A great experiment, maybe the story was a bit too short and there are many little things to fix.
I still want more though
I still want more though
i liked playing this and i liked the real time combat. terrible dungeon design but i did like the cities and the characters. my progression was cut off at some point because i put off doing army battles and i was required to do more in order to progress but the level scaling got all fucked up. sigh
legal mas demora muito, platinei
What the f** even was this game? Ni No Kuni II has a lot of good ideas, some not as good ideas and some bad ideas. The worst of all is that it has far too many ideas. The game layers mechanic after mechanic ontop of mechanic after mechanic, nonstop. In the end the game is convoluted and mired within itself. It's impossibly bizarre plot does the game no additional favors.
The opening five minutes are a complete fever dream. A presidential motorcade is driving through a tunnel and then onto a bridge entering some island metropolis that looks vaguely like NYC & Tokyo mashed with one another. We go into a limousine and see the president talking, an older Asian man with salt and pepper hair. He looks out his window and sees a missile roaring towards the city passed his car. The missile hits the city and a mushroom cloud rises over the city. A scene transition shows the president miraculously alive underneath a bunch of rubble where he grunts a few times before a glowing blue light washes over him and teleports him away.
The president reappears but now it's in a castle, and the president is much younger with long black hair in a ponytail. In front of him is a child with cat ears. Who is revealed to be Evan Pettiwhisker Tildrum, the prince of the kingdom in which the castle you're in resides. Within seconds a rumble is heard downstairs and Roland deduces a coup is undergoing. Evan is terrified at the weird alternate-dimension invader. Evan tries to knife him, Roland soothes him and runs downstairs. Roland's suspicions are right and a bunch of ~6foot armored mice-men are charging to kill Evan. Roland fends them off by, and I'm not kidding, literally shooting them in the face with a 9mm pistol. A large mouse, named Mausinger, reveals he had murdered Evan's father, the king, and is now going to kill Evan.
Roland saves Evan, the group flee, some chick Evan loved like a mother dies in the process. Evan resolves to take back the throne, later settling instead on founding a brand new different kingdom based on love or some shit. The rest of the game is spent strengthening the new kingdom through alliances with existing kingdoms and recruiting citizens to come live in Evan's new fiefdom. Which seems reasonable enough except it concludes with flying on a rainbow dragon (which is normally a little star person) into an interdimensional space rift in the sky to fight a gigantic horned rock demon that has a lady/dragon/unicorn creature trapped inside it. You do so trying to win back an ancient continent kingdom for a snake man and the lady/dragon/unicorn creature is his long lost love.
Confused? My favorite is chapter six, where you lead a communist revolution to overthrow Elon Musk. Except it turns out Musk is a good guy and actually was just corrupted by the aforementioned snake man. Eventually Musk realizes he needs to run a more ethical company or something and it all works out. I think. This plot sound batshit crazy and confusing? Believe it or not, the actual gaming mechanics are far, far more confusing.
The game begins as a sort of Kingdom Hearts-style/Ys-style party-based slashing JRPG. Fast paced with slashing combos and some mana-based skills. But shortly after this the game introduces a weapon switching mechanic where each weapon charges up and you have to switch between them to do optimal damage. Not too bad but each of your three party members has three weapons to switch from and the AI does not use them efficiently. So you have to switch characters to use their skills and mana and use their multiple weapons. Every enemy has various class typings and elemental attacks while your weapons also have various effects including elemental effects. It's quite in-depth.
The game then takes you to a global area map that your party trots across. Except your party is chibi and the map is chibi. Encounters take you into the normal attack camera. You then get introduced to 'higgledies.' They are little sprite elfy elemental looking goof characters. They provide all types of support. They can cast skills and provide stat boosts that vary from healing or attack speed or elemental damage reduction to actually attacking enemies either via single target or area of effect damage. Each higgledy, of which you'll collect several, levels up. The higher they level the better their skills. You can think of them like Chaos from Sonic Adventure Battle 2
Shortly after this you get some allies that offer their troops to you? And then here comes another mechanic. It becomes an almost Total War-esque top down real time strategy game where you bring units of troops into battle against opposing armies. Near-top down camera angle with troop commands and infantry stats. Totally nothing like any other part of the game.
Then next you get a city builder. You have to build Evan's new kingdom building by building and citizen by citizen. Each building needs to be staffed by the citizens you recruit. These citizens all have individual stats and abilities that suit them towards certain work in certain buildings. The buildings can perform all sorts of research that enhance your party's capabilities or the buildings produce resources that you can use to upgrade things that improve your party. There are 70 some odd buildings and 100 citizens to build and recruit.
