Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch

[Glen-i]

59 minutes ago, MindFreak said:

Until you have to metamorph them to their final stage... I don't quite like how that resets the level completely.

 

16 minutes ago, Hero-of-Time said:

The ones I'm using are already in their final forms.

Never underestimate the lengths @Hero of Time will go to overlevel the stuffing out of his party.

[MindFreak]

24 minutes ago, Hero-of-Time said:

The ones I'm using are already in their final forms.

Oh, wow, yeah, then you should be fine, I guess! I still have to evolve a few to their final form but I only grind when I need to.

[Happenstance]

I was just considering getting this on Switch but looking through the shops I see that the remastered PS4 version is cheaper than the PS3 ported Switch version. It’s ridiculous.

Ive given up on the idea of playing it now and instead decided to dig my PS TV out, plug it into the projector and replay Persona 4 Golden 😆

[Hero-of-Time]

The last boss has been defeated and the credits have now rolled. 

I ended up finishing the game at level 79. The last exp boosting spot wasn't working that well and it took me ages to get what I needed to show up. I wonder if this final spot has been nerfed in this release? I'll have to have a look around to see if that is the case.

I'm not sure if I'll go for the platinum on this. I obtained it on the PS3 and I remember it being a massive grind for materials and familiars. After practically playing games non-stop all week, I'm starting to feel a little burnt out and I don't think I have it in me to go trophy hunting at the moment. Maybe something to pick away at, just like I done with Tales of Berseria.

Anyway, great game and fantastic port. Everything ran smoothly and looked great. The game really holds up well. Like with the Link's Awakening, I would have liked a lower price point, what with it being the same game and all. Unlike Link's Awakening, at least this ran well and I got a good 30 hours out of it, which will no doubt double up if I do eventually go trophy hunting. 

[Hero-of-Time]

I've been playing the game practically non-stop for the past two days. Yesterday it was all about grinding the materials I needed to complete the side quests. Some of these were an absolute nightmare. You had to first find golden enemies (randomly spawn) and then hope you can steal what you need off of them. You only get one steal per enemy and per battle, so if you didn't get the item you needed then it was back to square one. One set of items took me 3 hours to finally acquire. 

Once that was done I done a spot of exp grinding and then set about taking on all of the secret bosses and real final boss. Thanks to me being at max level, as well as having some great Familiars with me, I took it down pretty easily. Plus, like I always do in JRPGs, I hadn't used any of the stupidly OP potions, so if anything did go wrong I was well prepared. It's such a weird thing that a lot of JRPG players do. Find an Elixir? Never use it because you think you may need it further down the line.  

Today the real grind began. I had to capture/level up 250 Familiars and create 120 of the 134 items. This is what was a killer back on the PS3 and sure enough it was the same on this. It wasn't as bad as it was back then. This was due to the amount of faqs and guides on the game that are now out there. It did still take all day but after i'm glad I pushed through and got it done.

Doing all the item searching and side quests did highlight certain design flaws in the game. You get loads of spells to use but a lot of them only get used a couple of times while others get used constantly. The ones that get used all of the time really should have been passive abilities. Having to scroll through spells just to talk to a ghost or an animal was pretty annoying. The most tiresome of these spells is the one that allows you to see treasure chests scattered on the world map. You need to collect all 100 of these for a trophy but the problem is the spell only lasts about a minute. By the time you've made your way over to the chest the spell has nearly ran out. You then have to fire the spell back up again. Constantly going in and out of menus all of the time to achieve this is such a baffling decision. 

Anyway, the game is now done and dusted. I can now play something else tomorrow. 

[drahkon]

14 minutes ago, Hero-of-Time said:

That trophy picture sure is tidy, innit?  

Edited October 16, 2019 by drahkon

[MindFreak]

Golden enemy spawn? Never seen one in muy 36 hours with the game! They must be rather rare.

And then finding and capturing 250 familiars? That's insane - some of them take hours to just try to catch! I'm glad there is no trophy on Switch.

I'm at the part where I need to collect a new instrument for finally taking on Shadar.

[Hero-of-Time]

2 hours ago, MindFreak said:

Golden enemy spawn? Never seen one in muy 36 hours with the game! They must be rather rare.

They don't appear until you've finished the game. They drop rare materials needed for high end equipment which can be used for the post game quests. Some appear quite regularly but others can be a right pain to find. 

[MindFreak]

I beat Shadar this weekend but I'm feeling the fatigue setting in now. I really should finish the game and beat the true final boss but I hope that I don't have to grind too much to be able to defeat it - I'm currently at level 60, ish. 

I also don't know if I should include the new party member on my team or not. I don't like Swaine but don't want to spend time levelling the fourth member...

