I'm only 5-6 hours into Ni No Kuni so I'm sure I'll post more about it in the future but my thoughts so far:
Soundtrack was done by Tokyo philharmonic orchestra and it is fucking amazing. Your fairy sidekick Drippy has a welsh accent and it's awesome, so far all the english voice acting has been really good and this is one of the few games where I haven't found myself mashing x though all the dialogue because of terrible voice work.
Combat has been fun but it takes awhile to take off, a review or two have compared it to the 20 hour tutorial march that plagued FF13 but it isn't that slow at all. Everyone will say it's a mix between pokemon and ff12 which pretty much right on the money but I haven't gotten to the point where you start collecting the monsters (familiars). Level 5 JRPG so it is going to be grindy as fuck so we will see how I feel about this as the game progresses. So far I've done a lot of exploring so I've been a decent level for encounters.
The graphics are very pretty and there has been a few points where I've sat in awe looking around and taking in the beauty of it all. Probably one of the best looking overworlds in a game ever. If you've seen a Ghibli film I won't need to tell you that the animated cut scenes are really good too.
And the story is there, and it's nothing you haven't seen before. It's going to take lot of charm from the characters to keep me interested but so far it's looking good. Overall.... I like it so far! I've been waiting for this game forever and while I'm not going into it thinking it's going to be the messiah of video games I do have high expectations and I'm hoping it lives up to them.
Also I have FF8 on my PS3 right now, and I really want to play FF9... I'm thinking of maybe just emulating that one though... I started a playthrough like a year ago, and I was grinding a ton and collecting everything and doing all the side stuff, and it froze right on the third disc or something. So I was like "man I'm not gonna play this shit for a long time". But now I want to.
I played through ff9 like last year I think? You are going to want a fast forward button the random encounters get very very bad. It's been awhile since I played any final fantasy besides that one but I think ff9 has to have the worst (highest) random encounter rate.