Ni No Kuni: First Dungeon

I went through the first dungeon in Ni No Kuni today. Which started off with a justification for the presence of chests littered around; I can’t remember the details (indeed, I’m not sure I figured out the details), but surprising to see. Monsters turn out to be visible, and somewhat hard to avoid; they weren’t too dense, though, and while battles occur on a separate screen, the transitions into and out of battles were mercifully fast. The battles were also quite short, and quite easy: by the end of the dungeon, I mostly stopped using magic, and that worked out just fine. (My Imagine turns out to be rather good with a sword, incidentally; Shizuku has some sort of special defensive technique, though I only used it on the boss battle.)

It also gave me a tutorial about using consumable items; at the time it gave me that tutorial, however, all my stats were full, so I didn’t actually try out the fluffy bread item. I know it’s some sort of restorative, but I don’t know if it restores HP, MP, or both; and the dungeon was so easy that I didn’t have any reason to use that (or any other) item during it, and while the magic master book talks about items, it doesn’t seem to go into more details than saying it’s a restorative.

I ran across a magic chest at some point that I had to use a new rune to open. For the first time, the game didn’t tell me which rune to use; fortunately, I didn’t have to go too far before running across “アンロック”, which I realized meant “unlock”.

Very short dungeon, despite which I leveled up all the way from level 2 to level 5 during it. And that was before the boss battle; for the boss, they made more of a deal about pointing out weaknesses (turned out to be weak to fire, which is of course my only offensive magic spell), and the boss had an attack where party positioning mattered, since party members who were behind somebody didn’t get hit. I got some sort of special item from the boss battle, I don’t know what’s up with that. And in general there’s clearly a generalized rock-paper-scissors mechanic here—the monsters were all labeled with some sort of type icon, though the game hasn’t yet emphasized that.

After the boss battle, I wandered around the overworld for a bit. I found a few chests, and monsters were thicker on the ground than I liked; eventually, though, I started running away and realized that I didn’t have to fight most of the monsters if I didn’t want to.

Then I went to the closest city (which Shizuku had told me to go to); but the gate was closed, the guards weren’t letting anybody in. I talked to one of them, and something was wrong with him; I forget the details, but there was some mental characteristic (concentration?) that he was lacking in. I was told to talk to the other guard, and then cast a new rune (“heart piece”); something appeared on the screen in my inventory corresponding to the thing that I’d gotten from the tree last week.

So I guess that wasn’t a potion: looking at it more closely, it’s a list of mental characteristics. Then I went back to the original guard, and cast a “heart cure” rune; he went back to normal and opened up the gate. The heart piece disappeared from my inventory, but I see a bunch of different slots there with different mental characteristics, so clearly there’s some sort of mechanic where I’m going to be restoring people to their mental health.

I saved when I entered the city; looking forward to exploring it next week!