Ni No Kuni is frustrating. It has a lot going for it, with the skeleton of a solid JRPG and the heart and soul of a Ghibli project. The latter is irrefutably its greatest strength and claim to fame. Every animated cut-scene is breathtaking, the story is solid (if immature) with some touching flourishes toward the back end, the world is beautiful and full of life, and the monsters are all wonderfully designed. I’ve seen some people complain about the ending, but I personally feel that the end-game and post-game are some of the most satisfying parts of the game both lore-wise and gameplay-wise, though the game’s charm is thickest in its first act meeting Oliver and exploring Ding Dong Dell. This is partially because everything is new and exciting, but also because there are significant gameplay flaws that only worsen the experience as the game goes on.

I’ve said Ni No Kuni has “the skeleton of a solid JRPG,” but unfortunately there’s no meat, no connective tissue, no brain as it were. The systems should work. It’s a creature collector, a genre I love, and the creatures are well-designed. It blends real-time combat with a pause function, and real-time with pause is my favourite system in CRPGs; this should translate. The movement and combat progression is paced well, and the merit reward system gives potent rewards that incentivize side quest progression. The most enjoyment I had with the game was breaking and then interfacing with it at a high level in the post-game, making it indistinguishable from, say, mindlessly grinding Pokemon. Unfortunately, that fact speaks to my core gripe with the game: it’s not fun!

Ni No Kuni is an exercise in tedium. Everything about it is tedious: overworld and interior navigation, creature collecting (!), regular fights, boss fights, and especially achievement completion. Until flight is obtained Oliver navigates the overworld at a glacial pace because movement speed is low and encounters are plentiful, and the activation of flight itself takes about 3 seconds. This same problem hampers interior navigation as well; that wouldn't be a problem if the interiors were all as interesting as Ding Dong Dell, but the cities are small and the dungeons are linear with few secrets or challenges that reward exploration. Conversely, the familiars are all interesting, but the tame system relies on pure RNG and is therefore annoying and needlessly grindy. This goes hand-in-hand with the evolution system, which resets familiars to level 1 and necessitates grinding or benching until they catch back up to the level of play. These are extensions of a generally flawed combat system that looks fine at a glance but feels wonky. The spell progression doesn’t feel powerful until well into the game, and the Unleash spell feels next to useless at the point it’s unlocked. An average fight one may even be overleveled for can take entire minutes because every enemy is a hitsponge and the time to kill is ridiculously inflated, and boss fights take these issues to the absolute maximum.

Not only do bosses have insane health pools and do insane damage, but they employ attacks capable of wiping an entire team with ~2 second block windows. Successfully defending is a feat itself, because if the player isn’t locked in a spell or item animation or watching a health bar slowly raise from the effect thereof, they have to navigate a clunky radial menu in real time. I personally acquired a Catastroceros as soon as possible to completely trivialize the following 30 hours of gameplay so that I would not have to engage with this system again. That’s a shame because some of the bosses in the late-game are actually cool, but the cool ones only start popping up in the last 10% of the game or so. The main antagonist for much of the story is the first to feature even a second phase! In fact, his third phase is the coolest fight in the game, because it evolves and experiments with the established scale and mode of combat. This is emblematic of a larger issue with Ni No Kuni made blatantly apparent in its last hours: the game is too scared to take risks until it’s far too late.

As I’m wont to mention, I like to get achievements in games. I set out, as I always do, to 100% Ni No Kuni, defying the protest of all my friends who watched me grapple with the game’s many flaws in real time. I eventually settled on 31/33, not because the remaining achievements are difficult to complete but because they are overwhelmingly tedious. In fact, every achievement not related to the story is, and many of them involve delving into the post-game. The bosses near the end of the game may still be over-tuned, but they evolve on the established model. The bosses in the post-game take this a step further, subverting the established modes of engagement learned during the game proper, and that’s cool! The same is true of the side-quests; before the post-game, the side-quests mostly consist of fetch quests, kill quests, or telegraphed Take Heart / Give Heart usage. In the post-game, the side-quests experiment on this formula and push the gameplay mechanics to their limits in fun and novel ways. This even extends to story beats! There isn’t a genuine character growth moment until the lead-up to the penultimate boss, but that moment is probably the single most powerful in the whole game. I have no idea why all of these genuinely fun and interesting ideas got pushed back to the end and post-game, because if I wasn’t a completionist I likely would not have experienced most if any of them.

For most of the game I thought Ni No Kuni would work better if it was boiled down into a 2 hour film, because the gameplay was far too tedious and the story beats and anime cutscenes too few and far between. Now I think it was really just a bit of fine tuning away from being a genuinely classic JRPG. The heart is there: the story is good, the art is very good, the concept is great, and the mechanics do what they’re supposed to. All it needed was an adjusted time to kill, controlled taming attempts, a more forgiving evolution system, some numbers tweaked, and some of the fat trimmed to streamline the actually interesting content. Bosses were given inflated numbers and made to punish slow reflexes where they should have had second phases or unique mechanics that play with established gameplay expectations like Shadar and The Guardian of Worlds do. Hell, that difficulty could have been shifted to transform rare showcases for singular telegraphed spells into puzzles actually required some thought or creativity. Unfortunately, Ni No Kuni is best remembered for what it could have been instead of what it is: a frustrating, unfun game that’s nice to look at.