Ni no Kuni - Wrath of the White Witch (Animations)

Experience a magical journey of a young boy named Oliver, who enters a beautiful and dangerous parallel world in an attempt to save his mother.

Ni no Kuni is a masterful game created in cooperation between Level-5 and Studio Ghibli. It features a rich story and lush graphics. What's more, it has large amount of cutscenes, both hand-animated and game engine scripted.

Japanese title: Ni no Kuni (二ノ国)
Release date: 17.11.2011 (international in 2013)
Rip & encode: neo1024
Extras: Scans and in-game art

Technical info:
- Video (animated): x264-10bit, 1276x688, 23.976fps, CRF 15
- Video (scripted): x264-10bit, 1276x636 (some: 1276x716), 29.97fps, CRF 16
- Audio: AC3, 5.1, 640kbps
- Subtitles: English hardsubs
- Total duration: 6 hours 33 minutes

I started out creating this collection from the scenes available in Mem-o-vision theatre from the Casino R.I.P. lounge. The initial plan was to create a one-file single-audio encode containing all the scenes in chronological order. It quickly became apparent that animated scenes have a different base frame rate and cropping than the scripted sequences. I also noticed quite a lot of memorable scenes that were absent from Mem-o-vision. So I ended up encoding each scene in a separate file, hunting quite a few scenes from my various save game points. This also allowed me to make dual-audio encodes of all hand-animated scenes and of quite a few scripted ones (yes, everything had to be recorded twice first!).

The characteristic of a scripted scene is that lip movements are synced to audio (while in an animated scene audio is synced to lip movements). Additionally, some of the scripted scenes require user input. Thus it was not possible to create complete dual-audio versions for all scenes. For the more important ones I created separate encodes, while lesser scenes ended up being partial dual audio.

A separate note about the sketches: closing credits run against a background of 12 concept art sketches. Using masking, I was able to recreate each image sans the credits.

The following legend is used in file names:
- VA - Voice Acting.
- SA - Single audio. In most cases Japanese, but for split-encodes denotes English as well
- DA - Dual Audio.
- Part-DA - Partial Dual Audio. The scene contains user interaction in its second half, making it next to impossible to create a complete dual audio.

All Ni no Kuni torrents:
Animations: #532865
Music: #589492
Wizard's Companion: #589493