The Most Beautiful Videogame COMING to America Early 2012!!!
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Ni no Kuni: Queen of the Holy White Ash Will Journey Out Of Japan In Early 2012
Gamespot were in attendance at a Sony Computer Entertainment conference in Tokyo, where Level 5 president, Akihiro Hino, reportedly announced an English release for the PlayStation 3 version of Ni no Kuni, an RPG developed in collaboration with the famed Studio Ghibli.
Ni no Kuni: Queen of the Holy White Ash’s story will start out the same as the Nintendo DS version’s, but will be told differently after the halfway point. Hino says Queen of the Holy White Ash’s story will continue after the DS version’s, and that the game will also have post-release downloadable content.
Ni no Kuni: Queen of the Holy White Ash will be released in early 2012. The game stars Oliver, a young boy who loses his mother to a mysterious illness and has to venture into an alternate world in the hope of saving her.
Check the websites who are praising the game's outstanding visuals.
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Originally posted by IGN
Many games here at Tokyo Game Show deserve the spotlight, but there's one in particular with so much promise it's hard not to love. An incredible collaborative effort between the game developers at Level-5 and the animation masterminds of Studio Ghibli, Ni No Kuni might just make us cry tears of sweet gaming joy.
I Think I Just Played the Prettiest Game On the PS3
What determines somebody's "best-looking" game on a system is a subjective thing. Some will prefer clean lines, others copious effects. Me, I can do without either if a game just has great art.
Level-5 and Studio Ghibli's Ni No Kuni on the PS3 has amazing art.
Given the contributions of Japan's most storied animation studio, you'd expect the game to look good, but even after all the trailers we've seen over the years I wasn't prepared for the actual game to look good. But it does. The lazy wandering around the world, the getting lost in a town, the menu screens, even the map, the entire thing looks gorgeous.
It helps that the game is displaying a level of polish reserved for the likes of the Uncharteds of this world. On the world map, for example, it's not just the immediate foreground that's highly-detailed; there's a criss-crossed coloured pencil effect that extends all the way to the horizon, making the entire game feel alive. It's the same in towns, with not just the main characters and locations well-modelled, but the whole settlement, from the front gates to the obscure little areas under the bridge most players will never even see.
The animation, too, is a delight, whether viewing half the world at a glance from the wandering map or getting right up close in a fight. You can see both the world detail and battle animation in the video to the left, which sadly was cut short by the most polite "push the guy's camera hand down and tell him to stop" move I've ever had the pleasure of receiving.
OH, AND IT PLAYS WELL TOO
Speaking of fighting, most of the conversation about this game up to now (and hey, even now) has been about how it looked, but not how it played. Which given the fact it's essentially a traditional JRPG could have been worrying.
But Ni No Kuni played as good as it looked. While fetch-quests and conversations are as per the genre, combat was surprisingly fluid and fun, the action presented not as a series of menus, but as a conversation.
When the battle begins (which is controlled in quasi-real-time), your avatar at the bottom of the screen begins to display little conversation bubbles around his face. Scroll through these (they slide around his face in a circular manner, so you can always see them) and you can do your standard things like attack, use magic, etc. It's the standard menu presented in a fresh and easy-to-understand manner.
Some commands and items are displayed with words, others - like changing party members - simply with icons or avatars, making them easy ot identify in the heat of battle. Again, when you strip it back it's not doing anything fundamentally different to a stodgy old menu system, but the way it's presented feels like a breath of fresh air.
Last week, Level-5 and Studio Ghibli's PlayStation 3 title Ni no Kuni: Shiroki Sehai no Joou finally got a Japanese release date - and a golden PS3 bundle, even. (The DS game, Ni no Kuni: Shikkoku no Madoshi was released in Japan last fall.) We saw some recent screens, too, but the most recent trailer for the PS3 game may make some of you envious of Japan (at least until the games come here). Even the video itself is a work of art.
Yes, Ni no Kuni: Queen of the White Ash looks gorgeous, but Studio Ghibli’s game is more than a pretty picture. It’s heartfelt story follows Oliver, a 13 year old boy, whose mother died in an accident.
Struck with grief, Oliver breaks down and cries. His tears fall on a doll his mother gave him, which suddenly comes to life. Shizuku reveals he is a fairy and a resident of another world called Ni no Kuni where it may be possible to revive his mother. Before Oliver can do that, he must defeat Jabo, a sorcerer who threatens the other world.
’ve often wondered how cel-shaded visuals would make the transition to the current generation of consoles, and have even played some titles like Tales of Vesperia on Xbox 360 which utilises a fairly subdued form of this technique.
Ni no Kuni on PlayStation 3 is one of the few games I know of which takes cel-shading to the next level in terms of detail, animation and overall artistic achievement.
Renowned animation company Studio Ghibli is responsible for Ni no Kuni’s stunning anime presentation, while Level-5 assumes the role of developer and publisher.
Games have been attempting to make us feel like we're exploring a living cartoon for a large part of the medium's history, and some have achieved spectacular results. The Wind Waker-style Zeldas seem more suited to their expressive, beguilingly childish look with every instalment. Level-5's colourful, lively worlds are often bursting with animated verve, whether in Dragon Quest and Rogue Galaxy's animé cel-shading or Professor Layton's more laid-back but equally distinctive style.
But collaboration with Studio Ghibli, the great powerhouse of Japanese animation, has taken the developer's already strong talent to a new level. You walk around in Ni no Kuni's world with the same air of wide-eyed amazement as the game's young protagonist, staring in astonishment at this beautiful alternate reality as a makeshift red cape billows around his narrow shoulders.
Ni no Kuni shares its overarching theme of childhood escapism with the studio's most famous films, Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbour Totoro) and Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away). Its premise is heartbreaking; 13 year-old Oliver is devastated by the sudden loss of his mother, and upon crying into a stuffed animal that she made for him, it comes to life, revealing itself to be a magical creature that leads him to a parallel world.
The PS3 on show at TGS demo offered two short scenarios to illustrate this lovingly-crafted new JRPG – a walk through a gorgeously rendered forest dotted with imaginative creatures, designed to demonstrate the battle system, and a short town quest where Oliver and Shizuku, an agitated little fellow who looks like a miniature Drowzee with a lantern hanging from his snout, must earn an audience with a king. The second gives a more rounded impression of what the game will actually be like when it arrives sometime next year.
It starts out in the overworld – a gorgeous, lushly colourful sprawl of green with windmills, copses of woodland, misty waterfalls and hills draped in drifting fog. Miniature towns and wildlife dot the map and Oliver runs around it as part of the landscape. The look and music are classic Ghibli – natural, imaginative and colourful.
