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2011-09-25

Ni no Kuni - More Gameplay Videos from TGS



I promised to show more gameplay videos of Ni no Kuni from the Tokyo Game Show, and these two videos are absolutely perfect, and quite lengthy, too.  I'm interested in hearing your impressions.

The game follows the old school RPG formula, with a few interesting wrinkles like day/night.  When I see that, I'm obviously thinking of Minecraft.  Will players have to battle monsters at night?  That would be cool.  I wonder if I could chop down those trees and build a house?  Yeah, then I could build a train station and lay down some tracks, so I can get to....ah, whoops, wrong game.

The combat looks very interesting.  This is an area where RPG game mechanics haven't changed in 25 years.  It appears that instead of directly fighting, your characters can send pets who will do the fighting for you.  Shades of Pokemon, but also the great Phantasy Star Online, and it does raise a lot of possibilities.  Will you have to train your pet?  Can they be bred and grown?  Can they evolve into new forms?  I think this could be the key element that could enable Ni no Kuni to break out from a very old and tired genre.

Yes, I know that Ni no Kuni has already been released for the Nintendo DS in Japan, but I haven't seen it, so I'm choosing to follow the PS3 version as a new video game.  I'm looking forward to the surprises.  Until then, I have Saturn, Dreamcast and Minecraft to keep me happy. But, hey, that's me. Enjoy the videos!

3 comments:

Stephen Smoogen said...

Video of the game starts at 3 minutes in. I was worried for the first 30 seconds of the first video.. nothing happened. Then the guy began moving. The poor fellow in the middle looks like he wants to escape badly.

I really wish I understood enough Japanese to know what they were saying.

Anonymous said...

I know this is a bit off topic, but do you think we could return to our Future Boy Conan Blogathon; I'm really curious to see what you think of the episodes directed by Isao Takahata who seems to be your favorite of the bunch.

Daniel Thomas MacInnes said...

Yeah, don't worry. I will get off my lazy ass and finish the second half of the Future Boy Conan essays. I've just been stuck for so long because, frankly, I don't know what else to say, not without repeating myself endlessly. I'll just have to muscle my way through it.

In any event, it's good to know there are Future Boy Conan fans out there. I'll be sure to get back on that.

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