One of the most important things in games, even if you can understand the game, is figuring out how the interface works, which will be the topic for this update.
A quick visit to Google Translate and...
1.Walkthrough [WTH0001].
Alright, that's what I'm talking about...
So we boot up the game, and get a Japanese equivalent of that annoying MPAA message that pops up on movies... Let's skip past that...
And a trippy intro scene with weird looking art, beams and sigils of light. Glimpses at the characters and settings. Some kinda shrill flute music. Credits in Japanese... Droolworthy Ghibli animated scenes... So far so good.
There's only one tab on the screen now... Er... Let's press "A."
Some sort of warning screen or whatever... Skipping...
Opening.
- Kicks off the story of a young boy, Oliver. Who lived in Hottoroito.
Mostly accurate... We saw a bit of a small, distinctly Eaglelandish town and Oliver run down a sidewalk and pick up some groceries. Except the sign says "Hotroit"... What kind of town name is Hotroit anyways?
Nice soothing music... Now how do I save...?
Well... All of the buttons except the D-Pad seem unresponsive, let's try Start...
We're at a pause menu. Pressing Start again just takes us back... Let's try again...
There's an option to press X... Let's do- Oh. Two options. Well, if playing MOTHER 3 has taught me anything about Japanese, it's that "No" is 3 kana and "Yes" is two. So let's hi-
... Okay, so at least we learned how to quit...
One repeat of the opening cutscene later:
ホットロイトの町Hottoroito Town.
Or Hotroit, for all you picky folk.
- Walk to the right to talk to us, "Mark" マーク.
Seems straightforward enough. But that's mostly because I can SEE Mark up the street.
- Walk back to the left. Back home in her memory, we are prepared to do.
Well, the map has a lovely arrow pointing down the opposite direction I just went, so this seems accurate too. If garbled.
Walked down the street of this lovely Small Town USA ripoff and talked to a couple NPCs... Unlike Mark, they don't get VAs. World's a little linear, at least for now. Oliver's neighbors are apparently antisocial jerks that have their front lawns gated, and Oliver realizes that he overshot his house if you try to run down the block.
Let's actually go IN the house now... Looks nice, and there's a set of stairs. Going up them will reveal two bedrooms, which at the moment have a whopping NOTHING to loot. Not sure if Oliver is supposed to be a goody two-shoes, or if Level 5 was just lazy at facilitating traditional JRPG klepomaniacal tendencies. Alright, let's now go to where the game actually WANTS us to go, the downstairs room to the left of the stairs. (Geez, Oliver's house seemed a LOT bigger than this on the outside...) Which takes us to a living room... With nothing to loot... At least there's a junky old TV in a corner, so Oliver is at least getting Saturday morning cartoons and infomercials. Following the next arrow takes us to... The kitchen, with Oliver's mom busy cooking or washing dishes... Or something... This sound effect is kinda ambiguous. (So who was the old gray-haired lady up front then? Neighbor? Or...) And Oliver just got a sandwich... So I guess his mom wasn't cooking. Whelp, looks like there's one JRPG tradition that Level 5 is keeping alive... Oliver's dad is nowhere to be seen.
Event.
- The story began when Mark Oliver meeting a middle of the night to get the car up until the invention. Oliver's mother accidentally died soon after, the mother of Oliver doll ever made. Turned into a demon. "Su Chi Kung," The ghost has delivered a private letter to Oliver's Forums. By saying that this book will make Oliver. You can travel to parallel worlds. Oliver, the world will soon find the people of this world in ways that differ from It was a world of it. Also, there is a way to revive the mother of Olympic women's as well.
... You lost me at "Oliver's Forums." Let's see what happens. Aside from the obvious of Oliver being out one sandwich-maker in the near future.
So we ditched mom and ran to a house... Looks like it's ours again. Oliver more or less passes out on the bed (looks like the one closer to the stairs is his) and we get prompted to pick between yes and no by the game again...
Hmm... Let's go with "Yes."
And YAY! We finally saved! The save menu's actually kinda neat, it keeps a running clock of how long you've had your cart running, down to the number of seconds.
Anywho, moving on...
Oliver is sneaking out of the house at night... IIRC, it's supposed to be over some dumb go-kart. Let's press on.
So Oliver snuck out to Mark's garage. The latter apparently told some spying neighbor girl to butt out and go to sleep already. He pulls the covers off and... Okay there is NO way that he built that thing by himself! It's got some sort of weird 1930s racing car aesthetic + that weird roof with the fins that some glorified go-karts at American county fairs have. Mark and Oliver pushed the thing out a ways during a short-ish cutscene... Is the thing even motorized? Music seems a bit tense... Guess Oliver's mom is kicking the bucket pretty fast...
Mark and Oliver do a fast game of Rock, Paper, Scissors... And it looks like Mark wins... Only he's too tall to fit into his yellow and orange deathtrap... Looks like we win by default!
