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

['Press Start']

Urrgg. Take heart, give heart, take heart, give heart, take heart, give heart. So boring.

I am just about to get

->Open Spoiler<-

The last stone for the wand

. Does the game get dramatically more interesting after this? I feel like I have invested too much time in it not to finish it. With each new section I hope the game grabs me but unfortunately not, just gives me a little something new with some padding. There is so much style over substance here.

I do love

->Open Spoiler<-

the Kurin Kurin Squash type mini game found in the casino, when Oliver and Esther cross over my brain tickles!

[SCCAAMMM]

To be honest, in my opinion no it doesn't. (yes, I have completed the story)

[Sketcz]

You know, I haven't bothered to go back to this since I saved inside that mountain. It's back on my shelf, and I have little urge to return.

In the meantime I clocked Cosmic Fantasy 2, and I finally finished Mother 3. With CF2 I disabled battles through hex editing, because screw that. With M3 is was a trudging bore. The game took me 5 years to complete and it was just horrible. The first and second were much better.

Maybe I've outgrown the RPG genre.

[Golgo]

Post Deleted

['Press Start']

Just Defeated Shadar. Much story left to get through? Puss in Boats is a legend!

Tried catching a Bat as I hear they make a great attacker but after 20 attempts with extra Familar charm upgrade I thought f**k him. I have not got time for luck in games.

[nakamura]

Maybe I've outgrown the RPG genre.

Nah, the average games are much less tolerable.

['Press Start']

Well I Finally finished this tonight. I am pleased in a way as it is a bit of a chore of a game but sad as it is such a beautiful world to leave behind.

I'll sum up my feelings in bullet point style.

The Good:-

• Level 5 are brilliant artists. They know how to create a world and make it teem with character. You can just walking around the towns or dungeon and take in every little detail.
• Music is fantastic. Each tune suits the town/area you hear it. I will miss hearing the over world tune and the overworld itself.
• The voice acting is brilliant. Top marks here as it really adds to the story sections. Great decision to go with British accents too.
• Despite my beefs below I have grown attached to the familiars I use. It was great to seem them evolve into better versions of themselves.
• Story was good. Good old fashioned
  ->Open Spoiler<-

  
  Parental death
  
  at the beginning of a story always helps sucker you in. The story was the main reason I kept playing.

The not so good:-

• Padding - There is enough explanation of this in the thread. Cheap, nasty padding in places to make the game seem bigger then it actually is.
• Too many Familiars - I have never played Pokemon or any 'monster' collection game but I can't see the point of that many familiars. Fair enough if your into collecting monsters then spending hours leveling them up only to find a better one therefore completely wasting your time leveling the previous monster.
• The dungeon design is poor. Level 5 have such wonderful art design coupled with very bland dungeon design. Sure it is nice to take in the art but the actual layout and design of the dungeons is very poor imo.
• For a game based around familiars there is
  ->Open Spoiler<-

  
  no mention of them in relation to the story or world the story is based in
  
  . I found it a bit strange??
• Big Spoiler
  ->Open Spoiler<-

  
  Poor ending for such a beautifully crafted game. Not even a Studio Ghibili animated ending....wtf?
  
  

I completed all quests apart from ones that involved catching certain monsters. I do not have the patience for luck based things like that. I also killed all bounty hunts and completed S-Rank in the fighting tourny. I am not up for going on more quests post game, time to choose from my 'What to play next' choices.

Oliver
Puss in Bouts, Sugar Plum Sprite, Mahanaja
Esther
Flourongo, Turban Myth, Underripe Buncher
Swaine
Bone Baron, Paleolith, Greater spotted Naid

So I ended up liking this game, although it did it's absolute best to make me hate it. Definitely a love/hate gaming experience.

Give it a go.

[rmoxon]

I doubt many people collect every monster in Pokemon and then get them all to max level.

Like Pokemon, there are loads of familiars so you can build a team that plays how you want it too. It's not simply an OCD thing, but part of the strategy of the game. I don't think anyone expects you to level up every one of them.

['Press Start']

I doubt many people collect every monster in Pokemon and then get them all to max level.

