Ni no kuni: Wrath of the white witch PS3 / Ni no kuni: The jet black mage DS

[S3M]

S3M accuses me of not knowing RPGs.

I'm sorry about the spoiler. I was considering putting spoiler tags around it, but given the game is... over 15 years old? I thought it wouldn't be too much of a problem. Besides, it happens so near the start, it's not like I spoiled the ending. Again, apologies.

I've finished the first three Suikoden games. The first takes about 15 hours to get all 108 stars. It's quite a short RPG. On a second playthrough, knowing what to do, I managed to get it down to about 10-11 hours. If you want breezy, play the first Suikoden. The second Suikoden took me around 45 hours to complete. Much more epic and my favourite in the series. The third Suikoden about 60 hours. I didn't like it because as I played through each of the three scenarios I was forced to play through the same environments again. Also, the story became silly towards the end.

No worries I should have played further into the first one, even more so since I have both the Playstation and Saturn versions. I got to the rebel camp, but as normal got distracted by another game. In truth I have seven of the Suikoden games both 32bit ports of 1, 2 on the PS1, 3,4,5 & Tactics on the PS2 and the DS one. I've been meaning to play them in order as I only managed to get a copy of the second one last year.

[rmoxon]

The suikoden games are fantastic. One of the best things about JRPG's is managing all the charactes, and the Suikoden games have LOADS of playable characters. Working out your favourite team is very enjoyable.

[Guts]

As much as I love Suikoden, the first game is mostly piss easy and 90% of the battles are totally meaningless where you just hit "Auto Attack" and watch your team whack the enemies who mostly die in one hit. The boss fights are pretty much the only fights where you have to think a bit.

Suikoden took me about 20+ hours to complete and I didn't get all characters, but then again I like to take my time, talk to people in the HQ and waste time. You most certainly don't fight your father 4 hours in, it's at the later half of the game.

[nakamura]

I have finished Suikoden at least 5 times and will do so again, amazing game and the music is better than anything released in this entire generation.

[fuse]

Am I allowed to talk about Ni no Kuni in this Suikoden thread?

I tried the method that was mentioned earlier in here, and well… it made it a little too easy to power-level. The last few bosses in the story have been a little ridiculous – Drippy advising me of their weakpoint by the time I’ve already whittled them down to 20% of their life. Not sure how close I am to the end but I am guessing I am getting there –

->Open Spoiler<-

Mornstar is back together and am now just going around to each of the cities putting together Clarion

. Up until the latest wave of new errands and bounties I was completely clear on that front, and I think this may be the penultimate wave of them too? I’ve purchased the last item from the merit shop thing, anyway.

Still enjoying it but I’d agree the padding isn’t great. On the whole though it’s a shame that this is being heralded as the poster boy for the great JRPG comeback, when there’s some much better examples from the last few years.

[Sketcz]

I'm not sure this was answered... Where exactly is the magic island where you can overlevel really quickly?

[fuse]

It's called 'Ugly Duckling Isle'; it's one of those off the north-east coast of the central continent.

[Sketcz]

Cheers! Will investigate.

[Guts]

I spent 15 ****ing hours in the desert.

How is this possible? My total playtime is 16 hours and I've got the boat now and done all errands and bounties.

[Sketcz]

My playtime when reaching the seaside village was about 20+ hours. I spent about 5 hours in ding dong dell and the dungeon. Maybe I only spent around 12-14 hours in the desert. Close enough.

Most of my time in the desert was spent trying to catch an unripe babana monster for one of the side quests. It has a very low capture rate. Since my level was quite high, they all ran away from me, leading to Benny Hill style shenanigans up and down the desert. Again, and again, and again. Given that I'd go hunting in hour long spurts, I did it about three times and a bit before I finally got the damn monster.

I suppose the sensible thing would have been to ignore it and just carry on.

But it's not that easy. On FF8 I spent about 10 hours in the first school area trying to beat everyone at that optional card game. Eventually I quite playing, having never, ever moved beyond the card game.

[Guts]

That's weird as I captured the babana monster in probably my first or second try, took me about 5 minutes to find it.

[Fader209]

I managed to catch a Green Buncher on my first attempt too and actually still have him in my team. I found that if an enemy runs away from you on the map, hit the menu button then close the screen again and the enemy should change direction or stop so that you can catch up to it. And getting the merit stamp card power to run faster helps too

[fuse]

I managed to catch a Green Buncher on my first attempt too and actually still have him in my team. I found that if an enemy runs away from you on the map, hit the menu button then close the screen again and the enemy should change direction or stop so that you can catch up to it.

Neat tip! It took me ages to get the Green Buncher too Sketcz; I'd say we killed at least a hundred of them before one finally charmed. Was getting regular 'Nice' bonuses too...

['Press Start']

I found that if an enemy runs away from you on the map, hit the menu button then close the screen again and the enemy should change direction or stop so that you can catch up to it.

The above works if your about to get stung from behind, or just speak to Drippy.

[NekoFever]

Finished it earlier. Loved it overall, especially once you get certain abilities that make jumping from city to city much less of a pain.

I did kind of break the game by farming Tokotokos near Perdida and being massively overlevelled by the end, though. Really easy to do that when you're building up a familiar when one run down the mountain can get you ~35,000XP and it meant the final act was pretty much a cakewalk.