New Ni No Kuni Game Is Absolutely Rotten With Crypto Garbage

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Ni No Kuni

Image: Net­mar­ble

Hey, there’s a new Ni No Kuni game out! And it looks beau­ti­ful! This should be cause for cel­e­bra­tion, but we don’t deserve nice things. So instead, we have got a mobile/PC gacha game that is built on a foun­da­tion of cryp­to nonsense.

As we’ve cov­ered, the sup­posed ‘val­ue’ of the these mar­kets is in freefall, but while that’s bad news for ‘own­ers’ of car­toon jpgs and made-up cur­ren­cies, many video game stu­dios and pub­lish­ers are push­ing on regard­less, and among them are Kore­an devel­op­ers Net­mar­ble, the team behind Ni No Kuni: Cross Worlds, which despite an Asian release in 2021 was only made avail­able in the West last week.

Look at this trail­er, and you’ll see why fans of the series—and of Stu­dio Ghibli—might have got excited!

This is sad­ly now the part of the sto­ry where I tell you this is actu­al­ly a gacha game that also has cryp­tocur­ren­cy bull­shit baked into it. Net­mar­ble have their own cryp­tocur­ren­cy wal­let called Mar­blex, and as this web­site help­ful­ly points out, play­ers are able to take in-game items, trade them for Netmarble’s Aster­ite or Ter­rite Tokens (which are cur­ren­cies you can trade on Mar­blex), then trade those for oth­er cryptocurrencies.

Image for article titled New Ni No Kuni Game Is Absolutely Rotten With Crypto Bullshit

Image: Net­mar­ble

As the game’s web­site proud­ly boasts on its front page, empha­sis­ing just how cen­tral this is to the game’s entire existence:

Ni no Kuni: Cross Worlds employs a game­play-based blockchain sys­tem, giv­ing play­ers who enjoy Ni no Kuni: Cross Worlds the oppor­tu­ni­ty to play to earn tokens through gameplay.

Play­ers can acquire two types of tokens in the Ni no Kuni: Cross Worlds blockchain sys­tem, and our team will do our best to pre­serve the token values.

Oh, and they’re also plan­ning to bring in NFTs lat­er in the year as well.

Play­ers are report­ing that, less than a week after launch, the game’s econ­o­my is already heav­i­ly slant­ed in favour of those pur­chas­ing the company’s cryp­to. As Tezoze says in this post, “Cryp­to was said to be ‘min­i­mal’ in the game but it seems like you can lit­er­al­ly buy the best in slot sets and pets in the game right off the store. No gacha, no gim­micks, just straight pur­chase. This is extreme­ly cringe, and caus­es mas­sive imbal­ance in PVP.”

I know gacha games have their fans, but I’m not one of them, because it’s a form of gam­bling and how­ev­er harm­less indi­vid­ual instances may appear, the mechan­ic itself helps nor­malise the prac­tice among young peo­ple. So I think gacha games mar­ket­ed at kids are bad enough. A gacha game that’s also got cryp­to spec­u­la­tion, and a market­ed empha­sis on ‘play to earn’ mechan­ics? Get the fuck out­ta here.

UPDATE: Despite the company’s men­tion in the game’s launch trail­er Stu­dio Ghibli’s exact role with this release is unclear, so the post has been edit­ed to reflect this. 

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