toblix

Ni No Kuni

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Anyone excited for this? At first I was like another japanese RPG whatever man, but then I heard that Studio Ghibli was involved, and I looked at the Quicklook over at Giant Bomb, and the game looks absolutely gorgeus. I think it has been out for a while on the DS, but is now coming to the PS3? Has anyone played it? How is it?

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The DS game never made it out of Japan - or at least, never to Europe. I have seen it though, at a friend's who imported it to practice his Japanese. It looked like a fun, if simple JRPG on that system. The PS3 version might be still better, no idea, but I'm hearing good things across the board.

And it does look very pretty.

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I'm actually really quite interested, i hear there's is alot of grinding :/ It's been out for a year already in Japan

It's got mostly positive reviews, polygon just put a review up today and gave it a 6.5 :unsure:

I loved Rouge galaxy and dragon quest 8 so i think i know what i'll be getting myself in for, although i'm not a jrpg fan by any stretch of the word

I don't have much spare time these days so a slow JRPG grindfest with lots of random battle encounters wouldn't really gel with my lifestyle....but i'm having some minor surgery in a couple of months and i'll have 2 weeks off work with nothing to do which would be perfect time to play this

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I've got it. Only spent ~3 hours with it, but loving it so far. Not counting wii & handheld devices (because I don't own 'em), it probably gets my vote of JRPG of this console generation. Which is maybe faint praise and/or based only on early impressions, but it's how I'm feeling about it so far.

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yeah rouge galaxy by French developer niveau cinq :P

I skipped through the first hour of the game on youtube, and it looked like an hour long cutscene/tutorial... but i suppose thats path of the course for jrpgs

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You guys of course realize that the collector's edition of this game is called the Wizard's Edition.

I enjoyed the demo, but I just know that I have no chance of finishing this game. I just can't do the 100-hour JRPG thing anymore. Maybe if I finally finish Xenoblade and get the craving again somewhere down the line.

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After listening to the Giant Bomb coverage, I was starting to get enthused to try out another JRPG after a long hiatus, but I don't have a PS3 :(

I guess I'll just go pick up Persona 3 for my PSP.

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I have the Wizards edition on preorder (the game's been delayed in europe).

Played the demo and it's suuuper pretty.

<3

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After listening to the Giant Bomb coverage, I was starting to get enthused to try out another JRPG after a long hiatus, but I don't have a ps3

It's worth buying a ps3 for uncharted 2 alone, I think even today playing that for the first time will blow your socks off. My ps3 just sits gathering dust these days. But I'll never forget that magically weekend me and drake spent together.

Do it! Its only a ton

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Sony-PlayStation-3-Slimline-160-GB-Charcoal-Black-Console-/271143755559?pt=UK_video games_video gameConsoles_video gameConsoles&hash=item3f216d5f27

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Several hours in, a hell of a lot of fun. The combat is a bit too grindy, with fastly respawning enemies. But otherwise it's a gorgeous looking JRPGish game in the vein of the big map world Final Fantasy type games. It's very highly polished, has a cute story that I'm interested in despite ripping off Harry Potter too closely, and has a lot of things going on with it.

The battle system itself is like Pokemon combined with a modern, realtime ish take on the classic JRPG battles. You collect, level up, and equip Pokemon like guys, which you switch out in battle in realtime to run around, selecting attacks to use against enemies. It's pretty neat and works well enough, and you can fortunately skip past a lot of the "end battle reports" and etc. since you'll be getting into battles A LOT.

So far though, definitive :tup:

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Are the battles in this random? My connection is too slow to view a gameplay video and that's really the deciding factor, here, because this game looks like the best.

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Are the battles in this random? My connection is too slow to view a gameplay video and that's really the deciding factor, here, because this game looks like the best.

No, you can see the guys on the map, try to run away or avoid them, or even sneak attack them if you get them from behind.

Trying to avoid wife aggro and not buy any games for a bit after the last steam sale. Kind of hard, because I simply love me some JRPGs.

Sorry to say, it's one of the best JRPG's I've ever played. While, right now with only 1 party member and a few hours in the battles are sort of grindy, well that's just a JRPG thing. But the bosses have been pretty friggen awesome and intense so far!

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I was hesitant about jumping into a 40+ hour game featuring what looks to be a lot of grinding and sidequests, but when I played the demo and saw how beautiful it was, and that Drippy the sidekick had a thick Welsh accent, I was sold.

