My opinion on Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch Remastered

Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch Remastered is a beautiful and enchanting JRPG that brings Studio Ghibli's magical animation style to life. The remastered version enhances the original game with improved visuals and smoother game play, making it more fun to play. The story follows young Oliver as he embarks on a heartfelt journey to save his mother, while encountering memorable characters and engaging in unique combat.

What also adds to the games fun is the use of familiars, which are monsters you can combat and capture to use as party members in battle, kinda like Pokemon. Familiars can evolve into a stronger forms after meeting certain requirements which adds to the joy of finding and obtaining all them.

The story is lighthearted and nothing insanely complex but it is enough to keep you engaged and interested to reach the end. The game's fantasy world, great soundtrack, and emotional depth make it a must play for fans of JRPGs and Studio Ghibli's works alike.

I am just blown away, the way the full feature anime cutscenes transition into game engine cutscenes, then again into gameplay itself is just amazing. When first loading up the game, I noticed "Studio Ghibli" and the quality of the artwork just clicked: I'm in for an fantastic story. I find it wild to be playing such a high quality anime game, I love the "Tales of ..." series but they don't hold a candle to this, but being put up against Studio Ghibli isn't fair.

A flawed gem of a game, that is held back mostly by its combat system and repetitiveness.
There's a lot of nuance in it, so I can't write just pros and cons.

So lets start with the elephant in the room
- You fully control 1 out of 3 characters, each can have 3 familiars (local pokemons) which do the fighting for you. During combat you can switch between them when you want. The characters that you don't control are given to AI and you have a very limited list of "strategies" that they can follow. Thankfully there are "don't do anything" and "don't use abilities" commands. Main problem is if you allow AI to use abilities, you will run out of magic points (MP) in a couple of fights and there will be a LOT of fighting, so what you do is block abilities and only allow them during boss fights or tougher enemies throughout most of the game, which limits you only to physical attacks.
- Since there are a lot of fights each time you'll go through the same cycle of a "transition flash", intro animation, battle, outro animation. It gets tedious and boring very fast, cause battles themselves don't provide much of a challenge or any skill expression. So you might "skip" them here and there and then you meet the boss, who will wipe the floor with you. But fear not if you fought the boss let's say at level 10 and got wiped, comeback at level 20 and now you will do the same to the boss. Grinding is how you "outskill" in this game, of course there are some cheese tactics that you can come up with, but usually just adding a couple of levels does the trick. Since your power is dependent mostly on your level and to a much lesser extent on equipment, you will have to choose your familiars early on and stick to them, unless you want to constantly regrind exp and level them up. There are some good places for that, but you must reach them first and know where they are to begin with (will probably have to look up a guide for this).
- Now it's not all bad, everything else about the combat is decent, the dumb AI and repetitiveness are the only 2 big downsides. Once you get used to it, it might be even ok, especially if you find a familiar you like. If only it had a system similar to Final Fantasy XII's gambits... oh well.

This one is easy, it's great, creates the mood for each location and fits well.

I like how they call local side-quests as errands, because that's what they mostly are. Another weak point of the game, you are quite literally an errand boy, you get normal rewards for completing these + stamps, that you can later redeem for quality of life upgrades. There are a lot of these and I wouldn't recommend skipping them, you'd still need that exp so might as well do something at the same time, instead of just mindlessly beating everything you see. I think if they were cut in half, ni no kuni would only end up being better. Some errands are actually quests though, so there's that too and you never know when you might be surprised.

I enjoyed the beginning and the end of the story the most, those are the best parts, though game seems to be catered more to pre-teen children, the way it's sometimes preachy and childish in its dialog can get annoying, on the other hand it has some subtle nods for adults too, though you need to actively look for them to see. Oh and the game has actual gambling in it with blackjack and witches... no, I'm not exaggerating, it's done surprisingly well though, I did enjoy that part and made some massive coin for items to buy. So is it really for pre-teens? :D

Aged well, because of the style devs chose, pleasant to look at. The line of sight is a bit short in the open world section, so you can see how distant objects change as you get closer, there's a visible radius where that happens, other than that it's great. Some forms of familiars look especially cool/fun (looking at you Captain Whamtastic).

Having said all that I did find the game enjoyable with all its flaws and in time it grew on me, so much so that I finished even the post-game content, which IMO you should do if you've completed the main game, cause it has some interesting lore in it and a bit of extra horse power.

And remember
♡ ∩_∩
| („• ֊ •„)♡
|￣U U￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣
| curiosity is the virtue
| required to save the world
￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣
7/10

Creature catching game with Studio Ghibli art design? What more could you want?! Play this GAME!!!

Gagafrumpist