Before I begin this post, let it be known that I really don't like anime. I understand the appeal of Japanese cartoons, and a lot of my friends love them, but I personally am not a fan. Dragonball Z will of course always hold a special place in my heart due to how much I absolutely loved it when I was a kid, but other than that I've never really found an anime I've found immersive and fun without being completely stupid. "But Matt", you say, "You haven't seen (insert anime title here)! how can you say you don't like anime if you haven't seen (insert title here)!". Well to you I say, that doesn't matter. I don't need to see every anime show ever to tell that it's not my thing. I don't have anything against it, and if you like it that's totally cool, I just don't. Leave me alone.
Despite my dislike for anime, I have found an extremely well made, immersive and memorable game in Level 5's overwhelmingly huge RPG, Ni No Kuni. I bought the game a few months ago on sale, the guy at the store told me it was a good choice and that it would keep me busy for a looooong time. "Yeah, whatever", I thought, "This dude is just trying to sell it to me to make money for his store", but I was totally wrong. EB Games Dude, you were 100%, completely right (for once.) Ni No Kuni is an absolute masterpiece of the Japanese RPG genre and one of the best games of 2013, if not the complete best. I'll admit that at first I was not really that into Ni No Kuni. To me, it seemed like a fairly generic role playing game with nicely designed visuals by an actual anime studio and nothing else substantial behind it. Young boy loses his mom and travels to an alternate world with a living version of one of his toys to save her. Not a terribly original plot. Why do I care? I didn't at first. But as the long story of the game wore on I became incredibly emotionally invested in the characters and their roles in the plot, and hopelessly addicted to the deep gameplay and massive world. The main quest of the game follows the adventure of Oliver, a young boy who travels to a parallel universe along with one of his toys which comes to life and has apparently been a fairy all along. During this journey he meets up with Esther and Swaine, two others who follow him on his adventure for various reasons. In the most basic terms, his objective is to destroy the White Witch, an evil entity intent on destroying the world to make way for a new one, and somehow bring his mother back to life. This story isn't largely important to the game, most of the plot devices consist of NPCs saying "Oh, you need this to continue your adventure? Well do this for me and I'll give it to you" which is fairly standard for role-playing games. I found myself several times doing an errand for someone so they would give me something which I would give to another person in exchange for all or part of what I really needed all along. And that in itself is one of the big appeals of Ni No Kuni, if you play it and find that you like it you're really in for a treat because the game goes on FOREVER. There are literally hundreds of sidequests and bounty hunts you can perform for the various denizens of the game world. Some of them take minutes to complete, others hours, and to get 100% task completion in the game will take you weeks if you're a committed player, months if you take your time. The world is massive and very well designed, containing the various ecosystems you would expect in an expansive RPG: deserts, tundras, caves, oceans, forests, volcanoes, islands, and some incredibly weird levels that are perfectly at home in a Japanese fictional universe. This world never feels like a chore to traverse either, you thankfully gain the ability to fast travel early on in the storyline and later acquire both a ship and a dragon you can use to fly to parts previously unreachable. There are about a hundred hidden treasure chests to find and if you want to create every single alchemy recipe (a task that took me about 30 hours of playtime alone) you'll be travelling a lot.
But that's enough about the world. A role playing game is nothing if it doesn't have good combat, and in that aspect Ni No Kuni is great, nuanced but simple at heart. The combat system in this game is real-time, and most of the time your characters will not be fighting directly but instead using creatures they have tamed called "familiars". These are essentially the enemies found in the game. When you defeat a creature, you sometimes get an opportunity to tame it. If you choose to recruit it, it becomes a member of your party and you gain control over it. Familiars can equip weapons and armor, and gain abilities and stats as they level up. This probably sounds a lot like Pokemon, and to tell the truth it is. There are several different types of familiars, and over 300 species, so you'll need to find strong ones and know which types to use to succeed in combat. This means travelling all over the world and fighting all the creatures lots of times to capture them, and then fighting tons more to level them up to make them strong (and evolve them to their strongest form, just like in Pokemon). Having a strong team of familiars for each of your party members is the key to victory in Ni No Kuni, and to make it through the endgame and fight the postgame ultimate bosses you need to pretty much find the best familiars and get them to max level. Doing this took me a looooong time but running around with a crazy strong team destroying everything at the end of the game was extremely fun.
The ridiculous amount of content and easy-to-learn, hard-to-master combat system in Ni No Kuni is brought together by simply amazing production values, and these elevate the game to a level of quality rarely seen in video games. The entire game is drawn and animated by the famous Studio Ghibli, the studio responsible for several critically acclaimed animated films including Howl's Moving Castle and the irresistibly charming My Neighbor Totoro. Everything in the game is absolutely gorgeous, from the cutscenes to the varied terrain, everything is beautifully brought to life. The soundtrack is also stellar, being performed by the Tokyo Philharmonic orchestra. Just listen to this. Or this. Or any of the other songs, they're invariably fantastic. There aren't many games that come out these days that make me want to just stand still in a dungeon or town, just listening to the gorgeous soundtrack. In terms of presentation, Ni No Kuni is amazing, and almost unrivaled in its quality.
You should play this game. You might think it's for kids, but if you have any inner child left in you at all you will love it. There is so much to do and see in Ni No Kuni. And all of it is of the highest quality, and most definitely worth experiencing.
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