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Today, I finished 'Ni no Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom'.
For those with any reservations, the JRPG traditions of great sense of adventure, wide open world, and an epic story are wholly intact and 'Ni no Kuni 2' is fun to experience. I had some problems but it's a good game.
For those with any reservations, the JRPG traditions of great sense of adventure, wide open world, and an epic story are wholly intact and 'Ni no Kuni 2' is fun to experience. I had some problems but it's a good game.
What I really liked was how the story of Evan building a new kingdom where everyone could live happily ever after was brought into the gameplay. You actually do build, grow, and maintain a kingdom as a gameplay mechanic, right down to recruiting new citizens.
You can also get into skirmish battles, where you use your army to fight other armies. It's an EXTREMELY trimmed down RTS sort of arrangement and it feels off from time to time but it's charming enough and hardly bad to play.
So you have three primary gameplay modes: standard adventuring and combat, a Facebook game-esque kingdom manager, and skirmishes. With these three modes together, 'Ni no Kuni 2' hasn't just told the story of a king making a kingdom; it's made a GAME around it.
The big problem is that the three modes don't intersect enough. Your kingdom management hardly affects your adventuring or skirmishes, and your skirmishes don't affect your adventuring or kingdom. Recruiting new citizens can get you new soldiers but that's about it.
Let's focus on the kingdom management. For some contrived reason that makes no sense, management uses a separate currency from your adventuring money. Never mind questions like how is my kingdom making this money or how does it help our economy. But that's just the least of it.
You can build facilities that can do up to three things:
1) Provide services for you to use, such as buying weapons and armour or learning new spells,
2) Research things, like buffs for adventuring such as getting more XP or providing better services, or
3) Getting vendor trash.
1) Provide services for you to use, such as buying weapons and armour or learning new spells,
2) Research things, like buffs for adventuring such as getting more XP or providing better services, or
3) Getting vendor trash.
The thing is, there's no reason to ever buy a weapon or armour. The game drops those like 'Borderlands'; why spend money and materials on buying and upgrading a weapon when you can always get a far better one lying around for free?
What's more, the services that upgrade the game proper like the more XP research are few and far between. So that leaves you with crafting that you'll never use and vendor trash mills that have no purpose except completing sidequests and upgrading things that'll be outclassed.
I swear, there are a ridiculous number of fetch quests in this damn game. Those that aren't about vendor trash are about giving away a specific weapon or armour piece. Some sidequests request they be of a certain rank that you can upgrade them to. Bloody needy, these people!
Do you see what's going on here? The only reason to really upgrade your kingdom is to complete sidequests, which you only really do to upgrade your kingdom (or sometimes your adventuring). And none of this really affects the main game in the slightest, apart from XP grinding.
A small plot point is that a king literally gains power from their kingdom and its citizens. 'inFAMOUS' had a good system going with its side missions; completing them would clear up the city. I feel like there was a missed opportunity to have the kingdom directly empower Evan.
In an ideal game, the three gameplay modes would complement each other. Fact is, kingdom aside, skirmishes are few and far between in the main story and aren't THAT fun enough to seek out otherwise. So they all feel a bit hollow and ancillary to the primary loop of adventuring.
'Ni no Kuni 2' would have had much to benefit from thinking through its gameplay more, particularly in the interplay of its modes. Having said all that, the game is by no means bad. If you're looking for a fun, light-hearted JRPG adventure, then you could do far worse than this.
I should mention that I got distracted for several hours at some point in writing this thread, so forgive me if it seems like I repeat some words or ideas a fair bit.
