Ni no kuni 2: revenant kingdom review
Ni no Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom is a classic JRPG transported into the contemporary era. Infused with ideas from the Suikoden series, the Dark Cloud games, and with a firm understanding about what makes action chơi game engaging và exciting, Ni no Kuni 2 continually surprised me with how effortlessly it kept me from getting too bogged down in details and minutiae.
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Case in point is the opening of the game: We follow the president of a pseudo-U.S. In his motorcade. As he approaches a city, a missile comes soaring overhead. It destroys the city in what appears to lớn be a nuclear attack, và the President, thrown from his vehicle, looks up toward the destruction before shimmering out of existence and appearing in the fantasy world in which Ni no Kuni 2 takes place. I repeat, this is what happens at the opening of this game.
Similar to 2013’s Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the trắng Witch, which centers on travel between worlds, what follows is a more a traditional, but rich fantasy story. While the grand narrative structure will be familiar to those who enjoy JRPGs, I found some real pleasure in the specifics of Ni no Kuni 2’s plot. When Roland (the President) disappears from his world, he appears in the royal bedroom of Evan Pettiwhisker Tildrum, a teen prince who is set to be inaugurated the next morning as king of the realm of Ding Dong Dell. Evan’s father, the previous king, died recently under mysterious circumstances, and now there are villains in the castle who are trying khổng lồ destroy the Tildrum line once and for all. Roland rescues Evan, gets him out of the kingdom, and then enters into a big world full of sky pirates, magical water kingdoms & robot-filled treehouses.
One of the stand-out features of Ni no Kuni 2 is the combat. Gone is the pseudo-Pokémon chơi game of the first Ni no Kuni. In its place is a real-time action combat system that places three buổi tiệc nhỏ members in a small battle arena in which they can perform the classic maneuvers of fast attacks, strong attacks, magical abilities, block và dodge roll. All of these are implemented without complication and for maximal ease of use. Ni no Kuni 2’s combat is surprisingly tight, and becoming familiar with artful dodge rolls and optimal skill usage allows you khổng lồ take on many more enemies (or higher màn chơi enemies) than you would be able lớn in a more traditional or a turn-based JRPG.
A zing gauge manages how often you use your three equipped melee weapons (each character also has a single ranged weapon). When you score enough hits with a sword, its zing gauge fills up lớn 100 percent, allowing you to khuyễn mãi giảm giá more basic attack damage with it. You can also expend that full charge lớn power up your already strong special abilities. If you want khổng lồ get even more fiddly with your combat experience, you can delve into the game’s tactic tweaker, which is a way of augmenting how much damage you vì to certain enemy types, how much of each kind of loot you gain, what kind of elemental damage you can do, and other sundry effects in combat. You can go deep in this combat system, but you’re also not punished for quietly ignoring it.
If you miss the combat of the original Ni no Kuni, you might appreciate Higgeldies. Understood lớn be phenomena more than individuals, Higgeldies are strange little elementals who help Evan out on his journey. You can equip up lớn four at a time, và in combat they appear to passively attack enemies và provide buffs for your party. Every now & again they will spread out into a visible area so that they can be activated, & upon activation they will either vì chưng a powerful attack (like shooting a fire cannon at your foes) or provide you with some kind of boon (like a healing field).
While a lot of your time is spent in combat, that’s obviously not all you are up to lớn in the game. Evan and Roland embark upon a journey of self-discovery và hard political choices, và after some early trò chơi soul-searching và general sadness about being deposed, Evan decides that he wants to found a kingdom in which “everyone can be happy.” This being a fantasy game, that generally seems attainable, so Evan travels around the world on a mission lớn convince all of the different leaders of the world to sign a Declaration of Interdependence that will ensure safety & prosperity for all.
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The center of this prosperity is Evan’s own Kingdom of Evermore, a little citadel nestled in the middle of a wide plain. While the depth of combat and the well-written và clever fantasy story kept me hooked into the game, the management and defense of Evermore is really what got me to lớn lock in for hours at a time. Taking notes from both the Dark Cloud and Suikoden series, Ni no Kuni 2 has the player directly managing the population, construction, management and research agenda of Evermore. Lượt thích the combat system, you can get deep & fiddly with it. Unlike the combat system, which I enjoyed but didn’t invest too much time into, I fell right into the kingdom management trap.
You build Evermore & staff it with citizens that you gather from around the world. Sadly, unlike Dark Cloud, you don’t get to lớn determine where khổng lồ put the buildings, but you choose the order in which khổng lồ build them and who lớn place inside of them. The researchable upgrades in those buildings have effects all across Ni no Kuni 2. Some of them affect sản phẩm drop rates, character speed, experience gained in battle và a dozen other scattered things. Others allow for better weapons and armor to be crafted. Still others simply gather items like bones, crystals and dairy products to put into your inventory.
You need those banal items lớn get citizens. While items are useful for other side quests và for upgrading your Higgeldies, their real purpose is khổng lồ be used as enticing objects to lớn bring people lớn your kingdom. After you get Evermore up & running, there is a near-constant stream of available micro-quests centered on convincing people to lớn live there. A fair number of those quests are based on giving a person a simple item like coral or iron ore. Those items can be manually gathered in the world by the player or they can be passively gathered in sufficiently upgraded buildings in Evermore. You can see the loop forming. Managing Evermore has taken up a significant amount of my 30 or so hours of playtime in the game, despite making enough progress in the game’s story that it feels like the ending is coming right along.
There’s one more piece of the Evermore management puzzle: military power. Evermore defends itself via a neat military battle system that places Evan and four contingents of troops on a battlefield. The troops rotate lượt thích a wheel around Evan, and you manipulate them in order to lớn win rock-paper-scissors battles with your enemies in realtime on the world map. It’s simple, clean và sells the story that Evan is learning all of the different skills that a pseudo-medieval king might need lớn know.
The game’s story is pure comfort food, full of JRPG stock characters and plots. In his travels around the world to lớn get everyone khổng lồ sign his pact of friendship, Evan learns that there is a nefarious presence going around & corrupting all of the world’s leaders. That presence is stealing the Kingsbond — a magical linkage between that person and a magical being called a Kingmaker — from those rulers. While each of the thematic kingdoms of the game have their own story acts (all of which are familiar to lớn someone invested in either fantasy or JRPG narratives), they ultimately cohere around giant magical monsters & those who can (or cannot) manage khổng lồ control them.
The level of commitment lớn specific ideas within those plots, however, is commendable. The story of the kingdom of Goldpaw, for example, revolves around state-based debt, taxation, và what a government will bởi vì to preserve itself. Another is focused on the tension between surveillance và freedom. Yet another features a revolt of workers who literally chant “we need workers’ rights!” in the street. I never thought that I would write this, but Ni no Kuni 2 is a surprisingly political trò chơi that is more in conversation about real-world conditions than you might expect.
Wrap Up
Ni no Kuni 2 aims for a lot of different targets: world-spanning story, management sim, recruitment game & solid combat experience. Against all odds, it manages lớn hit them all in a way that very few games in its genre can manage. There’s no part of the game that feels more or less important, và there were no moments in the game where I thought I was slogging through exposition or kingdom management to pad hours in my playthrough. There’s not a wasted breath or a plot point that doesn’t manage lớn pay off in a significant way. Ni no Kuni 2 is a solid contemporary JRPG that brings a lot of thiết kế ideas that I love into sharp, clear focus while staying entertaining and engaging throughout.
