After looking into the details of this week's Level-5 press conference, I'm excited and apprehensive about Ni no Kuni. In addition to this Studio Ghibli game being shown off in demo form, the book that will be bundled with the game -- a spellbook called the Magic Master -- was finally shown to the press. I'm concerned about the relationship between that book and the game. The spellbook has the potential to add wonder and awe to the experience, and to take the game in bold new directions, but there's also the chance it could wind up as a clunky nuisance that drives up the game's price.
When Ni no Kuni was first revealed, I assumed the bundled book might be a jazzed-up game manual, running about 50 pages and trying to inject thrills into a normally mundane booklet. But now it's clear that Ni no Kuni's spellbook is actually going to be something closer to a strategy guide: 352 glossy pages, filled with spells, a bestiary, alchemy recipes, a catalogue of Imagine creatures, and decodable "hints," with plenty of accompanying flavor text. The book apparently will ship with every copy of Ni no Kuni.
The guidebook is an ambitious undertaking, but also a potentially dangerous one. What happens to game balance when every player has a strategy guide? When all the little pieces of information that would be so fun to discover are consolidated into a volume that the developers actually pushed upon the consumer? Much of the challenge in RPGs is to root out these details and exploit them, and Ni no Kuni might wind up trading that challenge for the novelty of its spellbook.
One might say that players aren't forced to look things up in a guide and could enjoy the game without it, but the problem is that this book is begging to be read. Not only is it bundled with the game itself, but it's full of story details, history and lore, and it's gorgeous-looking. The message from the developer seems to be that the game experience is incomplete without the book. Studio Ghibli's productions generally convey a sense of childlike innocence and discovery. That seems to play into the design of the spellbook, which seems like a book that should be meadered through, sometimes for tracking down information and sometimes just for exploring the pages.
The game and book have a relationship that will be difficult to balance. If the book figures heavily in the gameplay of Ni no Kuni, the game risks alienating people who don't have the book or who don't want to cart around a 352-page tome with their DS. On the other hand, if the book contains already-obvious information and doesn't connect with the game very well, it becomes a collector's item that is forcibly bundled with the game, upping the price and taking up space. It will be very easy for the book to become either too essential or too unnecessary.
But aside from creating challenges, the book also provides a unique opportunity for Level-5 to turn the RPG genre -- perhaps even the whole game industry -- on its head. It offers the opportunity for games to transcend our screens and become larger meta-games that stay with us long after we're forced to step away from our TVs and handhelds.
Picturing that sort of relationship between book and game, the closest thing I can think of is The Fool's Errand, a Mac puzzle game by Cliff Johnson. The Fool's Errand carefully doled out small puzzles and pieces of prose in a way that they all connected to solve one big puzzle, the Sun's Map. Only by solving the puzzles and by carefully poring over the story could the game be completed. This type of game is called a meta-puzzle, and Mr. Johnson became famous for them.
Of course, both the puzzles and supplemental story of The Fool's Errand were confined to a computer screen. Ni no Kuni wouldn't have that problem. Prose and puzzles in the book could be used to reap tangible in-game rewards, while the inside the game there would be keys to unlock further secrets in the book. The story could bleed between the two, requiring both components to get the full backstory. If done gracefully, this meta-puzzle arrangement wouldn't directly hurt players without the book, while still keeping the book useful and interesting.
Or, to make this hypothetical little more sinister and unsettling (like some Ghibli films), what if the book were an unreliable narrator? The early parts of the book might start out as guide, with correct information, but then as the player progresses, odd discrepancies start to show up between stories told by the game and the book. The book had to have been written by somebody: what if that somebody had wicked intentions? If then the goal became to take information from the game and solve the misinformation in the "guide?" The possibilities to create an ensnaring story are limitless.
Perhaps my ideas are starting to get ridiculous at this point, but the more I think of how to tie a guide book and a game together, the more I see what kind of amazing storytelling opportunity the developers have on their hands. Instead of just regurgitating information, the spellbook could overcome the obstacles that giving a guide to players creates and instead provide a deeper experience for players. What a wasted opportunity if the book really is just a glorified guide after all.
