Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch for PlayStation 3 Reviews by Gamers

Ni no Kuni has the parts of a masterpiece, but it's not. The story is compelling when the reader is not being overwhelmed with unnecessary and often telegraphed dialogue. The art is mostly beautiful, but the pastels, and a horrid duck tree ("tree face"), make the expansive open world bland. These shortcomings are very disappointing because Ni No Kuni has a fun Pokemon-like battle system and great Pokemon-like creature collection to go along with a variety of quests, gear, spells, and weapons. The menus and creature information pages are gorgeous and informative. So many components impress in Ni no Kuni, but the art is inconsistently beautiful and the delivery of a compelling story is not something I can gloss over.

There was a lot of hype to this game, & while I wasn't one of the googly-eyed minions waiting with my mouth ajar letting drool down to the floor, I will say that I decided to get this because I thought that there were not enough RPGs fro the PS3. This does not meet the requirements however to be considered "great" in my opinion.

First it's playable. It isn't really replayable and it lacks quite a few cognitive measures that would make a great RPG. My reasoning lies in the facts that:

A) It's a rehashed Pokemon game system. There are games that have familiars in them that do more than a few "tricks" and capturing your enemies after you beat them to a pulp? Sound familiar? That's because it was started a 10+yrs. ago. There is no depth to this system by the way; you beat it up and it randomly decides that after you beat the living daylights out of it that it wants to give you it's eternal soul. Meh.

B) It's slow to build and incorporate features that really didn't require such. A specific battle skill for instance is learned after the battle where it would have been really useful to use to begin with. It is almost as if it's taunting you with the status of being unable to do something and then three minutes later once you win giving you the ability to do what you wish you could have done ten mins. prior. Meh.

C) Character specializations don't really shine for a very long time. The third character you acquire has a specific skill that really is not useful for most of the game. This is true for other chars. as well.

The musical score is good, not great, good, and the graphics are expected, not astounding, just expected. It is not seamless between animated scenes ( as per hype ) and probably would have been better shaded in my opinion. It gets a 7 because of how few competitors it has not because of it's inherent genuine genius. Even the story is a rehashing of the age old "Death = Hero for Revival" trope. It gets better as you go but I admit I just was n