[Hero-of-Time]

On October 23, 2019 at 10:47 AM, MindFreak said:

I beat Shadar this weekend but I'm feeling the fatigue setting in now. I really should finish the game and beat the true final boss but I hope that I don't have to grind too much to be able to defeat it - I'm currently at level 60, ish. 

I also don't know if I should include the new party member on my team or not. I don't like Swaine but don't want to spend time levelling the fourth member...

You don't need to level him up. I never used him once during my PS3 or PS4 runs through the game.

[MindFreak]

And done! I went to the final part of the game yesterday evening, grinded a bit of Totocold or whatever it's called (took quite some time to make one appear but then I got three) and went to the final boss. The first part of the boss nearly beat me, as I was suddenly having two fallen allies and almost no time to wake them. But the next two phases were fine but slow. 

Overall, it's a really good game with a great story and atmosphere. The familars are so-so, I didn't really care about them and didn't really want to catch the ones I missed. The battles had their faults, they tried to be a mix of real-time and turn based and it just didn't really work that well. Often I found that the enemy's attack was too fast for me to take a defensive stance or I had just started loading an attack as well. It made me feel like I wasn't in control. Furthermore, the AI definitely had its problems: I quite often found that Swaine wasn't attacking at all, just standing there and watching. I also made the mistake of giving both of them tanks (Lumberwood and Monolith) and they always switched to those during battles even for regular enemies - they dealt 1 HP damage per attack. They also drained their own mana which I of course could disable but that was also problematic because sometimes I would actually need their mana. Overall, I think the game would have benefitted from giving the player more control in a quieter setting somehow but I understand the need for distancing from Pokémon battles.

Furthermore, i think the game could have ended after beating Shadar.

Last, I experienced some errors (maybe 8-10 in the 50 hours I spent with the game), causing the game to close. I seldom lost more than 10 minutes of game time but at one occasion I lost a familiar I had catched that wasn't easy to catch. I hope this is addressed in an update but I don't think it will be.

Despite these niggles, I enjoyed the game very much. I even did most of the errands and bounty hunts because I think the rewards for doing so were good.

If you want a good JRPG - that isn't as long as the usual - this is a good call.

Edited October 27, 2019 by MindFreak

[Hero-of-Time]

43 minutes ago, MindFreak said:

Last, I experienced some errors (maybe 8-10 in the 50 hours I spent with the game), causing the game to close. I seldom lost more than 10 minutes of game time but at one occasion I lost a familiar I had catched that wasn't easy to catch. I hope this is addressed in an update but I don't think it will be.

This was a big reason why I went with a version on another platform. A few reviews mentioned this issue and it's sad that the game is still suffering from hard crashes after launch. Baffles me that they couldn't port a PS3 game without this issues.

Anyway, glad to see you finished the game and enjoyed your adventure. 

[darksnowman]

*uses Phoenix Breath on thread*

I added Ni No Kuni to my Switch collection the other year but didn't have time to properly get into it as I was juggling a few games at the time like Breath of the Wild, Dragon Quest Builders 2 and Pokémon Shield as far as I remember. In the last week or so I've been giving it some attention and made a decent amount of progress, picking up from leaving the opening area of Ding Dong Dell until just getting the travel spell.

The travel spell is something I would have appreciated having sooner, and in fact, since it hadn't come, I just figured there was going to be no fast travel in this game--especially since for a while, I thought those manholes by restore points would be used for fast travel but they ended up being pick up and drop off points for familiars. Really glad to have the travel spell now as it means quests can be done much quicker rather than traipsing back and forth between areas as I had been doing. It feels like the game is opening up to me now.

Something I think would be useful (maybe it becomes available later) is tents/ cabins/ cottages to heal up when you're out and about on the overworld map. The areas aren't big so you're never too far from a town and the Cat's Cradle Inn, but some encounters leave you in a bad way. This is supposed to be an easy game but I've had more than my fair share of game overs as it doesn't pull any punches when you pitch up in a new area or reach a boss. I've died to every boss so far, checked online if there's a strategy I don't know about, only to see I'm usually about ten levels above the recommended and yet still toiling away! So it seems that MP restore items are the most valuable thing as burning through all my MP only takes off about a quarter of bosses health bars. Rough! 

This is a really well put together game, though. Towns are all unique and the dialogue is brimming with personality, and, imo, they went above and beyond with the Wizard's Compendium. I just wish the locket was bottomless like the bottomless bag so you could store more than one emotion fragment at a time as it's not easy to remember where to go back to take heart to get a refill. It's good that the mini-map highlights people that are relevant to sidequests. 

When playing, my mind can't help but wander back to the likes of Dragon Quest VIII, IX and Fantasy Life when Level-5 seemed like they were coming into their own as a force in the RPG realm.