10 Critically-Acclaimed 2013 Video Games (With Major Gameplay Flaws)

7. AI Tactical Stupidity - Ni No Kuni: Wrath Of The White Witch

2013 was a great year for Japanese role playing games: with titles like Fire Emblem and Tales of Xillia, developers showed that the market for JRPGs is anything but invisible. But Ni No Kuni surpassed them all as a brilliant game birthed by an incredible collaboration of creative minds at Level-5 and Studio Ghibli. Ni No Kuni possesses all the charm and whimsy of an animated movie and all the depth and technicality of a great video game. It truly feels like a grand adventure, one you'd be remiss to skip out on. But even in all its adorable characters, lush environments, and general sense of fun, Ni No Kuni has some flawed battle mechanics. An easy way to sum up combat in Ni No Kuni is by calling it contradictory. It's a little difficult to classify the game because while battles do happen in real time, certain actions run on a timer, resulting in a sometimes convoluted combination of real time and turn based combat. This often works a lot better in practice than it would have you believe on paper, but this kind of system is ripe for problems. Because actions run on a timer, the artificial intelligence of the characters not in your control can be a bit lacking. A character may cast a defensive spell well before the enemy's attack, causing the effect of the spell to run out before the enemy has even finished it's assault. Also, since the combat is still technically in real time, the characters run around the field doing their own thing, but don't always pick the best positioning on the field, taking hits that should be avoided.