Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is a Japanese-style role-playing game released in North America on January 22, 2013. The game is a significantly enhanced version of Ni no Kuni: Dominion of the Dark Djinn, released for the Nintendo DS in Japan in 2010. Ni no Kuni was acclaimed by many reviewers, with praise particularly directed at its story, gameplay, but mainly its graphic design, who’s art was created by famed Japanese animation house; Studio Ghibli. Wrath of the White Witch became one of the best-selling PlayStation 3 games and a sequel, Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom, was announced in December 2015.

Pros:

This truly is an outstandingly beautiful game, and very true to the visual style, details and quality you would expect from Studio Ghibli. It is a modern take on a classic JRPG, almost to a fault. It has touches of almost every successful aspect of the genre. You can catch, train, and evolve familiars just like Pokemon, you can even equip them with armor, weapons and accessories. Your team members can also be equipped, trained and fight, but you share your character’s total HP and MP with all of your familiar, regardless of which one you use. You can combined items together to create new ones in a system called “alchemy”. You can run errands and claim bounties for merit badges (kind of lame) that you can turn in for upgrades and items and such (not bad). The battle system is a modern real-time variation on the classic turn-based system and the world is amazingly in-depth.

Enjoy this trailer for the game to get a good feel for its …cuteness… and all it has to offer.

Cons:

The bad is there is simply too much, and as awesome as it is to have it all, none of it is the best version of what of what it is. There are hundreds of different familiars and each of them can be evolved in 2 different directions, which means that if you want to “catch them all” you would probably spend the better part of your whole life doing it. You can equip your familiars, but will only accept certain equipment. Some take axes, some spears, etc. That would be cool if they actually showed them in combat or they did something different, but they don’t, just variation for variation’s sake, I guess. The equipment building is a worse variation of what I have seen in games like Star Ocean. Each one of your main characters have their own skills. One upgrades his magic, one has a harp, who is the only one who can actually catch new familiars and the last guy has a gun… ‘MERICA. you have one more member option towards the end of the game, but again it’s just variation for variation’s sake. They have this wizard book that is literally a book, that the game pushes you to read so you can unlock extras. The book even has its own language you have to decipher. It’s amazingly in depth, but too seriously too much and I would be much happier with it if it was integrated into an interesting and consistent way. However, all of these issues pale in comparison to the obnoxious amount of dry, thin dialog. Seriously it took me almost an hour, literally an hour, of overly elongated conversations and cut scenes, until I finally got to start to play the actual game. Instead of them saying “do this, get that” it overflows to a paragraph about how and why they feel the way they do, filled with rebuttals from your crew. I understand the point to try to build some character depth or a rich environment, but it is so damn much. The storyline is all over the place and also very thin too. Sadly the main point and defining aspect of this game is traveling between two worlds and “healing” broken hearts, which is more of a boring chore than anything exciting.