go-kart malfunction, dies of a heart attack.
Left alone, Oliver is paralyzed with despair (as anyone would be, losing their only parent at such a young age). Yet a series of mysterious coincidences drop a ridiculous, lantern-nosed Cockney Fairy, named Mr. Drippy (Lord High Lord of the Fairies (not a typo)) right into Oliver’s lap along with a whole bunch of overly-convenient occurrences that shunt Oliver into the overused RPG role of Chosen… err, ‘Pure-Hearted One’ with the ability to save Drippy’s homeworld from an evil character known as Shadar the Dark Djinn (who isn’t even an actual Djinn). Oliver is reluctant to take Drippy up on his offer, until Drippy pulls some metaphysical philosophizing out of his rear to present Oliver with a potential way to get something he really wants.
Drippy explains that his world and Oliver’s world exist side-by-side as parallel dimensions, and that everyone who exists in one world has a Soul Mate in the other world. These Soul Mates are tied together by their hearts and their fates, meaning that when someone in one world gets sick or dies, their Soul Mate does the same. Except that Drippy knew Oliver’s mom’s Soul Mate and witnessed her being imprisoned in a pocket dimension by Shadar. Drippy’s logic tells him that by saving the Great Sage Alicia from Shadar’s prison, Oliver’s mom, Allie, would probably come back to life.
I always found Drippy’s seat-of-the-pants metaphysics to be built on an extremely shaky foundation, but Oliver’s desperation to get his mom back finds him accepting this nonsense outright (of course, a kid his age wouldn’t have had access to college-level philosophy classes, either). Thus the two set-out to the other world to take up the quest to turn Oliver into a first-class wizard and defeat the Dark Djinn once and for all.
But what, one might ask, does a Dark Djinn have to do with the White Witch in the game’s title? Well, it turns out that “NNK” for PS3 is actually an enhanced port of a game that was originally released on the DS. The White Witch appears in bonus content tacked-onto the game after the point where the DS original ended. As a result nothing in the story really makes a whole lot of sense until a couple of particularly large info-dumps near the very end.
Instead of an intriguing narrative that reveals bits and pieces of information to the player and the characters simultaneously, “NNK” shows the player cutscenes with no context and leaves the characters completely in the dark. Oliver, Drippy, and the handful of friends they meet on the course of their adventure always seem to be incredibly slow-witted and derpy when it comes to interpreting the events going on around them, and the player is only given enough information to speculate about potential outcomes, but is guaranteed to speculate the WRONG outcomes because key bits of knowledge are always withheld. I ultimately found the entire cast to be fairly one-dimensional, uninteresting, and unrelatable, while the story dragged along with awful pacing until the last 10 hours or so (out of a 60 hour RPG).
What’s weird is that, in my mind, the story was much more interesting than it actually turned out to be. Before the final set of reveals, I was speculating that the flat characters, abundant coincidences, and the fact that Oliver can only traverse a 6-block town in the ‘real world’ while he has access to an entire planet in the ‘second world’ were all pointing to the entire game taking place in Oliver’s imagination as he tried to work his way through the grief of losing his mother. That would have made for a much more interesting game than the Ghibli-fied take on “The Chronicles of Narnia” that Level-5 actually produced.
Gameplay
“NNK” looks, at first glance, like a new game built on the “Dragon Quest 8” engine. It has all of the trappings of a traditional RPG: An overworld, towns, dungeons, multiple modes of transportation, weapon and item shops, sidequests, and random battles against enemy groups that are visible on the world map. And, indeed, all of these aspects of “NNK” are incredibly well-done. There’s even an alchemy pot ripped straight out of “Dragon Quest 8” that allows for the creation of the most powerful items in the game. Conveniently, “NNK” also provides the player with a browsable copy of Oliver’s Wizard’s Companion tome, which is filled with monster data, maps, recipes, and other pertinent knowledge (though it is incomplete and it is up to the player to recover the missing pages).