Each one of these mechanics is pretty reasonably deep, and they are all interconnected. It becomes so opaque that it feels nearly impossible to follow. Manipulating these mechanics to your advantage takes hours for even mediocre increases in you abilities. And the game makes it plenty easy to ignore all of these mechanics until near the end of the game or even after the main story altogether. But once you need them, or decide to try to figure it out, it's a bear. Even using guides it's like trying to dissect a god damn frog in AP Bio.
The game is just so god damn unwieldy. Whether it's the actual gameplay mechanics or the impossible to give a shit about plot. It takes like 7 chapters for the storyline to truly develop in a meaningful way, and then the story pivots in a total batshit direction with the Allegoria storyline introduction. In the eleventh hour of the game the entire story switches introducing new characters, settings, lore and new lore relationships. It's a mess. The game just never decides what it wants to be. It's six different games smashed together and the storyline uses time travel, dream metaphors, actual time travel within only dreams somehow, interdimensional travels with no explanation. It's just so, so, so, much. Every time you think the game can't get more nuts, it gets ten times more nuts. Both in story and in gameplay mechanics. Each and every time.
There are redeeming qualities. The music is fantastic. Final Fantasy tier. Just really fantastic music in diversity and quality. Every track is a god damn banger. Visually the game is quite pleasing as well. Super Disney meets Ghibli sort of aesthetic. Some of the character design is uninspired, especially for the main cast. But supporting characters can be quite cool. Lady Trudy, Niall, Pugnacius. Really cool. Some of the cities are similarly cool. Goldpaw is a fantastic city with a really cool vibe that I'm desperate to implement into a DnD campaign someday.
Technically the game was pretty good. No lag or weird spots, no poor cutscene audios or mixing. The game did spontaneously crash once. And the loading times were very long, even longer than you'd expect given I played this on a PS5. But still it hummed along pretty fine even compared to many AAA releases nowadays. The frequency of full heal savepoints as checkpoints was very nice. You can also fast travel to basically anywhere. Fairly player friendly.
Ni No Kuni II is nothing shy of ambitious. Nothing short of large. The game is sprawling. And while sometimes sprawling seems nice like Breath of the Wild. Other times sprawling is quite bad. Like an urban sprawl. And Ni No Kuni is certainly the latter. Just dense and chock full of everything* the devs thought was a cool idea along the way. A little restraint would've gone a very long way. There's a good game buried deep in here somewhere. It takes a lot of work to find it.
The opening five minutes are a complete fever dream. A presidential motorcade is driving through a tunnel and then onto a bridge entering some island metropolis that looks vaguely like NYC & Tokyo mashed with one another. We go into a limousine and see the president talking, an older Asian man with salt and pepper hair. He looks out his window and sees a missile roaring towards the city passed his car. The missile hits the city and a mushroom cloud rises over the city. A scene transition shows the president miraculously alive underneath a bunch of rubble where he grunts a few times before a glowing blue light washes over him and teleports him away.
The president reappears but now it's in a castle, and the president is much younger with long black hair in a ponytail. In front of him is a child with cat ears. Who is revealed to be Evan Pettiwhisker Tildrum, the prince of the kingdom in which the castle you're in resides. Within seconds a rumble is heard downstairs and Roland deduces a coup is undergoing. Evan is terrified at the weird alternate-dimension invader. Evan tries to knife him, Roland soothes him and runs downstairs. Roland's suspicions are right and a bunch of ~6foot armored mice-men are charging to kill Evan. Roland fends them off by, and I'm not kidding, literally shooting them in the face with a 9mm pistol. A large mouse, named Mausinger, reveals he had murdered Evan's father, the king, and is now going to kill Evan.
Roland saves Evan, the group flee, some chick Evan loved like a mother dies in the process. Evan resolves to take back the throne, later settling instead on founding a brand new different kingdom based on love or some shit. The rest of the game is spent strengthening the new kingdom through alliances with existing kingdoms and recruiting citizens to come live in Evan's new fiefdom. Which seems reasonable enough except it concludes with flying on a rainbow dragon (which is normally a little star person) into an interdimensional space rift in the sky to fight a gigantic horned rock demon that has a lady/dragon/unicorn creature trapped inside it. You do so trying to win back an ancient continent kingdom for a snake man and the lady/dragon/unicorn creature is his long lost love.
