This Week in Anime

Is Ni no Kuni Worth Watching?

Andy
Hey Nick! I had so much fun watching a movie last week that I was in the mood to do it again. You up for a Ghibli one?

Hmmm I remember Haku looking differentl

Ghibli actually did some beautiful animation for the games, and I bet they're just tickled to see their work disrespected like this. The character designs are obviously trying to ape Miyazaki's house style.

The real insult is all the large scale fantasy environments that try to play as vast and magical and instead come across bland and weak.

As someone that played some of the games, if you hadn't slapped the title on it I wouldn't have a clue. There's almost zero resemblance to the feel or story of them outside the wanna-be Ghibli aesthetic. It says a lot about how poor a production this was when their initial plan was to take something pretty cute and whimsical and turn it into yet another isekai story. The whole mess is pretty obvious to the audience before off-model Totoro even shows up.

I do commend them for not going into the "wow this is just like my video game" but part of that reasoning might also be because it never even occurs to them because they are some of the dumbest characters I've seen in awhile. Especially Haru.

Ok seriously someone needs to make Haru take a first aid class because holy shit he does the worst things when he sees an injured person. Girlfriend gets stabbed? BETTER PICK HER UP AND RUN AIMLESSLY INTO TRAFFIC! Later, best friend gets impaled on fantasy rebar? BETTER YANK IT OUT!

This isn't even mentioning that his first reaction to seeing his stabbed girlfriend is being mad that Haru is upset about it?

That's pretty much the rub here. I'd honestly be ok with Haru's idiocy being the driving force, but once everyone else in the show starts operating on that same level I was astounded. There are numerous times characters shout a Proper Noun out of nowhere to messily set something up, or even worse, something happens and then we get a monologue about whatever nonsense we just saw.

You cannot skip over the Ginyu force dance that failed to cure her.

It was one of the few joys I was given. It's also stupidly relevant because we learn from their deaths that when someone dies in Fantasy World they Die in Real Life.

Well, everyone but Haru learns that but we'll get into that mess in a bit.

Look, some people died but they weren't his girlfriend, so who really cares, right? Besides, nothing else can possibly go wrong now because she was magically unstabbed? I never really caught onto how time works between the worlds and I think that's because no one writing this did either.

I mean he does start believing again once this happens.

and BOY DOES THIS TAKE A TURN.

HEY SAVING THAT GIRL SAVED MY GIRLFRIEND BUT MAYBE I SHOULD DO SOME MURDER??? This logic comes out of fucking nowhere and I think has established a new level on the grief scale.

Which makes what happens next even more infuriating. See, in this world this kind of absolutely batshit logic jump is apparently contagious, because guess who else got brain worms after the whole princess saving incident?

As stupid as this whole scene is I do kinda love that her response to Yu saying "What the hell is wrong with all of you??" is "Oh so you don't have the BALLS to stab me?"

Let's chastise the new kid for not being stupid enough to immediately leap to killing a princess. When the voice of reason in your show is this fucking thing you know you done fucked up.

Which I think now is a good time to mention that the dub of this is absolutely amazing. In the sense that every bad UK accent you can think of are saying these incredibly stupid lines.

If it didn't involve watching more of this I would recommend some of the fantasy scenes for the line reads alone. They tend to deviate from the subs a lot, which is probably a good idea except it means this line was never spoken.

Look, Haru's around this guy for like 20 minutes of screen time and during that time he repeats "You've gotta kill the princess to save your girlfriend, or are you chicken?" about 8 times so you know he has his best interests at heart. It's also a bit confusing because during the princess's "Take this knife and stab me" scene we learned that was a magic dagger that could bypass her magical princess immunity. Which might be why they had to kill her Kotona counterpart to get around it? That's never cleared up. Nor really matters.

I'd go get crepes with him. Also between that last image and this one my brain finally clicked into what it expects from these designs. Some motherfucking card games.

A strong and regular complaint I have about shows is that they shouldn't remind me of better things I could be watching. This one has a lot of that. As you said earlier, 80s-90s isekai has a lot of strong contenders. The two best friends becoming bitter enemies over the life of a Princess has real strong X vibes. And Spider Assassin is really out of place in this show, especially in the real world, when he should be hanging out in Ninja Scroll

I honestly love how inconsequential this spider monster assassin is. His entire existence raises so many questions and absolutely none are answered.

Ok but he also has another identity

If this makes you ask, who are these people and why are you doing this? Don't worry everything makes perfect sense. You see:

I think my favorite part of that was the reveal that their dad did a genocide and the current king's response is

Like I still don't care about the evil plot bullshit but you know what, go ahead and you can be the king.

Is that who it's supposed to be? Because uh, with the pile of Chekov's guns in the floor near the end I thought it was implied that this might be the Father that committed genocide with the missing Magic Sword... who comes back to laugh about the situation and hand the sword off.

Ok so that could be him or the kid from Quest 64. Either way he exists only to give Yu the magic sword, which I feel the need to mention is called

Because every time I saw it my brain read it as Monstars and I really like the idea of this old dude crafting his legendary magic sword out of an old VHS copy of Space Jam.

Wait, wait, this made me remember the best part of the villain's reveal. It is so insultingly dumb that I actually got mad at the screenwriters. See, normally when you have a puppet master villain there are mistakes they make that the audience can pick up on. Ni no Kuni is at least smart enough to recognize this by making the clues dialogue that Galeroth had other characters repeat. Now, this does mean anyone in those scenes could be the culprit...so how do our heroes narrow it down to Galeroth?

I even went back to check that scene, and there is not a single thing that implies smell. No whiffs, no odd facial expressions. Ab-so-lute-ly nothing. Wonderful choice for your audio/visual medium guys.

If the screenwriters can't be bothered I can't blame the subtitlers either.

Yeah he tries to kill her with pieces of debris because apparently that would get around it? So would long falls or drowning her, I guess? If only there was a way to get her way up in the air. Oh wait.

Apparently he can turn into a flying Scorpion King, but then just tries to uh, crush her?

I guess the curse doesn't matter anymore. Also this was clearly written by a dude that throws a fit about the end of Return of the King because I have no other explanation for what happens next:

The villain simply has no chance against sudden magic bird (that disappears immediately after this while the villain is still alive, so I guess it just is very territorial about it's airspace?) and instead it's up to the power of either animation or editing errors to finally defeat him.

See this shot? Immediately after this the sword teleports about 50 feet behind the villain so that Haru can pick it up and kill him. It's played as some kind of smart plan or trick by Yu but oh my god is it complete bullshit.

Don't worry I'm sure we all learned a valuable lesson.

Welp, can't argue with The Legend. C'mon Yu time to go back to the wheelchair and watch Haru make out with the girl you love instead of staying with her equally shallowly written counterpart here. I mean, they both like sour oranges so you know they're the same.

There is that weird lingering part where everyone has a counterpart but our two protagonists. If only that mattered somehow...

How dare you say smart enough because I refuse to believe this was planned.

I mean it still doesn't parse so maybe it takes his broken brain to do it.

Since everyone remembered them and the old man in both worlds every time.

I care too much about my own sanity to do that, but hey everyone's happy because now you don't feel bad ditching your friend to go up stairs.

Tbh I wish I'd read your assignment instead, because then I'd at least know who to blame. Who am I supposed to shun for this?

Netflix pls

There's also plenty of new shows this season that deserve your attention more than this does. We should get on that and let this one fade into obscurity.