Unfortunately, the beautiful scenery, musical score, and character designs don't make up for glaring mechanical flaws.
The game's story is a fairly heartwarming tale of a young boy, Oliver, who escapes to another world with his welsh doll/fairy sidekick, Drippy, in order to cope after a tragedy. In this world Oliver tries to undo events that cause grief in both worlds, and ultimately save the fantastical land made of wizards and animal royalty. The game never really goes into much depth about whether Oliver is actually a young wizard who was transported to the other world or whether the world is a figment of a young boy's imagination. It would have been an interesting idea to explore, but the story is successful, even when filled with goobery dialogue every five minutes such as "Jeepers!"
Unfortunately, dialogue is mostly text based. You'll be doing quite a bit of reading, and a lot of that reading is filler. What could be said in 5 lines is dragged out to 30. This is clearly exemplified in every quest where you must retrieve something for someone. They'll repeatedly tell you what they need when they ask you and when you bring it back. The majority of the cut scenes are also text filled and while not necessarily a huge problem. It's sad to see the voice work used so rarely, especially on a game that has Studio Ghibli's name behind it.
The over world and various environments also accentuate the fantastical atmosphere that is Drippy's world. A cell shaded style that is full of minute details. It's truly beautiful to look at: a graveyard area with a beautiful full harvest moon in the background, a golden forest filled with giant mushrooms to bounce on, a trek up an erupting volcano, and many more highlight this journey. Along with these amazing views character models are equally creative. The cute familiars that you obtain throughout the quest have both creatives names and looks, and the music that follows you on the journey, although often looped, is soothing on the ears.
Aesthetics aside, problems start to arise are mostly mechanical.
The game is paced extremely slow and then goes towards a breakneck pace at the end, mostly because the end was added as an afterthought. You cannot befriend your first familiar (comparable to Pokemon) until about 8 hours into the game. You can not tell you're entire party to defend until about 15 hours into the game, leaving 2 members defenseless - when defending actually works - against cinematic special attacks. You're not able to fast travel until about 20 hours into the game although this feature could be extremely useful earlier on. Random boss difficulty spikes can also be rather frustrating.
*Note: I finished the game in 40 hours, and I did all the side quests, besides the post game ones. I know play time for this game could be considerably longer which means that you'll most likely get the fast travel spell, defend all command, etc. considerably later.
The core of the combat system is a Pokemon-esque styled game where you use befriended "familiars" to battle against other monsters. There is a certain amount of depth to the combat as there are three different types of weaknesses and strengths, depending on elemental type, astrological sign, and genus of the creature; however, a lot of these creatures are useless in battle and by the end of the game you're using only a select few regardless of what type they are - the typing never seemed to be a disadvantage for me.
All these problems are then compiled into a pseudo real-time combat system. The player controls one character at a time, be it Oliver or another party member, or any one of their familiars (each human character is allowed 3 familiars). The player is then able to move his character around the field in real-time and rotate through a command wheel to select options such as attacks, items, commands, etc. Once an option is selected, such as attack the player has no control over the character, and they will attack until the player cancels the action or until the character's finished. Usually, the familiar/party member will make a bee-line to the enemy; however, if there is anything in the way it's a slow process of moving around the blockade.
A layer of frustration is added when the enemy does a cinematic attack. A cue will prompt you to stop what you're doing and switch to a character that has a defend option; however, often times the casting time for these attacks is too fast. The player is not capable of canceling a command, switching characters, and then selecting the defend command before the spell is cast. Even once the player receives the "Defend All" only the AI party members defend - sometimes - while the player's character has to scroll through all the menus still.
As for the characters you're not controlling, a fairly bad AI controls them. They tend to guzzle MP, and not do what the player commands them to do. Most of the time is spent baby sitting them and using items and spells to heal them.
Later in the game I got a few perks from doing the majority of the sidequests, such as increasing my HP and MP by 100 that I could just ignore the awful combat. I also acquired some of the stronger monsters that tanked through most enemies. But towards the end you become so overpowered, that you can basically ignore it.
There are quite a few side quests that appear in the game, but all of them boil down to fetch quests where you must go back and forth multiple times, and scroll through mind numbing filler dialogue that tells you exactly what to do. The other type of side quest are bounty hunts. These are very fun, despite the combat flaws, because you get to see some of the more unique designs. You also get better rewards from them.
Overall, Ni No Kuni is beautiful aesthetically; however, mechanistically it needs some polish. I had a good time with this RPG, but don't go in expecting this to be the be all end all of JRPGs.