Ni No Kuni is one of those games that I think most westerners probably haven't played or even heard of. Like a lot of RPG's it was a huge hit in Japan that kind of got a following over the pond and in Europe and the gameplay is actually very reminiscent of Dragon Quest (not Dragon Age). The art is good, the story is stupid, and the gameplay changes from overhead outside view where you can try to dodge encounters with enemies and then switches to interior areas such as caves and what not where the concept is the same as far as dodging enemies are concerned.
Encounters are handled in a similar manner to Dragon Quest's later titles as well and this is something that a lot of people welcome so that is probably why even though the semi-turn-based battle approach has kind of long-since-been outmoded, that they still used it. Don't fix it if it aint broken, eh?
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The reason why I returned to this was because after finishing a game that I really liked, and trying the next game and kind of being nonplussed by it, I seemed to recall really enjoying a game that I will refer to as NNK from this point forward.
Wow was I in for a shock.
It has been a long time since I played it so I knew that I wasn't going to be any good at the combat so instead of moving forward in the story from wherever it was that I last played, I decided to intentionally walk backwards and fight some stuff out there.
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Let's just say that combat was a "bit more involved" than I recall from 2 years ago.
In this game you are controlling - I suppose not right at first but at the point in the game I stopped at - 3 different main characters. This sounds very typical and quite manageable but wait, there's more! Each of these 3 characters are quite useless on their own direct attacks and the idea here is that you are meant to be using 3 different pets that are under the control of each of them. There are many kinds of pets and although I might have been familiar with their strengths and weaknesses 2 years ago, I was completely oblivious to what any of that was about. No matter in this particular battle because we were a lot more powerful than the opposition but this doesn't change the fact that I had no idea what was going on and after a few more battles I started to remember why it probably was that I stopped playing this game in the first place 2 years or more ago.
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This is a painstakingly made picture someone made of all the available familiars (pets) that you can possibly have in the game and that's fine and all but then we get to where things get even more complicated. When you first find a familiar they are level 1 and quite weak. The only way to get the "up to scratch" is the same way that you got your human powers up a bit: You gotta fight with them many times so they can gain xp and therefore levels. You also have to nurture each of these pets individually by feeding them and having them "grow up" because of what you give them.
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I had forgotten about all of this and while it is probably really neat for someone that enjoys a game this customizable I think this is the main reason why I left the game in the first place. It takes quite some time to feed one pet 1 chocolate bars in a row and this is by design. The idea is that you use ingredient sheets to make items that will make the process of leveling them up even faster but this process in itself takes a lot of time and resource-gathering as well.
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So after about 1 hour of re-familiarizing myself with all of this I kind of came to the conclusion that the ol' feeling that I had when I initially walked away from this, is a feeling I have about the game now. Doing all that work in order to have a slightly more powerful version of just one of my 9 active pets is not really something I am willing to invest a bunch of time into and well, this game is likely getting flushed back into the void where it sat for 2 years.
I don't mind a really complicated and seriously customizable RPG, but after playing Hogwart's where things get moving a lot faster I'm afraid I don't really have the patience for this at the moment.
I recall having fond memories of this game in the past but there is another bad side as far as me personally as a gamer is concerned: The game is very story heavy and in this particular situations I don't really care for the story and this is often a problem for me when games are whimsically translated from Japanese into English. The voice acting is over-the-top British-English and I guess it is meant to be funny, but mostly this falls into the category of rather useless dialogue that I would rather not have included at all.
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I did manage to stay in the game long enough to get a dragon to fly around on which I suppose could make the game open up a lot. I think I'll get in there today for a bit longer just to see what sorts of things this guy allows us to access in game, but honestly, I may just bite the bullet and finally go and see what God of War: Ragnarok is all about instead.