Ni No Kuni - The Best Bad Game I've Ever Played

Ni No Kuni is a game that for a while now has been heralded as the "great savior" of the JRPG, or some such. The fact of the matter is we don't get many triple A JRPG style games these days, it's a genre that has mostly been relegated to the indies and the handhelds. The ones we do get tend to be very strange, like they are stuck in some ugly mid-metamorphosis stage, trying to adapt and be fresh and new but not quite getting it right. So the prospect of a solid, traditional style RPG made by Level 5 and the legendary Studio Ghibli was quite tantalizing for many, myself included. Now that I have just about completed everything there is to do in the game, I thought I would talk about my thoughts on the game. 

The short version is, it's undoubtedly a good game, but it has such a ridiculously large amount of problems with it, that it doesn't come anywhere near being great in my book. Thus far I've played the game for about 65 hours, and a good 15-20 of that has been spent bored and/or angry at the game. Now I'm glad I played it, it was mostly fun, but the game designer in me aches as I play it. Aside from the amazing visuals, the likes of which we will probably never see ever again, I don't think there is a single aspect of the game that doesn't have some problems biting at it's ankles. If you are looking for a game with a good story and an interesting universe to explore, then Ni No Kuni is probably a game you will love despite it's problems. If like me, you are more interested in good combat and interesting mechanics, then Ni No Kuni will probably still be worth playing, but might be disappointing.

There are a lot of little problems that bog down the game, but there are a handful of huge, fundamental flaws as well. So let's break it down:

Repetition

Let me quickly outline one of the game's mechanics. Basically, many people in Ni No Kuni are "brokenhearted". This means they are missing a piece of their heart corresponding to a specific property (love, courage, ambition, restraint, etc). As such they don't act entirely reasonably, and that's a problem. Luckily the protagonist (Oliver) has a locket which allows him to extract pieces of heart and redistribute them. So if you find someone with an excess of courage, with their permission you can take it and give it to someone lacking courage. It's an interesting mechanic, but very overused. Throughout the game there are about 80 side quests, and at a guess, about 50-60 of them involve fixing someone's heart. Not only that, but a donor for the appropriate quality is almost always just across town. It gets to the point where I literally skipped as much quest text as possible, because as soon as I saw that red word that said "Courage" or what have you, the entire point of the quest is clear. The fact that a dozen boxes of text exist where a single word is sufficient is another problem, but I'll talk more on that later.

Now the issue of brokenhearted people extends beyond sidequests, too. See the game has a very clear formula that repeats exactly 8 times, stretching through almost the entire game. Basically, almost every time you arrive at a new town, it goes something like this: I need something in this town. Oh no, the leader/important person is brokenhearted! Fight a boss (a ghost thing named "Void of whatever heart quality the person is missing"). Now we need to fix their heart. Oh, the person we met 5 seconds ago has an excess of what we need! Cool, they are better, now they can help us with the reason we are here to begin with. Time to go do a dungeon, then head to the next town! This happens almost exactly like this 8 times, once for each aspect of the heart, and it gets very old by the end. 

Now the last thing to mention on Repetition is just that, you revisit old areas a lot. Like, A TON. It's not like anything really changes in the places you visit either, so it's not a cool kind of revisiting. It's the monotonous kind. There are more issues with revisiting areas, but they fall more under future categories, so I'll leave it there for now.

Pacing

Pacing is really one of the things that Ni No Kuni does quite badly. In fairness I think it's an issue that plagues almost every long epic style RPG, but it still stuck out to me while playing Ni No Kuni. The short version is simply that nothing you do is quick and easy. Every task has to be bogged down by some sort of fetch quest or some form of complication. Oh, you want to go back to town? Too bad, volcano errupted on the other side of the continent, go there first. The "formula" I described earlier is an example of this too. You can never just show up and talk to the king about what he can do to help you save the world. You have to get an audience with the king, then fix his borkenheartedness first. Some of this was acceptable at the beginning of the game, because they used it to demonstrate the game's mechanics. But then they just kept doing it...

