Ni no Kuni Wrath of the White Witch Remastered Review
The winter is nearly here, and it’s about time we dive deep into Ni no Kuni. The Japanese developers Level-5 teamed up with QLOC for the remaster and ready to take us back to Oliver’s journey to another world to save his mother and stop the beckoning evil. With over 100 hours of gameplay filled with great side missions and a beautiful storyline, Ni no Kuni invites every gamer to be a part of the journey.
Ni no Kuni Wrath of the White Witch Remastered Review
If you ask me, Ni no Kuni franchise has what I would call my dream come true JRPG games. Whole franchise is just represented with beautiful artwork and colour palette. Studio Ghibli’s magic touches that made many of us fell in love with the Japanese art style is ridiculously consistent throughout the series. Imagine watching My Neighbour Totoro and suddenly you are in control of the movie. Back when Studio Ghibli started working on games in mid-2000’s the exact Studio Ghibli art wasn’t there due to hardware limitations. But when the Ni no Kuni Wrath of the White Witch came out in 2011 they showed the world how would it feel to control a Studio Ghibli movie. With the help of veteran game developer studio Level-5, Ni no Kuni made it possible to attract non-JRPG fans to the world of crazy Japanese RPG games. Especially with the Revenant Kingdom -the last entry of the franchise that came out on PS4 sold more than 2.8 million copies. We can keep talking about the series success but we have a remaster to talk about.
Ni no Kuni Wrath of the White Witch Remastered is one of the cutest games you can play packing countless hours of fun. Diving deep into the characters’ storylines while following our hero Oliver can be a huge joy. The number of characters to explore is incredible. Sometimes many triple A games can suffer from scourge of scale but Wrath of the White Witch proves otherwise. Every interaction feels worthwhile because of the beautifully written dialogues. The combat still feels a bit clunky but that’s about the original game, nothing that can be handled through a remaster. I’m not really sure if it’s the controls that feel clunky or the combat mechanic itself but I’m pretty sure I felt like this back when I played the original.
Speaking of combat, the control mapping is great. With the help of Steam acknowledging nearly every controller as an Xbox controller makes it so much easier. I played the game both with a Logitech F710 controller and an Xbox One controller. Both felt perfect and I had no issues that would make my gameplay experience go bad. Some of the early Steam reviews pointed out that some people had minor bugs while booting up the game, but I’ve never experienced one.
Critic Consensus
Ni no Kuni Wrath of the White Witch was one of the best JRPGs of the last generation and it is even better now running at 60fps with the remaster. Seeing the beautifully crafted landscapes on greater resolutions and 60 fps is what makes Ni no Kuni a worthy time and money investment. There has never been a greater time for players who missed out on the first game to play it. It was pretty common for a lot of players to miss it because it was a PS3 exclusive for nearly 8 years. But now that it is on PC, PS4 and Switch, it is time to finally grab it. I promise you that you will be hooked. Keep in mind though, the pace of the game starts out really slow.
When it comes to PC, the game runs nicely even on the aged systems. My own laptop is pretty aged but it was able to run it at 720p 60fps. I know 720p sounds a bit weird in 2019 but considering the original game on PS3 was running at 720p 30fps, I consider this a win. The PC remaster was handled by QLOC. The company is known for making either great ports or the worst ports ever. Even though the disastrous PC remaster for Dark Souls they made last year got them a huge backlash, Ni no Kuni remaster runs smooth as butter. Aside from all the pros I’ve counted for the remaster, there is a little con. The cutscenes. They are probably taken from the original game because all of them runs at 30 fps. I don’t know if there are any fixes to this but it feels a bit off switching back and forth between 30fps and 60fps.
