Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch

I have a sore face from grinning, I feel nauseous from over-excitement and my shoulders and legs hurt from sitting in the one position on the couch for a week. I was worth it, though, so worth it. The feeling I’m left with is sort of disconcerting. I genuinely believed I would never feel this way about a game again. I’m generally very optimistic when it comes to new games but it’s been many years since I’ve  felt this way about a title and over a decade since I’ve experienced a JRPG as good as this.

I don’t think Ni No Kuni can be reviewed with any other focus than as a Japanese role playing game. If you don’t like JRPGs then even the beauty, quality and depth of Ni No Kuni is unlikely to change your mind as it’s very much in the tradition of the genre. But within that genre this might be the greatest title yet, even dethroning Final Fantasy VII. When you think of the genre there are several elements that almost all games within it share. Ni No Kuni raises the bar in every single area – story, visuals, sound, music, voiceover, characters, dialogue, settings, map, customisation, skill development, magic abilities, inventory, items, battle mechanics, enemy design and side quests. In every respect Ni No Kuni builds on and outshines what we’ve seen before.

On top of all this there is an incredible bonus that few can have anticipated: the humour. The dream team of Studio Ghibli and Level 5 have cleverly combined saccharine sweet characters and concepts with a select bunch of cheeky bastards. Our protagonist Oliver’s lovely nature and use of words like “neato” and “jeepers” is constantly offset by his companion – a soft toy/fairy called Mr Drippy. You may have heard that he’s got a bit of a welsh accent and says funny things but that doesn’t really cover it. Firstly his accent is intentionally outrageous and everything he says is laugh out loud funny. He takes the piss out of Oliver for crying about his dead mother and he deadpans an explanation of a quest that involves being fired into Drippy’s mother’s mouth from a canon to retrieve babies from her belly, who are too comfy to come out (she also has an outrageous Welsh accent). Another character, a supposed “Great Sage” calls everyone boring and an idiot. When Oliver’s wide eyed and good-hearted companion, Esther, expresses enthusiasm and gratitude when the Great Sage offers to pass on some spell incantations, he turns his gaze upon her and proclaims her “rather annoying”.  I wasn’t surprised in the least to see a cat on the throne in Ni No Kuni as this is a common trope in a Level 5 games. Kingly cats are very much the norm. However after making the acquaintance of His Meowjesty in one kingdom I was delighted to be granted an audience with Her Moojesty in the next realm I visited. This is a game that invented the expression “tidy slide” for a woman’s front bottom – an expression I will be using forthwith. You’ll even get to “take a ride on a tidy slide”. It just doesn’t get any better than that.

There hasn’t been a moment of Ni No Kuni that I haven’t enjoyed and each moment is better than the last. You get so used to being able to list your top favourite games that over the years that they just start to trip off the tongue without even thinking about it. Years can go by without a new title being added to that “all time” list. It’s like when you forget to change the year when you date things in January or tick the wrong age box because you think you’re still 23. Ni No Kuni just swans past some of my most treasured gaming experiences to the top of the list. It’s a wonderful feeling but kind of shocking.