Just to add insult to injury, the game's scenes are painful (and surprisingly few of them are voice acted). Whenever you do anything you are faced with a fairly hefty amount of dialogue. Perhaps the most annoying thing about it though, is the way said dialogue is done. Quite literally it seems like they explain everything like you are 5. Simple concepts are explained at gross length, obvious plot points are slowly unravelled 10 minutes after you figure it out, and every time you need to do just about anything your companion feels the need to hint at what needs to be done and/or how to do it. The volume and quality of the dialogue make the scenes drag on dreadfully, to the point where it feels like you spend more time discussing how to save the world than actually doing it. In fact, the game's dungeons are all pretty small and really don't grow at all the further you get into the game. They get more windy, but not any bigger.

One of the other things the game seems really good at doing is introducing new mechanics several hours after  when you could have used them. You don't get the ability to start capturing familiars (one of the game's main mechanics) until about 8-10 hours in. Compare that to something like Pokemon, where you get your first pokeballs usually within 20-30 minutes. Another example is the Travel spell, which warps you back to areas you have visited. Yet, you learn it after you have already explored half the world. In a normal game that might not matter, but in Ni No Kuni revisiting old areas is the norm, whether you can warp or not. You would think maybe they would give you the warp spell before giving you quests to walk all the way back to the other end of the continent, but no. 

And of course you have weak enemies back there not worth fighting. Many of them will run from you rather than engage, but some will still charge at you. Why a level 1 boar would charge a level 99 I dunno, but you have to waste the 30 seconds killing it anyways. Even Earthbound had a solution for that, and it was released almost 20 years ago! Ni No Kuni's solution is an invisibility spell that you get ~40 hours in, and involves doing side quests. Of course you always have the option of not doing any side quests, and you would almost never have to return to old areas then. The problem with that is that, the game's difficulty is high enough that if you skip the side quests there is a good chance you won't be prepared for the next dungeon. In other words, you need to do side quests on top of all the random fluff tasks the plot has you doing if you want to make it through the next dungeon, which probably won't be longer than half an hour.

AI

So now that difficulty has been mentioned, let's start talking about the game's AI. By now it's already pretty legendary in it's inability to do much of anything, and personally I would call it the biggest issue in the entire game. Before I go into too much detail, here's an overview of how combat works. You have a party of three characters, but only control one at a time. Each character can be assigned up to 3 familiars to control, and in combat they fight as either themselves, or one of their familiars. Each familiar can only fight for ~30 seconds before running out of stamina, and forcing the character to switch familiars, though familiars can be switched at any time. Each character shares a heath and MP bar with their familiars, though they all have different stats and abilities.

So now that's out of the way... The AI is just bad. A lot of the issue comes down to your inability to make the AI do what you want it to. You can change tactics for each party member, but they don't seem to work very well. The number of times I've seen a character burn all of their MP using attack spells when I set them to the "Keep us healthy" tactic is astounding. It also doesn't help that you can only change tactics while in battle, and while controlling one of the characters. So if you are controlling a familiar, you have to switch back to the familiar's master and then select the tactics menu from there. Changing tactics is not a fast thing, though it's less of an issue if you consider how useless they are. It's almost always best to just set everyone to not use any abilities (which thankfully, actually does what it's supposed to), and do everything yourself. That brings up other problems, but more on that later.

Now, even just doing nothing but physical attacks, the AI still manages to be terrible. The only thing they are good at is getting themselves killed. If you give someone a squishy caster familiar to be used for healing or something, you can guarantee that you will see that person up in the enemy's face attacking for 1 damage. Similarly, your companions will forego familiars and fight themselves surprisingly frequently. Which is strange, considering that the actual familiar masters are all terrible at doing physical attacks. There's no reason for them to ever fight themselves unless using one of their abilities (which the AI is forbade from doing). Even with no purpose but doing physical attacks, the AI is insufficient. If I need to switch to a different character to heal or something, you can guarantee that the AI controlling the damage dealer will spend most of their time sitting around doing nothing. Considering controlling said damage dealer usually consists of nothing but mashing X, you would think the AI could at least do that right, but alas.

Ultimately it all comes down to you having to do everything yourself. In short/easy fights that's fine and all is more or less well. The second a fight gets even slightly challenging though, all is lost, and things instantly become incredibly frustrating. The AI is completely incapable of doing the things that it needs to do, you end up having to switch back and forth, and said switching is not at all a fast or seamless process. Meanwhile your companions are derping about being useless and getting themselves killed, forcing you to do more switching. Or you let them die and kill stuff with one character. It works better than you might think. There are no fights in Ni No Kuni which are objectively hard. If the AI actually used the abilities you wanted when you wanted they would be easy. I honestly believe that Ni No Kuni would have been a much better game if they just made the combat turn based.

