With flavors of Pokemon, Studio Ghibli & old school JRPGs, Ni No Kuni is a very fine meal indeed.
Without giving too much away, the plot strongly suggests that the entirety of the game is simply an allegory. It may, or may not, ever explicitly confront this, but it's plainly there, in the way that Oliver (the hero) jumps between our world and his more magical world.
I loved that. It's pretty rare, honestly, that video game plots possess layers. Even 'complex' ones, such as Heavy Rain, often have this very narrow-minded, linear approach to story-telling. To get into the deeper stuff, you've got to explore indie games, like Braid, LIMBO, or Lone Survivor.
Yet those are sometimes irksome because it often feels like the story is being TOO ambiguous. Y'know, like a 1950s playmate, the goods always hidden behind a curtain or a skillfully positioned bowl of fruit. Teasing is good, but only if it leads to something.
Ni No Kuni doesn't really have that problem. The superficial story - and all of the gameplay elements - work on their own. The game is just plain fun. I very rarely felt that battle fatigue which happens in a great many JRPGs. They weren't overly strategic, but they were fast-paced, quick, avoidable, and requiring of some skill (Well, proper timing is rewarded, anyway).
It helps, too, that much of the fighting occurs with the help of familiars which you can capture and grow in various ways, which gives it a flavor of Pokemon.
There are, also, all sorts of extra sidequests to partake in:
-Assisting people with various tasks (such as mending their hearts or collecting a certain species of Familiar)
-Bounty hunts
-Scouring the overworld for extra items
-Returning to old dungeons to get missed chests
-Collecting ingredients and crafting new items with alchemy
All of which are assisted by various methods of travel, unlocked at perfectly paced intervals.
Perhaps what I enjoyed MOST about Ni No Kuni is the mundane nature of magic. You'll unlock a ton of spells and only maybe 1/5th of them are actual battle-spells. The others are spells like 'bridge' that can grow magical bridges and 'rejuvenate' which can return objects to their former glory. Sure you can only use most of these spells in a handful of situations, but it was nice to feel like I was helping Oliver grow into a wizard of a more practical and realistic nature, instead of a battle-hardened war mage, which is the nature of 'magic' in 99% of other games.
If it hasn't become clear by now, I dug this game. It's got a great mixture of new and old RPG elements, a simple and enjoyable story underpinned by a more complex maturity, and that innocence and wonder that all of Studio Ghibli's films possess.
What more can I say? The best RPG I've played since the original Dragon Age.
[If you're curious why it's a 9.0 instead of a 10.0, I took points off for what I perceived as a missed opportunity to more explicitly confront the more complex interpretation of the story, there were a few burdensome UI elements, there was more potential for magic use, some parts that should have been voiced were not, and the battle system could have been more complex.]