I’ve had my eye on Ni No Kuni DS ever since it was announced: I love Studio Ghibli, I generally have a favorable impression of Level 5, and the book sounded wonderful. I’d been idly waiting for news to trickle out about a U.S. release of the game; recently, there was an announcement that the PS3 version would be ported, but I’m less excited about that. So I figured: if I’m going to play the DS version, I should just order it; and, actually, I suspected that it would be at a good level to test my Japanese skills.

It showed up a couple of weeks ago; and I will say: I’ve been playing video games for a long time, and games from the mid-80’s in particular had glorious packaging, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen packaging like this, the book is just amazing. Here are some unboxing photos (sadly, taken with a not-very-good cell phone camera), just to give an idea of what’s in there:

The top of the box, with the wrapper on

The top of the box, with the wrapper removed

The box opened, with the top of the book visible

The contents of the box

Side view of the contents of the box

From those last two pictures, you can see just how large the box and the book are: there’s a standard DS box as part of the packaging, and it’s a lot smaller than everything else.

Next, some pictures of the book:

For those of you who are really curious about the game, I’m planning to keep a diary of my experiences with the game on my other blog. Of course, being the bookish sort of person that I am, I haven’t actually started playing the game: I’m still struggling with the manual! (The regular DS-style manual, not the book.) But I’ll get into the game proper one of these weeks. (Months? Depends on how much I look at the book first, I guess.)

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