#ni no kuni dominion of the dark djinn

[the-soupgoblin]

I need yall to know that I am obsessed with this man

The sillyyyyy <3

[catastrophicarts]

damnatio memoriae

[lyney-mp3]

-͟͟͞☆ ni no kuni 1 stimboard ! ♡ requested by no one . . . self indulgent !

( 🍂🍂🍂 | 🍂🌱🍂 | 🍂🍂🍂 )

[grizzlytreyu]

Ni No Kuni oc

Charlotte or Maria(マリア)

Age:13-14

Ethnicity:Half Chamoro, half French

Sexuality:Bi

Charlotte is a socially awkward, mellow, and humble young lady who is always self aware of what she does but would usually keep her sadness to herself. when she starts to feel unwell explicitly, she would brush it under the rug to tell them that she is fine and dandy. That would change when Oliver gives her ‘Honesty(in which its not in the game btw). She had been familiar with Ollie and the others such as Phill, Myrtle, and Denny ever since she first moved to Motorville.

[nenukoone]

ive had these two designs for a bit and just didnt post them here so hi tumblr you get my dotdd au desgisn i guess

A prince and the one he left for dead

[horsebeast]

Ni No Kuni: Dominion of the Dark Djinn - The Wizard's Companion

[sweetpea-sprite]

manna designs for micah and nicky... i do truly believe we should've gotten manna micah in wotww over Porco Three but manna nicky is just for funsies

[incorrect-ninokuni]

Swaine: So, given Marcassin’s attraction to Micah-

Marcassin: How did you know that?!

Swaine: I can see.

[forbodium]

THAT'S IT THAT'S THE GAME

[clinketyclank]

[sugarroseparfait]

thank u emulator drippy 💖

[the-soupgoblin]

Hey ni no kuni fans do any of yall remember this pirate girl from dotdd??

Shes literally so cute why wasnt she in White Witch???? /j

[catastrophicarts]

art nouveau marcassin

[jrpg-jukebox]

Main Theme - Ni No Kuni: Dominion of the Dark Djinn

Joe Hisaishi

[downtroddendeity]

@turnkeyassurance saw your tags and figured I'd take the opportunity to pause my descent into madness to give my more sober opinions on the Ni no Kuni franchise, lol. (Warning: I am a humongous JRPG nerd)

The NNK games are really odd ducks, quality-wise. You can call either one a good game or a bad game and call either one better than the other, and any combination of those opinions can be something I think is entirely justified. Both of them have things they do remarkably well and also serious, profound, deal-breaking flaws, and the really weird thing is that there's almost no overlap between those two lists for the two games. What clicks and doesn't about both of them is going to be deeply individual.

What Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch does, with resounding success, is Vibes. It sets out at every single step with the goal of being a playable Ghibli movie, and it sticks to that principle. It's all about beautiful, cel-shaded whimsy. It's a game for people who want to feel like they're wandering through the meadows in the movie version of Howl's Moving Castle. There are lots of puns, and you can befriend all the random encounter monsters and feed them ice cream.

But that's also its Achilles' heel: because it's dedicated entirely to imitation, it has trouble bringing things to the table that are really its own. It has the visual and narrative aesthetics of Hayao Miyazaki's films, but it doesn't have the raw emotion at the heart of them. And as a game, its mechanics combine the clunkiest features of menu-based combat and action RPGs, and while everything about the Pokemon-esque mechanics seems designed to encourage players to collect and experiment with them, the balancing turns attempting to do that into a miserable grindy nightmare.

The other problem is that it... isn't actually the first Ni no Kuni game. Wrath of the White Witch is, in fact, a remake of the Nintendo DS game Ni no Kuni: Dominion of the Dark Djinn, which was never released outside Japan. The reason for this is pretty easy to explain, because DDD had another gimmick besides its aesthetics: it came with a real-life physical copy of the wizard spellbook, and the player had to look things up in it and draw sigils on the DS touchscreen to cast spells. So, we've got a high-effort remake that had to completely cut the central mechanic... and which also expanded the plot so that the original main villain was no longer the primary antagonist. This results in a game with what is very clearly a final dungeon and very clearly a final boss and very clearly a resolution to the story, which suddenly has a completely different plot dropped on it like a fucking anvil that it expects you to be just as invested in even though it hasn't had anything like the same level of buildup.

And ironically, this is almost the exact opposite of the biggest problem with Ni no Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom, a.k.a. the one with my new blorbo, the President of the United Union of Eagleland. 2 is an effort to try to cement an identity for the series that can be its own, rather than requiring them to depend indefinitely on borrowed Miyazaki nostalgia. It just has the teeny-tiny, itsy-bitsy problem that at some point in development it had a budget shortfall so bad that you can finish the game without ever realizing that there is a continent-sized crashed interdimensional spaceship on the world map.

This game has had a machete taken to it. Don't get me wrong, I genuinely respect the work they did to make what they could with what they had, but you can see the signs of massive scope cuts to literally every aspect of the game. The back half of the game has almost exclusively recycled enemy and environment assets; voice acting has been trimmed down to canned voice clips; the catboy protagonist's ears and tail are barely animated; one minigame was so inadequately playtested that a level 16 mission is massively harder than level 50 ones; and while whatever restructuring they had to do to the main plot still left the final version with a more solid and coherent central arc than WWW in my opinion, it also left a lot of truly gaping plot holes, like oh, I don't know, why the President of the United States got turned into a 19-year-old.

Literally, they just. Entirely forgot to explain that. Half the DLC is just the writers scrambling to fix stuff like that and add a bunch of character development that should have been in the base game.

However, despite all this, I personally enjoyed NNK2 more than NNK1 unironically, not just for Rolandposting reasons. Compared to the first one, it plays much more smoothly as a straight action RPG, and while it can't provide the same knock-your-socks-off aesthetic cohesion, to me it seemed a lot more heartfelt- that is, like a game that was made because people had a story they wanted to tell.

But, well, we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the non-unironic reasons, because the story they really, genuinely wanted to tell was about a magical catboy growing up and learning to become a leader, and somehow, miraculously, they really thought that was the story I was here for too when they opened the game with the President of the United States being isekaied by Nuke-kun.

Sorry, guys, I have a crippling addiction to dramatic irony and my day job is tech work in local politics, you could not have more laser-targeted this at making me specifically laugh my ass off if you tried.

[thetisming]

explain your reasoning in tags if you want!!!