Ni no Kuni: Shiroki Seihai no Joō | "DESTROY ALL FANBOYS!"

While this watercolor image for the Japanese version of the game is indeed a truly lovely piece of art, it’s also pretty generic to a fault. At best, It looks like a greeting card for some made up holiday (Happy Festivus!) or a menu from some renaissance fair salad bar and at worst, like a roadside sign advertising a fairy farm (Come Pet Our Unicorn. Please. Thank You).

Given the lush backgrounds found in both the DS and PS3 versions, I was hoping to see a Level-5/Studio Ghibli combo cover to end all covers. Or at least art to match the beautiful images found on the official PS3 and Nintendo DS sites for each system’s respective games. Here’s a link to a recent trailer as well so you can see that the game is absolutely a LOT more gorgeous than this placeholder-looking cover image. Oh well. It’s not THAT bad. Still, I guess it’ll be up to Namco Bandai to give us a North American version with a cover image that soars. As long as they use art from the dev team or Studio Ghibli-provided assets, it should be a winner.

Fantastic. Level-5 and Studio Ghibli’s gorgeous single-player RPG Ni no Kuni: Shiroki Seihai no Joō has been one of the most desired for localization imports of the last few years. The game revolves around a young boy who enters an alternate world using a magical book in order to try and resurrect his late mother. The Nintendo DS version, Ni no Kuni: Shikkoku no Madōshi was released last year to rave reviews in Japan and excellent sales, so it’s pretty much guaranteed that the November 2011 Japanese release for the PS3 will be equally successful. As soon as we find out who’s localizing and publishing the US version, that news will become available.

While no word of an English localization of the DS version has been announced, I’d imagine Nintendo (and Nintendo of America) wouldn’t let Sony steal all the glory by getting the onlyversion of this eagerly awaited game to gamers outside of Japan. That and the Japanese version of the DS game came in a really cool over-sized box thanks to the game manual designed to look like the magic book the main character carries and yes, it would indeed be great to see a similar package hit US as well as UK and European retailers.