The combat really didnt look that bad to me, but i will see when i go through it. Atm i am playing through Xillia. Almost done with it. My main complains is that the series seeems to be falling in the same pittfalls as all other JRPG's. Still too slow paced for the first 25 hours. The story hardly moves. The last 15 hours are more like it.
The reusing of assets during those first 25 hours can get annoying aswell. I am hoping better things from Xillia 2 and the next mainline Tales games graphically with the sucess Xillia had. In terms of combat and game systems though, the game is pretty good though. No complains, wheres in Graces i disliked most of it.

There is still that japanese desgin where the game's combat doesnt get really fun until the later half of the game. Though its not like the combat on Xillia is bad at the beggining, it gets alot better further down the road.

These are the mistakes JRPG's stil fall into. Pacing, non-interactivity (not required if you have a good story pacing though) and the design where you must go through a grind to finally unlock the good part of the game. It needs to ne more imediate. We should be having fun from the get-go and should be motivated to keep going all the time. Tales of Abyss managed that for the most part, im sure the Tales team has it in them.

I love the game, my kids love it too, 9.5/10 for me. I easily put in over 60 hours, but did quit at lvl 80ish before being able to complete the last arena battle sequence. The effort to grind for better gear was not worth it to me.
The story was great and after it was over there was still tons to do.

There battle system was fine. It took a while for it to open up all the options but I never had a problem with it. The difficulty curve was good too, kept me away from areas that I was not supposed to go to yet, but with effort and some strategy I could get some good early xp in those areas. Boss battles were great, as well as monster hunting. Sure it suffers from the same overpowering problem as you level up as in any other rpg. Which is fine, my 4 year old can run around, sail the ship, fly on the dragon, drive the car and nothing on the world map can hurt my lvl 80 group.
Exploration and artwork were the best part. I loved how the world kept expanding, good dungeon design and those Ghibli hand drawn sequences were magical. (although I'm a bit biased in that area)

One of my favorites, top 5 this gen.

I absolutely loved the battle system!! it's like Grandia meets Pokemon!!

overall this is one of my favorite RPG's of all time now

And I'm not posting a review to say your opinion sucks , jus tto express mine. 

WIth the 35 hours, I didn't rush or anything.  I actually grinded a few different monsters to get to the last metamorphosis.  I played in the casino, currently holding over a mill chips and getting all the movie ticket items after beating the game.  Tried a few times on that cross game and eventually got past the second level.  I did a lot of the monster hunting quests and regular quests and have all first and second reward tiers, one third tier.  I also listened to all voice acting in the story and didn't start skipping quest dialogue until I reached Hamelin.

I also played the game on normal.  I always start games on what's labeled normal difficulty unless I hear the difficulty is too easy, like Tomb Raider, then I start on hard. 

Being action oriented doesn''t mean the game automatically has more depth.  Ni No Kuni isn't Tales of Graces F after all.  It's my opinion, but aside from bosses, there's really no depth to it.  But there are games that really don't need any sort of depth to still be enjoyable.  The combat to Ni No Kuni is just boring.  But for games with depth  I could list just games like Grandia and Shin Megami Tensei to point out how much more depth to combat a standard RPG can have compared to a action RPG like Ni No Kuni, but I'll list others instead.

Here's a game you wouldn't expect to have too much depth behind it but it has a lot more than you  think.  The original Final Fantasy has a lot of depth behind it because of its limitations, or atleast features that weren't implemented until later games.  If a monster is killed in battle and another ally attacks it, the attack will be ineffective.  This requires you to remember the enemies HP for characters who just attack, alongside weaknesses of enemies for those who use attack magic, and your stats effect skills.

In Final Fantasy 4, Rosa's extremely useuful outside of just using cure magic.  Slow is probably her most useful spell outside of curative spells, but then she has stuff like blink, charm, haste, berserk, and float which are all very useful throughout the game.  Rydia's best magic is her powerful summon spells, flare, quake, meteor, bio, and elemental spells, but stop, death, osmose, and break, are all very useful.  Even warp is a useful spell. 

Here's a few example battles in Final Fantasy 4.  Red Giant's are one of the more powerful enemies in the game before you reach and at the Lunar Subterranean.  After killing them, they cast explode on themselves, more than likely killing any one of your allies.  Cast stop.  Why waste so much magic casting Bahamut to damage them when you can cast stop and not allow them to damage you during and after the battle?  Rosa can cast slow on the other while the other characters are attacking the one that's stopped so it has less turns.  When it's Rydia's turn again, cast stop on the other.  This saves a lot of damage you would have sustained, plus saves MP by not casting the most powerful spells in your list.

Behemoth is another random battle, this one is fought in the Lunar Core along with more of the most powerful enemies in the game.  With Final Fantasy 4's evade being a percentage, it's like a dice roll, so damage can be a little bit higher, especially depending on the power of the one who is attacking.  Behemoth can sometimes one shot your allies, and if he doesn't, he'll take off a ton of damage.  Hold and the mindflare summon can paralyze him while Edge can cast image on himself and Rydia casts Blink on everyone.  Blink avoids two physical attacks 100% of the time.  Casting berserk on Cecil will get the job done quicker for more attack, or just to make sure you don't attack while not effected with blink, just leave berserk off, Kain jumps, and Edge attacks.  If the Behemoth recovers from paralyze, you can have Rydia cast it again.

So just because a game is turn based doesn't mean there isn't depth to combat.  On Final Fantasy 4, everything(except slow) doesn't work on every enemy, and everything isn't as simple as cast an elemental weakness. 

That was a great analysis. Thanks. I mean I still kind of disagree, but that's besides the point. I played Final Fantasy 4 about a year or 2 ago. It was my first FF game and had only heard great things about it. Though what you said makes sense, I didnt' enjoy the game all that much and found the combat much less fun. I got bored several times playing the game and I don't remember anything about the story. Guess not my cup of tea. I wasn't implying that you were wrong or anything, just how diffrent opinions on the same matter can be (similarly people calling Heavy Rain a revolutionary game and others not a game at all).

In regard to the turn based-action based difference of depth, I'm sure that a turn based game can more deeper than the other, but not because it's turn based, but because of how spells, items and attacks work. I don't see how the nds version of Nino Kuni was any better.

Truly a shame that you allowed for your exaggeration of what are ultimately minor grievances with the combat, sour your entire experience. This is evident by the fact you felt the presentation is deserving of a 7/10.

Well, watching a gameplay video of the Nintendo DS version, it looks like Oliver and more than one monster can be in combat at once.  So I'm guessing Oliver and three monsters?  Since there are no glims in the game and I've seen that Oliver can cast that one really powerful fire spell, there's probably just a difference in the games gameplay.

It's not like we can play the DS version without importing, so unless we decide on that we'll really never know how good it is.  Though if we were to decide on importing, atleast we'd know the story, hopefully the star still tells you where to go, and it's easy to tell what kind of element a spell is by the color of the spell, and the amount of magic points it uses.  So it's a game that would be playable even though we might like knowledge of Japanese.

If I ever get a flash card for my 3DS, I might atleast try it out.  Or could always emulate it sometime to try it out.  While it could be better, since I wasn't a fan of the PS3 version, there's no telling if the gameplay actually makes the DS version better, so I don't want to import and waste money on a game I might not like.

In case you ever do for whatever reason, please let us know. i'm curious.

Please tell me what that gif is from.

OT: OP, did you even try to understand the combat tutorials?

Nope, not at all.  I just somehow managed to beat the last string of boss battles at level 48.  Chalk it up to luck.