Combat

Issues with the battle system don't end there, though! While the AI is certainly a big problem, the combat itself has issues. I mentioned that I think the combat should be turn based, and this is the first problem. For whatever reason, Level 5 decided that Ni No Kuni should use this action/turn based hybrid system, similar to what we see in games like Final Fantasy XII or Xenoblade. I really don't understand why they decided this. AI issues aside, it seems like Ni No Kuni suffers all the downsides associated with action combat, but reaps none of the benefits. Navigating the battle field doesn't do much for you aside from introduce collision issues with other combatants. Positioning rarely ends up mattering, and half the time when it does the game's pathing forces you to waste time running around the enemy to some strange spot before you can even attack. There is almost never anything in the battle area to interact with at all (lava, obstacles, whatever). Sure it may feel good to evade that big attack (using the evade command, not physically moving), but because of the turn based side of things you often end up sitting around waiting for your command window to pop up, stuck in another action, etc. The negative feeling from that more than offsets the satisfaction of getting it right. Don't even get me started on trying to get your allies to also block the big attacks.

The action side of things kind of works when you are fighting one on one, but as soon as things get more chaotic everything just goes to the dogs. The game would have been better off going all action or all turn based. Choosing a path and sticking to it is not one of Ni No Kuni's strong points though. Even if the game was 100% turn based, there are just too many mechanics at play in the battle system. Since the game has the familiar catching mechanic, which is similar to Pokemon, let me explain what the appeal of Pokemon is to me. Basically, each Pokemon has an elemental Type which gives it certain strengths and weaknesses vs other Pokemon. The idea is to pick 6 Pokemon whose strengths complement each other, in an a attempt to compose a flexible team that has an answer to every situation. When you counter a grass type with your fire type, it feels satisfying . It's pretty simple, fire type has an advantage against grass type in pretty much any situation. That's not the whole story in every situation, but that's the gist of it.

In Ni No Kuni it's not so simple. You have 3 teams of 3 familiars, and when composing a single team, you have to think about the following: Element. Almost every familiar has an element that it is weak to and an element it's weak to. This is similar to Pokemon, except that a fire elemental familiar may not actually ne any good at using fire attacks, in which case it doesn't have an advantage it can exploit, it just has a weakness. Beyond that, each familiar also has an astrological sign (star, sun, moon, planet). Star/Sun/Moon has a rock paper scissors relationship, which is another thing to consider. So putting a team together you probably want a star a moon and a sun, preferably of different elements. But then you have genus. Each familiar belongs to a certain family (bug, dragon, beast, etc) and each companion has 3 familiar types that are their favorite. Using familiars of those types increases the familiar's stats by 10%. So you want a sun, a moon and a star, all of different elements, all of compatible genuses. That's not even looking at the stats on a familiar, the abilities it can use, or how this all interacts with your allies. Heck, familiars even have different growth patterns, meaning that most of the familiars you used at the start of the game will peak around the middle and pretty much just stop getting stronger. Too bad there's no way of telling (without looking it up) what each familiar's growth type is. It would be a shame if that familiar you wanted to use ended up having terrible stats in the end game.

There's just so much going on that it's pretty difficult to put together whatever you personally would consider an ideal team. Instead you just end up using whatever you have sitting around, and you don't get any of that satisfaction of each familiar serving it's role. Certainly you can put together a well planned out team. Having so many mechanics does mean you have a lot of room to experiment and differentiate yourself from how someone else plays. I found that for the most part I just ended up not care about most the mechanics, though. I built a team around stats and abilities. I couldn't give a damn about astrological signs (and in fact, the game's hardest enemies don't even have signs). Yea sure, I fought a fire boss using a familiar weak to fire. It worked just fine. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the game lacks the simple elegance of Pokemon. In fact I can't think off hand of any RPG involving putting together a team which delivers less satisfaction than Ni No Kuni. Normally a game that offers this kind of long term planning and customization is my absolute favorite. Not this time, apparently.