Meanwhile... Oliver's mom just had a premonition of Oliver being in trouble (gee, with that deathtrap, I wonder) and finds what is apparently a last minute will letter from Oliver on her bed. She checks up on our room, and discovers that we're kinda not there. She then gets a little worried and shouts for us in different rooms of the house before running out.
Oh, so the thing IS motorized. Oliver dons a football helmet for some half-hearted gesture of safety and manages to get a whopping 500 feet down a riverside road before losing a rear wheel (nice workmanship, Mark!) and crashing into the river. And... He apparently can't swim for beans. Thankfully, Oliver's house is close by enough for mom to fish us out of the river. All is fine and dandy, and we're about to head home for the night... And probably the grounding of a lifetime... Until Oliver's mom apparently has the WORST time to have a congenital heart defect come back to bite her, and has a heart attack in front of a small crowd of neighbors.
A timeskip later, and we see that Oliver's mom apparently didn't make it. That clerk from the grocery store from the first scene came to try and cheer us up... More or less fails, and on her way out, bumps into what has GOT to be the fattest cat I've ever seen, and Mark at the bottom of the steps as well. The two leave the house pretty fast, leaving Oliver alone to sulk in his room. He picks up a... Er... "Doll" that his mom apparently made (let's just hope that she was a better cook than a toymaker!) and, like any other prepubescent who's abruptly lost a parent, proceeds to bawl his eyes out over it...
... Which brings the thing to life in a rather freaky cutscene. Which turns into that lantern-nosed thing that you've probably seen in the trailers (and sounds MUCH deeper than he ought to, thanks to his VA). After a brief discussion, we get presented with a "yes" or "no" question again... Er... Yes? Quite frankly, I'm as confused as Oliver at this point... Oh, so "Sekai" is apparently "World" (now I just need to figure out what "Subarashiki" and "Kono" mean)*, also the lantern... Thing just did a title drop. Looks like he's telling us about another world... More highlighted text... I guess Yami no... Something or other will turn out to be pretty important later on. Looks like we might be making our lantern friend a bit exasperated, he just went all wide-eyed and shrunken irises (somehow... His eyes are already dots) on us. Oh, so he's NOT frustrated with us... Yay? Looks like Oliver's STILL about as confused as I am...
The game asks us a question... Looks like the responses are "no" and... Something... Let's go with "no."
And... The first words out of Oliver's mouth are the second option... Maybe we never had a choice? Anywho, our lantern buddy is kinda freaked out... (According to TOW, his name is apparently Shizuku... How that mutated into "Su Chi Kung," I'll never know.) Shizuku yells at us a bit, and calms down after we respond. We get prodded into looking into something on the desk in our bedroom... And... We found something? Whatever it is, Shizuku's apparently surprised. We have another exchange and... Question time? Options are "yes" and... Something. "Yes" it is! Another exchange... Looks like Shizuku's a bit more cheery. Also, the second highlighted phrase pops up again (though not highlighted), I can make out a "Yami no Madoushi"... The game's subtitle apparently means "The Jet Black Mage"... So we're talking about a mage here? Another exchange... And it looks like Oliver's drawn the dots between "Ni no Kuni" and mom... Looks like that's our ticket to getting sandwiches again!
And... The VAs crapped out, and we're left with booping... There's more highlighted text... Okay, so we got a bag icon now, which we can access via the X button. Hmm... Looks like this is a tutorial... There's 9 slots, but six are shadowed out... Let's check these other three. We've got a bag... A book... And... A magnifying glass? Clicking the bag (which looks like it's our inventory) just brings up a notice... Let's ignore that for now... Trying to use the magnifiying glass does the same thing... The book... Same thing... Looks like this is an exposition... Also, we get to see our stats on the top screen. Oliver and Shizuku are both Level 1, Oliver's got 26 hit points and 12 MP, Shizuku has 33 HP and 10 MP, and unlike most beginning JRPG protags, we're flat broke right now. There's three hotkeyed buttons, Select, Start, and B, the last one appears to be a "back" function. Let's hit the B button and exit out for now... Oh... We can't? Hmm... Might as well hit those other buttons then. Oh! And apparently "Start" lets you save the game, we've now got a cute pic picture of Shizuku being a scribe on the bottom screen instead of the nothing that we got the first time around. Let's do so. A few more words between Oliver and Shizuku, and the game prods you to stop being emo leave your bedroom already. Let's save and stop there for now.
Takeaway Points:
- Press Start on the overworld to pause the game, press X while paused to pull up the quit menu.
- Press X to access your bag, press Start while in your bag to bring up the Save menu.
- Mark should strongly reconsider any future career paths that involve structural-related engineering.
- Oliver may not have a high life expectancy.
- Ni no Kuni is the key to getting homemade sandwiches again rezzing Oliver's mom.
Stats:
- Oliver: Level 1: 26 HP / 12 MP
- Shizuku: Level 1: 33 HP / 10 MP
- G:* 0.
- Play Time: 1 hour, 37 minutes, 30 seconds.
Next time, we'll learn how to draw funky magical sigils with the bottom screen and how to kill stuff with a prepubescent boy and a lantern-tapir.
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