Board 8 > Platinum #35: Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch (thoughts + review)

(+) Yeah! (+)

This game was sitting on my PS3 hard drive for at least 3 years, but I finally got around to playing it 2 months ago. I did not hear (or happened to miss) much talk about this game on the board but I guess it was a fairly big hit if they are localizing the sequel. It was a time consuming platinum, but the game itself was fairly easy once I learned the rules, and once I finished it the platinum wasn't that far away. I had a good time with it but I feel this game is too flawed to recommend without any reservations.

I like the Ghibli animation style, but the actual animated cutscenes were few, far between, and not the highest quality. The story was OK, the characters are paper-thin, and the big plot twist became obvious in the hour or two leading up to it, but I liked the whimsical atmosphere and it was certainly a feel-good game. However, it was very easy to tell that the last 10% of the game was tacked onto the original version despite the interwoven scenes with the White Witch and Pea. Certainly feel like the original ending would have been better, and the content afterward was not as compelling.

The ideas are very good, but the execution is flawed. The collect-them-all aspect doesn't matter much, because although you can have 9 familiars in your party, and new ones you collect start at such a low level that it doesn't make much sense to pick up any past the first half of the game. Magnifying this problem is that unlike pokemon, catching monsters is completely random. I think to capture a monster for a quest I spent like 3 hours just grinding out battles until the 4% capture rate popped. The game also lacks much in the way of differentiating the creatures for you in terms of how they work or what they will be good for, and the stats are all very opaque (never figured out how to compare attack speeds across species, for example). The starter creatures do not really keep up, and after the fact, I learned online that there are a few monsters you can grab fairly early on that will trivialize the entire game.

Gameplay is very hit and miss. Almost all of the sidequests are simply "talk to this person," "fight this monster," "collect these items/familiars," or some combination of those. The broken heart thing was neat but it just boiled down to "talk to people who glow green on the minimap." The dungeons were very short and, outside of a couple near the end of the game, completely bland.

The battle system seems like it could have been much better than it was. The design is great but is hampered by just a couple things. The two computer-controlled allies are practically brain-dead. You are giving a limited set of preset behaviors, but they aren't enough to make the AI competent. I ended up playing 99% of the game with "Do not use any abilities" because otherwise they will spam their highest MP abilities and within 2 random battles will be completely out of juice. In other instances, they will sit there in the heat of a battle doing nothing for seconds at a time. Even selecting "Keep everyone healed" will cause them to repeatedly use buff spells until they have no MP left.

The other problem in battles is a minor qualm but towards the end of the game was very frustrating. Whenever someone uses a field ability(cast on all enemies or all allies) it will cancel all other commands on the battlefield. I lost track of the number of times a clutch heal or steal or other charged ability was canceled because an enemy cast smoke bomb or an ally cast an AoE spell.

Those problems aside, battles were fast-paced and fun and somewhat tactical. I thought it was good enough to sink about 100 hours total into it. It seems like a solid JRPG.

I haven't looked at a ton of reviews or thoughts from other players so I'm not sure if other people share these opinions. But I would certainly love to hear from anyone else on the board who also played the game, love it or hate it.
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I saw you playin it a few times and meant to ask what you thought

The only other opinion I've heard is from SHINE, who said it was a fun platinum
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The platinum wasn't hard, but those last 20 hours were pretty grindy. The last couple trophies involve grinding for ultra rare items and familiars
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This is the only platinum I've gotten so far. Mostly because I just stopped to recruit all the new familiars whenever I got to a new area, and did all sidequests before moving on again, so by the end of the game there was very little left to do.
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