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.
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.