Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, a heart-warming tale of a young boy named Oliver, who embarks on a journey into a parallel world in an attempt to bring his mother back from the dead. Along the way, Oliver makes new friends and adopts many of the wonderful creatures that inhabit the world, raising them to battle other creatures on his behalf as he takes on formidable enemies. Developed by LEVEL-5 alongside Studio Ghibli, the legendary animation studio, Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch combines beautiful animated visuals, masterful storytelling and a sweeping score into an epic role-playing adventure like no other.

A demo for the upcoming JRPG Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is now available on the PSN. This is one of the upcoming games I was the most hyped to play in early 2013, and I’ll share with you my impressions of the demo.

Long story short, the demo blew my mind.

Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch E3 2012 Trailer

The demo is divided into 2 parts: the first one seems to be at the beginning of the game (Olivier is level 4) and the second is a little farther (Olivier and his crew are level 15-ish).

In the first demo, Olivier is traveling in a forest and quickly reaches a boss battle (the very first combat in fact). Even with a very light tutorial, every command is intuitive, and beating the boss is on the easy side. Once the battle is won and after a VERY pretty cutscene, you get to the overworld.

Wow.

The second demo is in a volcano where Olivier must reach the top. There are a few battles along the way and since this sample is from farther in the game, we also have at a few “familiars” – friendly monsters that are in our party. One of them is a highly convenient ice-elemental beast that launches ice attacks towards the fire monsters. At the top of the mountain, there is another boss battle, and I found this one harder than the previous one.

In the demo, the first thing that stunned me while playing is the graphical quality: the cell-shading engine is very impressive, and everything is colorful. Party members and enemies are extremely well animated, and made me feel like I was playing a Pixar movie!

The second thing that impressed me is the ease of navigation in the menus. This might sound silly but everything is so intuitive that even with a light tutorial, it felt like I’d mastered the gameplay in only a few moments.

From the available sections of the game, I can also tell that the musical score is very well done (the overworld and victory themes are both epic). As for the voice acting, its one of the best I’ve heard in a long time.

Being a LEVEL-5 fan ever since I enjoyed Dark Cloud 2, Rogue Galaxy and Dragon Quest VIII back on my good-old-but-not-working-anymore Playstation 2, I’ve been hyped for this game from the moment it was announced. Every RPG fan out there looking for a very good game in an awesome setting should at least try the demo available on the PSN!

Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch will be released January 22nd in the US and January 25th in Europe.