Marcel Winatschek

Everything I Want from a Game in 2009

Studio Ghibli. I need to stop there for a second. Princess Mononoke. Spirited Away. Howl’s Moving Castle. Three films I’d put on any shortlist of the best things animation has ever produced. And now they’re building a video game.

It’s called Ni No Kuni: The Another World, due on Nintendo DS in 2009. A thirteen-year-old boy kills his mother, meets a fairy, and travels into another world through a mysterious book. Which is—as JRPG premises go—refreshingly bleak. The usual genre setup swapped for something with actual weight in the opening scene. Ghibli’s visual language applied to a world you can move through, that specific Studio Ghibli brand of melancholy present from the very first moment.

After Zelda, this is what I want most from a handheld. I expect it to be the best game I’ve played in years. It probably won’t be—nothing ever is—but right now, from here, it looks exactly like that.