Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch has an interesting history. A Level 5 collaboration with Studio Ghibli, resulting in the original Ni No Kuni on Nintendo DS systems. This version came with a seperate 340 page Wizards Compendium which was essential to the game. Using the same story beats came a much more grand PlayStation 3 version. The DS game never left Japan, which meant the only way to play this interesting studio team up was by the PS3, until now. After growing up a fan of Studio Ghibli movies it’s on a platform I can finally play! Now that we can play it anywhere on the Switch, has Ni No Kuni still got the magic?

You start off introduced to Oliver (or Ollie) of Motorville, who in the opening hour experiences a great loss that he accidentally played a part in when his mother passes away suddenly. Not long after, Oliver unwittingly releases a creature from a curse called Drippy who claims to be King of the faeries. Drippy’s world needs saving from an evil Djinn, and maybe the solution to Oliver’s problems are there also. Oliver finds himself whisked off to a magical parallel universe with Drippy and a Wizards compendium in tow. As with most RPGs you’ll be meeting new companions and exploring all kinds of different regions throughout your 50 hour plus journey. The game has a good story, the beginning of which takes on some pretty grim themes. But Oliver is still quite young, so the story and world is largely presented to fit that. Overall the story can feel familiar and after starting off so strongly it’s hard to live up to. Thankfully the presentation and the characters make it enjoyable enough that you care about what happens.

Ni No Kuni outside of combat is your usual third person 3D RPG. You’ll travel around a world map, delve into dungeons and solve some puzzles along the way. As a Wizard in training, Ollie will also need the spells he learns along the way to progress and help out people. This comes in the form of taking on errands/tasks from bulletin boards and helping people who are broken-hearted. Citizens suffering from a broken heart lack a particular emotion, and to be returned to normal you’ll need to work out what emotion can reverse the damage and restore it. This is done by finding someone who has an abundance of the positive emotion and asking to take a portion of it to share. It’s an interesting mechanic that suits the game.

Once you come across creatures out in the overworld or in dungeons you’ll enter into combat. This is a combination of turn-based and active combat. You control either Ollie or another party member and a small group of familiars. At the start of combat you can select who is going to be out fighting, and once the fighting starts you can freely move them around. To fight, defend, use an item or cast a spell, you need to select it from a command menu. When you’re using one of the commands a little timer will show up as you’re performing the action, and you can’t do anything else until it’s done (unless you cancel it).

Familiars are creatures who have joined your party, either through encountering them in the story or taming a wild creature. There is definitely a Pokémon/Digimon vibe to this, with different types of familiars with different strengths and weaknesses. The familiars can also level up and can evolve. Thankfully the active party members and familiars in the team all receive experience so you can help build up lower levelled familiars. There is a degree of strategy to how you use the familiars. They each have a timer on how long they can be out in battle before they need to be switched out. Be warned, your health and mana are treated as one shared pool instead of managing several health and mana meters. It’s handy in that it saves having to chuck healing spells and food at each familiar, but it does mean you need to be careful because when you get hit by a devastating attack the whole party is wiped out. Over the course of the game I found that the combat can quickly get boring after hanging around to grind for experience, or when parts of the story involve more fighting. The combat is enjoyable generally, but sometimes it can feel like you’re on autopilot to the next objective.

Instead of having to lug around a hefty tome to play the game, thankfully the Wizard’s compendium in the PS3 original was reproduced in game, and is the same in this version. The compendium doesn’t start with all the pages, throughout the game you’ll find lost pages that contain spells and other information. If you really want to get into the lore of the game there’s plenty to find in the Compendium. It can be slow to move around each page and zooming in to read both in handheld or TV mode, but it’s still worth checking out.

The cel shading visuals still looks really good. While they might not always translate well from 2D animation to 3D cel shaded models, it’s easy to overlook. Ni No Kuni is full of colour and beautiful locations, and despite not getting the 4K upgrade it looks great regardless what mode it’s in. One of the biggest draw cards to Ni No Kuni is Studio Ghibli’s involvement, and there are 2D animations made by them throughout the game. The animated scenes look great, and combined with the character designs and environments it’s easy to imagine this could have easily been a movie made by them. Side note, there was a No No Kuni movie released this year but not by Ghibli.

It was always going to be interesting to see how well this port performs. While the PS4 and PC get a remastered version, the Switch just gets a more plain release. That’s not to say this is a bad thing, the Switch isn’t capable of 4K visuals. Remastered or not, this Switch port is solid and even on the handheld it looks great. Frame rate might not be 60fps but it does just fine at 30, and even at 720p Docked this is still one of the more visually striking games I’ve played on the Switch.

One of the other more notable things to come out of the original PS3 release was the English localisation and voices. Although it’s safe to say this is almost for the thick Welsh accent of Drippy as he guides Ollie through his adventure. The voices and writing in general are enjoyable, and add a lot to make the characters so charming.

It’s not only the voice acting that sounds good in Ni No Kuni. Joe Hisaishi is a regular composer on Studio Ghibli movies and like the animated sequences you can’t mistake his music for someone else. It feels like you’re on a grand adventure, whether it’s quieter emotional moments, grand sweeping swells and everything in between. One of my favourite elements of Studio Ghibli movies has been the music and it’s one of my favourites here too.

It’s great to finally see Ni No Kuni on current platforms, even without the ‘Remastered’ addition to the Switch version. It looks, sounds and runs well and will keep you busy for 50 plus hours. If you missed out on this title the first time around, don’t sleep on it now.