My First Impressions on "Ni No Kuni"

I bought this game during Black Friday last year and popped it in for about an hour this spring and I now realize I will never be going back. So while I wrote several paragraphs for my first impressions, planning to give the game a full run down, that is not going to happen, so here are some of my initial thoughts of disappointment and boredom. Maybe my expectations were too high from it getting recommended so many time. I can sort of see the appeal, but not really.

First Impressions:
Was playing the first hour of "Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch" (Why did they not translate the whole title?) on the PS3 and they really needed to bring in Neil Gaiman to do a punch up on the script. The number of "huh", "wah", "hmm", and various other mouth-noise filler is embarrassing. There is also the stupidly long installation period, load times, and opening credit sequence (just do the installation while playing the opening credits).

I got nowhere near even having little sidekicks and buddies.

They also have a very poor habit of sliding between 4 levels of exposition, there is the gameplay interactions without voices, those with voices, those that are in game cinematics, and then there are fully animated cut scenes, and then there are the fully animated cut scenes which happen in areas that the viewpoint character is not in, or those that flashback to another cut scene that we watched 5 minutes prior.
There was 45 minutes before the first bit of combat which consisted of me hitting a puppy with a stick 3-5 times... I like the art style and the character, Drippy, but this game has a lot of problems getting into gear.
Oliver the main character is shown as having helped build and then drove a car he and his friend made, this in part leads to the death of his mother who saved him when the car crashed into a river causing her heart to give out.  Will this skill ever be used again?  I can't find anything in the promotional art or screen shots that indicates that it will.  Is this to establish character?  If so, what does it establish?  Oliver is practically dragged into the situation by his friend and does little aside from get rescued once the situation turns bad.  I guess it is supposed to make him feel responsible for his mother's death, but he is a 13 year old who drove a small car into a calm river at low speed, why did he even need rescuing?  This whole opener makes him seem sheepish and ineffectual to the point of being a loser.
There is a subtext that the fantasy world is Oliver's attempt to escape from the harshness of the situation, especially considering that Drippy the Lord of Fairies is a toy his mother made for him yet claims to have been transformed into the doll by the villain... But that subtext is under cut when supernatural things are shown to exist before the tragedy that spurs the adventure... that is bad writing.  The ambiguity of whether or not this is a dream or real is important to showing the character coming to grips with things.  This is why I mentioned Neil Gaiman who does a lot of modern fantasy with going-down-the-rabbit-hole elements and has included scenes that make the reader question what is happening to the character ("Neverwhere" had that confrontation be one of the big climaxes of the book).

I must state, that even though the game's pacing kept me from playing it again, It remains one of the most beautiful and imaginative games I have ever seen and it a credit to all of the artistic minds that worked on it in that regard.

If you want a positive review, please watch this silly European woman.  She really liked it and explains why, in a way that allows me to see how others could appreciate it very deeply.

My Initial Opinions on "L.A. Noire"

            I am for the first time in my life going to try to get out ahead of public opinion.  There is a video game called "L.A. Noire" coming out that uses a state of the art motion capture technology that allows them to use multitudes of cameras surrounding an actor's face, this allows the actor to give a performance that can be perfectly inserted into the video game.  Essentially putting the actors whole head and face into the game granting really life like visuals.  I honestly don't care about this.

The making of Video 

            See, I have watched a few trailers and making of videos of this game and I have yet to figure out what the game is.  Is it a shooter?  A point and click adventure game?  What?  As far as I can tell the only thing about this game that can be determined is that it is set in L.A. is about cops, and is supposed to be noire.  Beyond that I don't know what is going on.  The selling point of this game are the graphics, those motion capture graphics I just described, and here is the real problem: Those graphics suck.

This is the Trailer

            See, the people in question aren't giving a performance with a group of actors, getting into it as they go, they are sitting at the center of a shit ton of cameras and trying to stay within the cone of all the camera's views so that the computer can capture them, so strike one, they are going to have trouble giving a performance.

            Since there are no other actors and the cameras everywhere, they aren't going to be able to tell where to look, so strike two: no eye contact and a general displacement of the characters from the scene (like how people must feel talking to me because I have a bad habit of not looking people in the eye or looking past them).

            Also, just because you completely capture a person's face the bodies remain the typical video game mannequins, with robotic stiff limbs and clothing, so strike three: you have human heads on robot bodies, the deepest part of the uncanny valley.  Lastly, why do I care about whether their faces are more real?  I have felt more emotion with a Pixar movie than I have with any, and I mean any, motion capture film with looks freaky and dumb; maybe if I knew something of the game play this innovative camera would be worth something, but as is I don't see the point.

Look at the sleeves, they don't ride up, they don't contort, they look fake, and when you mix fake and real, it looks faker.

            Now, I'm open minded, maybe this will be cool, maybe it won't look terrible in the end, but from what I have seen, this looks just awful.