It's a Day One Perch. Also, Wizards.

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just FYI, 17.5 hours in (just got 3rd party member) and some grindiness is showing (although that may be down to the way I choose to play and might not be strictly necessary to proceed), but my "best ps3/360 traditional jrpg" call still holds. Hey, squeenix, you could do (and let's face it, have done) a lot worse for Final Fantasy than taking a page from NNK and slapping a different skin on it. Just sayin'.

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I saw the quicklook and it got me in a JRPG mood, then I remembered that I had Dragon Quest VIII (by the same guys I think) sitting on my shelf virtually untouched. So I played it for a while yesterday and it completely put me off.

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Seen Sal play it for, like, the entire weekend (of billowing, sailing-on-the-seas-of-cheese music). The combat fills the gaps between movies, like a wall of slot machines one has to feed before advancing. The utter absence of any kind of inventiveness on the game play end is glaring. It feels like so much money went into this thing, the suits made damn sure there wasn't anything surprising going into the product. The side quests are fun. She likes it "even though it is tedious as fuck... and boring." She says she finds it "funny even though it is boring."

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i've only played it for maybe 3 hours, but it's overflowing with charm. it's so studio ghibli so far, where you're a very polite young child who is trying to help everybody out.

i had read that the actual gameplay was very much inspired by classic 90's rpgs, so i think i had a good idea of what i was getting into.

i'll take polygon's review with a lump of salt, i've only read a few but they all seemed to written with the intent to stir up a bit of controversy. i'll have to read it again once i get further into the game and see if they have a point

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The utter absence of any kind of inventiveness on the game play end is glaring.

I dunno, maybe it'll wear on me later, but the lack of inventiveness is part of what I find endearing; it's tugging all the same nostalgia strings that got me pouring hundreds of hours into ps1/ps2 era jrpgs. I think, as squeenix has shown, oftentimes trying something novel is just giving yourself the chance to screw something up badly. In a hypothetical ps3 environment where jrpgs were plentiful like back then, a lack of innovation might bother me more, but as it stands, it's the first jrpg I've liked in a long, long while.

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just FYI, 17.5 hours in (just got 3rd party member) and some grindiness is showing (although that may be down to the way I choose to play and might not be strictly necessary to proceed), but my "best ps3/360 traditional jrpg" call still holds. Hey, squeenix, you could do (and let's face it, have done) a lot worse for Final Fantasy than taking a page from NNK and slapping a different skin on it. Just sayin'.

Atlus does a bunch of really good stuff. Granted most of it hasn't come out on current Gen hardware and is more PS2/handhelds, but that is kind of where it seems most JRPGs are being published. That said this would have to be pretty good to knock down Tales of Vesperia from its #1 spot for me.

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I've been playing a bit of this game, and I'm about 10 hours in now.

Now that it has opened up a bit I'm starting to feel a bit overwhelmed by the 'familiar' system. I'm feeling the need to collect every one possible, and I worry about wasting time and items developing them improperly. I know that I need to get over this, but I'm finding it a bit paralyzing. I don't know if anyone else has had this experience.

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I've been playing a bit of this game, and I'm about 10 hours in now.

Now that it has opened up a bit I'm starting to feel a bit overwhelmed by the 'familiar' system. I'm feeling the need to collect every one possible, and I worry about wasting time and items developing them improperly. I know that I need to get over this, but I'm finding it a bit paralyzing. I don't know if anyone else has had this experience.

I've been collecting every one, but I just stuff them into storage as lvl 1's, only really putting serious time into levelling up a core 9 (I have a 3rd party member, don't know if you do yet) once I figured out which ones I liked (which to be honest, is based more on the way they looked than any rational assessment of their capabilities). And 3 of the ones I kept are ones introduced to you as part of the story (mite, esther's bird mage thing, the lemur/monkey thing).

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I figured out which ones I liked (which to be honest, is based more on the way they looked than any rational assessment of their capabilities).

That is probably what I'll end up doing in the end.

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So delighted when I got my second familiar and it still received experience when not used in battle. I had horrific visions of Pokemon-esque tactics of starting with a badly-matched and weak familiar just to level it up.

The Ghibli cutscenes are making me wish they'll produce a Ghibli film of this. I think my housemate would love it but there's no way she'll watch me play 40 hours of a RPG.

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