Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch

Ni No Kuni is currently on sale for $15 on the Nintendo store, and I’m trying to figure out something to say about it that isn’t just a variation on “it’s magical and delightful.”

It’s... probably a seventy-hour JRPG, I think? I’m about forty hours in; and, based on the strategy guide, I’m guessing that I’m probably about 3/5 of the way through the game. I didn’t care about the story at first, but now I’m invested. It’s clearly intended for kids around the same age as the game’s protagonist (who is maybe ten years old?), but I’m not worried about getting bored of the game before I finish it.

The world map is gorgeous and reminds me of playing Final Fantasy VII for the first time. The towns are intricately detailed and full of life. You can tell that Level 5 and Studio Ghibli put a lot of love and attention into designing the world.

Um, what else...?

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The cel-shaded graphics are amazing and have not aged a day. The animation is spectacular. In particular, the way that the mantle of your main character’s cape moves is a technological marvel. You really do feel as though you’re walking around in a Studio Ghibli movie, and it’s incredible. The voice acting is lovely. The translation is brilliant. The score by Joe Hisaishi is everything you’d hope it would be.

I’m not saying that everything has to have a fandom, but I really do wonder why this game is relatively unknown. There were precious few JRPGs on the PS3, which was odd after the immense popularity of JRPGs on the PS2, so you’d think a super high-quality game like Ni No Kuni would have stood out. Then again, I myself never managed to get into it back when it was on PS3, so my guess is that Ni No Kuni's nostalgic JRPG elements help it work much better as a pokémon-style portable game on Nintendo Switch.

Re: Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch

Okay, so this is awkward to talk about, but…

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I guess what I’m trying to say is that there’s more to American culture than hot dogs and hamburgers and saying hello to your neighbors from across their white-picket fences as you stroll down Main Street.

And you could counter this with, “But Ni No Kuni is a game for children that flattens and parodies all of the people and cultures it incorporates into its fantasy world,” and that’s fair. At the same time, I’m happy that Japanese game developers have since figured out that it’s okay to have more than one Black or dark-skinned person in any given game, and that it won’t break anyone’s sense of immersion to have NPCs walking around with a variety of skintones.