Charming, albeit flawed little RPG.

I really liked the first Ni No Kuni, it took some of the themes and aesthetics from the famous Japanese animation studio Studio Ghibli and merged it with Japanese Role playing games to create a beautiful and interesting experience. The sequel follows that trend exactly, creating a wholesome gorgeous game though it also brings the same flaws with it.

The story follows King Evan Pettiwhisker Tildrum, a young man whose father has just died and whose kingdom is being overthrown in a coup. Fortunately for him a man from another world named Roland has appeared before him saving his life and helping him escape. At the edge of despair Evan doesn't know what to do but with Roland's advice decides to create a brand new Kingdom, a place where everyone is welcome regardless of race or background. Evan is an idealist who wants to create a world of peace without war and with Roland's help may even manage it...

The story isn't the deepest thing in the world but actually has some really nice moments and the ending I especially liked as certain things tie in really well together. A lot of the game involves traveling the world visiting different kingdoms and attempting to get them to sign your peace accord, while recruiting people to live in your kingdom on the way. this is one of the aspects of the game I really loved, kingdom building. Evan's kingdom of Evermore needs residents to thrive, most of which you get through quests as the game progresses allowing for you to recruit them. Each resident has different skills and can be put to work in your kingdom researching new abilities, producing materials, and some of them can even join King Evan's army. Your kingdom produces it's own currency allowing you to build new structures and upgrade them over time such as a weapons shop, mine, inn, magic research lab etc. I spent far too much time upgrading and building everything as well as recruiting the 100+ residents available. It was really addictive.

While traveling from Kingdom to Kingdom Evan and his party will get in combat with a variety of monsters and enemies and this is where the game falls down a bit. Combat is frankly, boring. It's essentially an action role playing game (rpg) where you control one of three party members being able to swap between them on the fly. Each character can block, attack, use a range attack or up to 4 equipable skills. There is no real strategy involved except for gaining magic to use skills, most of which are pretty underwhelming or using higgledies. These are little creatures Evan can equip that run around the battlefield using passive skills and occasionally ones you have to manually trigger. They do very little damage and most of their skills don't seems especially useful outside of healing. They simply clog up the battlefield. Combat was kind of Ni No Kuni's weakness and it feels the same in the second game only they've changed it.

Dungeons themselves are equally unexciting. Half of them are just copy paste procedurally generated looking corridors of either the same looking forest, temple or cave which is a little disappointing considering how gorgeous the art, visuals and animation are. All the characters really look like they've jumped out of an anime into the game. the world is extremely colorful and the different cities and character races are fantastic. Which brings me to another point, you get 6 characters in your party, in a world with cat, rat, and dog people as well as robots and merfolk, the cast you get is.....six white humans. Two of which are so forgettable and bland it's not even funny. Why couldn't we recruit a cool cat warrior? A Merfolk Magician or something? With those options it feels so uninspired.

On the audio side of things the music is very good, especially the main theme which really stands out. I also really love the voice acting, it sounds like the cast from a Studio Ghibli animation really nailing the atmosphere. The problem is, there isn't enough of it. Only a few key cut scenes are fully acted, most of the time you get a "hello" or "Knickers" one of the characters might say to set the tone for the dialogue. Some of the text boxes are also tiny at times making it a pain to read.

All in all despite some issues I really did enjoy this game a lot. I played it for about 80 hours getting absorbed in the gorgeous atmosphere of the world. It's incredibly charming but it falls down in a few key areas that make it merely a good game rather than a great one. Still worth it if you were a fan of the first game or want a relaxing Japanese Role Playing Game to play.

+ Kingdom managing is surprisingly addictive.
+ Enjoyable quest system.
+ Art and visuals are gorgeous.
+ Atmosphere is really charming.
+ Great voice acting.

- Combat is kind of boring.
- Dungeons are mostly bland corridors.
- Main cast takes no risks, just 6 dull humans.
- Not enough voice acting, text is too small.

One of the very few games I can say that I definitively dislike. Graphically, beautiful. Music, amazing. Story? I don't remember much of it. Gameplay? Oh god when will this end.

The final boss was awful, I was underlevelled and it STILL couldn't kill me. Horribly balanced uninteresting gameplay, basically nothing from the first game made a return apart from the setting (and even then, very loosely). They didn't bother trying to improve on what they established for the first game at ALL. What a disappointment.

I don't think this is objectively a bad game, I just found myself thinking "when will this end" quite often while playing it. I kept playing since it's a sequel to one of my favourite games, but I'm not sure any other games have made me constantly think about stopping playing.

I wasn't really into what the first Ni No Kuni was going for in its gameplay, but it did have unique ideas that I wish they could have improved with this game. Instead they opt for a rather generic hack and slash system. The combat feels too stiff for a hack and slash game that puts quite a few enemies on the battlefield. I only ended up playing as faster characters because the heavier ones felt way too sluggish to evade attacks that had little tells. That being said any frustration had, and I should stress that it was little of that even, didn't come from the difficulty of the combat itself, but rather the the various hurdles the combat throws at you to slow you down to elicit the illusion of difficulty, being the aforementioned sluggishness that leaves you open to attacks that will knock you down and stun you. This is a very easy game, so much so that I'd recommend playing on hard. It wasn't until around the 70% mark where I actually felt like dropping it back to normal. That is unless you plan on doing all of the side content, which becomes cumbersome to the point that I'd just leave it on normal to not prolong the experience longer than necessary.

There are a lot of side quests. The majority of them involve you recruiting citizens and doing odd jobs for them to increase your kingdom's influence. These were the highlights of the game for sure, and is the sole reason I regard the game as highly as I do, being that this makes up the majority of the content. It added depth to otherwise extraneous characters. The localization is fantastic, adding a lot of fun flares to otherwise mundane scenarios. The tone is fairly juvenile, assumedly to evoke the general feel of Studio Ghibli's work, which the previous entry has ties to.

The main story itself was serviceable, but does suffer from the more safe narrative. I'm supposed to believe groups of war-hardened folks all rally under our boy king giving the most lackluster speeches? It also takes heavy influence from its previous game that would go unnoticed to those unfamiliar, and would leave those people confused about certain revelations. I do understand the tone it's going for, but that tone is hard to commit to when the first thing that happens is a city being exploded by a nuke.

The game really looks incredible. The Ghibli style translates surprisingly well to 3D. The locales really go all out with their flare, assuming they are major cities. Dungeons are reused constantly, which is to be expected to some extent, given that there are quite a lot of them, but it did make exploring them tiring after a while.

The game also has a rather simple tactical mode that honestly wouldn't be worth mentioning if it wasn't such a big focus of the game. You rotate little armies that either have an advantage against an enemies weapon or don't, with variations of ranged and defence units alongside those. It's really just a matter of rotating to the correct unit and attacking harder. It was lame.

If you crave that high you get from making 100 friends in a game, this is perfect for that, and honestly sometimes that's enough.