Like Pokemon, there are loads of familiars so you can build a team that plays how you want it too. It's not simply an OCD thing, but part of the strategy of the game. I don't think anyone expects you to level up every one of them.

Have you played ni no kuni?

[rmoxon]

I have. Why?

['Press Start']

I have. Why?

It appears that most people end up with the same/nearly same group of familiars. Compared to the amount of familiars you are able to use the ones people actually use seem to be quite a small number. Meaning the rest are pretty much a complete waste of time.

In terms of play style I do not think the game is diverse enough for you to have a particular play style. If you want to achieve everything in the game then IMO peoples play style converges into pretty much the same style. You have tanks, healers and hitters in your squad, of the 400 or so familiars it would appear only about 50 at most are worth having.

Let me know if I am wrong.....

[Guts]

I agree. I quite like the game, but it isn't a deep game tactically. I've been pretty much using the same familiars since the beginning and my friend did the same thing.

[rmoxon]

It appears that most people end up with the same/nearly same group of familiars. Compared to the amount of familiars you are able to use the ones people actually use seem to be quite a small number. Meaning the rest are pretty much a complete waste of time.

In terms of play style I do not think the game is diverse enough for you to have a particular play style. If you want to achieve everything in the game then IMO peoples play style converges into pretty much the same style. You have tanks, healers and hitters in your squad, of the 400 or so familiars it would appear only about 50 at most are worth having.

Let me know if I am wrong.....

Youre probably not wrong. Unlike Pokemon where all the monsters are balanced, there are clearly some familiars that are better than others in Ni No Kuni. I was just pointing out the developers intentions, I wasnt really arguing either way as to wether they achieved those intentions or not.

As collection and battling with monsters goes, I doubt pokemon will even be bettered, but Ni No Kuni has a lot of other things going for it anyway, so it hardly matters.

[speedlolita]

Rmoxon I suggest you play more Pokemon if you think they're all balanced. In Pokemon I would only catch em all after carefully breeding and evolving my ideal team to level 100. There are far more mechanics to Pokemon than the game informs you of.

[importaku]

In the DS version there were extra layers of strategy when raising imagines/familiars making a reason for trying to get a lot of them, on top of feeding them food from the alchemy pot to level them & using the gems to give them new magic powers. There were also marbles you could feed them these only appeared in the DS version sadly, the marbles changed the alignment of the weapon slots the imagine had. In the game they could only hold certain items if they matched the slot colours, this meant you had to hunt down a variety of them till you found ones that had the right slot colour combination or close enough, obviously the marbles were rare so once you got a imagine with nearly all the slots you needed you could tweak a few colours to make it perfect. The most powerful artifacts were black items, this is a rare slot colour & the marbles even rarer to change the slots to black. Took me a while to assemble a strong team that could hold all the best gear.

I love the PS3 version as it complemented the story already told in the DS game and the new take on the battle system was refreshing after 100+ hours in battling the top down turn based DS game, however i loved the DS version more as the puzzles were done so much better, they were done in a way that pulls you into exploring the book. There is one dungeon that had a maze where in the mist there are cursed arches if you walk under one you get a spell removed from your list & once you lost it you had to manually redraw the rune to put it back. Now in the book theres a page with a picture of a jewelry box, on closer inspection you realise the contents of the box are actually a map on how to pass through the maze safely avoiding the cursed arches. There are quite a few puzzles like that, ones that have help hidden in the book. Plus having to draw the runes instead of just selecting a spell from a list made it more enjoyable, it was one of the things that made me actively want to search out new spells.

Moyas tower was a massive reason to keep playing long after the game had been completed, it's what kept me going for about 30 hours after i finished the main game. A tower with 100 floors each of which you have to search the entire world & battle imagine to get ingredients to build the floors one at a time, each of the floors has harder imagine as the floors get higher some of these drop items you need too fo build the upper floors. This time it's the pot genie's dad that does the work When you reach the very top theres a fantasically hard battle to win a pretty awesome prize.

Anyone not familiar with what Moyas tower is then here's a handy vid.