Confused? My favorite is chapter six, where you lead a communist revolution to overthrow Elon Musk. Except it turns out Musk is a good guy and actually was just corrupted by the aforementioned snake man. Eventually Musk realizes he needs to run a more ethical company or something and it all works out. I think. This plot sound batshit crazy and confusing? Believe it or not, the actual gaming mechanics are far, far more confusing.
The game begins as a sort of Kingdom Hearts-style/Ys-style party-based slashing JRPG. Fast paced with slashing combos and some mana-based skills. But shortly after this the game introduces a weapon switching mechanic where each weapon charges up and you have to switch between them to do optimal damage. Not too bad but each of your three party members has three weapons to switch from and the AI does not use them efficiently. So you have to switch characters to use their skills and mana and use their multiple weapons. Every enemy has various class typings and elemental attacks while your weapons also have various effects including elemental effects. It's quite in-depth.
The game then takes you to a global area map that your party trots across. Except your party is chibi and the map is chibi. Encounters take you into the normal attack camera. You then get introduced to 'higgledies.' They are little sprite elfy elemental looking goof characters. They provide all types of support. They can cast skills and provide stat boosts that vary from healing or attack speed or elemental damage reduction to actually attacking enemies either via single target or area of effect damage. Each higgledy, of which you'll collect several, levels up. The higher they level the better their skills. You can think of them like Chaos from Sonic Adventure Battle 2
Shortly after this you get some allies that offer their troops to you? And then here comes another mechanic. It becomes an almost Total War-esque top down real time strategy game where you bring units of troops into battle against opposing armies. Near-top down camera angle with troop commands and infantry stats. Totally nothing like any other part of the game.
Then next you get a city builder. You have to build Evan's new kingdom building by building and citizen by citizen. Each building needs to be staffed by the citizens you recruit. These citizens all have individual stats and abilities that suit them towards certain work in certain buildings. The buildings can perform all sorts of research that enhance your party's capabilities or the buildings produce resources that you can use to upgrade things that improve your party. There are 70 some odd buildings and 100 citizens to build and recruit.
Each one of these mechanics is pretty reasonably deep, and they are all interconnected. It becomes so opaque that it feels nearly impossible to follow. Manipulating these mechanics to your advantage takes hours for even mediocre increases in you abilities. And the game makes it plenty easy to ignore all of these mechanics until near the end of the game or even after the main story altogether. But once you need them, or decide to try to figure it out, it's a bear. Even using guides it's like trying to dissect a god damn frog in AP Bio.
The game is just so god damn unwieldy. Whether it's the actual gameplay mechanics or the impossible to give a shit about plot. It takes like 7 chapters for the storyline to truly develop in a meaningful way, and then the story pivots in a total batshit direction with the Allegoria storyline introduction. In the eleventh hour of the game the entire story switches introducing new characters, settings, lore and new lore relationships. It's a mess. The game just never decides what it wants to be. It's six different games smashed together and the storyline uses time travel, dream metaphors, actual time travel within only dreams somehow, interdimensional travels with no explanation. It's just so, so, so, much. Every time you think the game can't get more nuts, it gets ten times more nuts. Both in story and in gameplay mechanics. Each and every time.
There are redeeming qualities. The music is fantastic. Final Fantasy tier. Just really fantastic music in diversity and quality. Every track is a god damn banger. Visually the game is quite pleasing as well. Super Disney meets Ghibli sort of aesthetic. Some of the character design is uninspired, especially for the main cast. But supporting characters can be quite cool. Lady Trudy, Niall, Pugnacius. Really cool. Some of the cities are similarly cool. Goldpaw is a fantastic city with a really cool vibe that I'm desperate to implement into a DnD campaign someday.
Technically the game was pretty good. No lag or weird spots, no poor cutscene audios or mixing. The game did spontaneously crash once. And the loading times were very long, even longer than you'd expect given I played this on a PS5. But still it hummed along pretty fine even compared to many AAA releases nowadays. The frequency of full heal savepoints as checkpoints was very nice. You can also fast travel to basically anywhere. Fairly player friendly.
Ni No Kuni II is nothing shy of ambitious. Nothing short of large. The game is sprawling. And while sometimes sprawling seems nice like Breath of the Wild. Other times sprawling is quite bad. Like an urban sprawl. And Ni No Kuni is certainly the latter. Just dense and chock full of everything* the devs thought was a cool idea along the way. A little restraint would've gone a very long way. There's a good game buried deep in here somewhere. It takes a lot of work to find it.
I really love the themes and combat, but the characters development is quite terrible.