The problem with “NNK’s” gameplay is the battle system, and by extension the Familiar System. Unlike a traditional RPG (or “Dragon Quest 8”), “NNK” foregoes the excellence of turn-based combat for an annoying action-based system where everything happens at the same time, but the player gives commands instead of directly controlling a character. Early in the game, this battle system is somewhat tolerable, as Oliver is by himself. But as the game marches on, Oliver is joined by companions, of which two can (must) participate in battles with him. Of course, with an action-based system and multiple characters, the player always gets screwed because developers have yet to come up with a better way to handle such situations that making two of the three party members AI-controlled. Sure, it’s possible to set some AI options for these characters, and it’s possible to switch between them, but it is NOT possible to rapidly move between characters, tell them what to do, and let them do it, since switching characters automatically causes them to recall their Familiar and stop all actions. After gaining the third party member (which was far too late for my taste) the game provides the player with two one-button options to give an All-Out Attack of All-Out Defend command to the two AIs, but they respond slowly to the defense command and inconsistently to the attack command. None of these AI-centric issues would be terribly annoying, however, if the AI was actually competent; but instead they seem content to do dumb things, fight ineffectively, and waste MP on skills that are overkill for most enemies. Enemies also tend to gang-up on one character (usually whichever one is being player-controlled at the moment), and can hitstun them into dust while preventing any retaliation or movement. Allied characters tend to run-into each other in combat, resulting in traffic jams that waste time and give the enemy free hits. Ultimately, most boss battles devolve into Oliver kiting the boss around the battlefield, while casting powerful spells and praying that the AI will do something useful with the other two characters, all the while keeping an eye out for the boss to start powering up a cheap-fast-and-hits-everyone special attack to attempt a defensive action.
The Familiar system ties directly into combat by making the actual characters (except for Oliver) incredibly weak and useless in battle. Instead, each character (including Oliver) can command a team of three Pokemon-esque creatures. Each character can only have one of their three Familiars active at any given time, and each Familiar has a stamina meter that determines how long they can remain in play before their controller is forced to switch. All Familiars share their controller’s HP and MP meters, meaning that its necessary to conserve MP and avoid taking damage at ALL times.
Any non-boss monster in the game can potentially become a Familiar (after the second character joins Oliver’s party) by singing to it when it randomly decides to become interested in Oliver’s team. The random nature of Familiar recruitment is tooth-grindingly frustrating, as it can take a ridiculous amount of grinding in order to finally get a defeated enemy to express interest… and there is NO way for the player to influence the recruitment chance outside of a single super-late-game passive skill that doesn’t really seem to do much (unlike, say, the ‘Dragon Quest Monsters’ spinoff series where enemies could be enticed to join the party by throwing large quantities of Meat at them). Even worse, instead of starting at the party’s level when recruited (or even at the level they should have been when defeated, based on their difficulty), Familiars typically start at one of three levels depending on their Metamorphosis (*coughEvolutioncough*). Un-metamorphosed Familiars ALWAYS start at level 1, middle-metamorphosed Familiars start at level 10, and final-metamorphosed Familiars start at 20… even when the party is level 40+! Familiars also revert to level 1 when the player manually Metamorphoses them. The result of this stinginess with Familiar levels is that anyone wanting to switch-up their Familiar teams with new members can look forward to stupid amounts of grinding… especially because there are so few enemies that provide decent chunks of experience. I ended up keeping my same crappy Familiars for the vast majority of the game simply because I didn’t want to take 20 hours out to grind my new recruits up to snuff.
Overall
“Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch” is a gorgeous modern take on the RPG genre that, predictably, was unable to avoid the pitfalls that have plagued that genre since the start of the 7th Generation. While it may look and sound spectacular, “NNK” is ultimately a boring game with pacing issues in the story and AI issues in the battle system. While I only spent around 60 hours with the game, it felt much, much longer… and I lost interest in the post-game content (refighting all of the game’s bosses… yay?) 1/3 of the way through. On the surface “NNK” seems like the game RPG fanatics have been waiting 7 long years for, yet I think starving RPG fanatics will find the fewest redeeming qualities in the game. “NNK” is not horrible, by any means, but neither is it particularly good.
Presentation: 4.5/5
Story: 2.5/5
Gameplay: 3/5
Overall (not an average): 3/5
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