Ni No Kuni just never clicked for me in a way that Metacritic told me it would. The animation from Studio Ghibli and score from Joe Hisaishi are obvious highlights but as the budget starts to run dry, those gorgeous hand drawn sequences disappear (as does the voice acting) and the soundtrack becomes virtual instruments instead of live. The disparity between the artistic highs and lows of the game are hard to ignore, and this is all without mentioning how overlong the experience is; It takes a strange amount of time before the idea of catching Familiars (Ni No Kunis take on Pokémon) is even mentioned, and meeting the full team that you will spend the entire game with takes even longer. The difficulty spikes are often brutal, and many of the pacing choices a bit baffling. Eventually, Ni No Kuni does get its teeth into you and insists you stick around to see some of the secrets and challenges that the world has to offer, but generally this became tiresome for me and I was well ready to see the end of it by hour 40 or so.