Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom

My review:

Good wholesome fun. A good game to play with a significant other. Nice art.

About 5 hours in and enjoying it, its laid back and relaxing. But yes I hope at some point the challenge ramps up a bit. Combat seems like it has a fair amount of depth but its wasted when everything dies in seconds.

Shame about the combat. Considering it was the one thing it seems like they wanted to improve.

I dont mind an easier game, sometimes its nice to just relax. The actual fighting reminds me of the good Tales of games, feels very fluid to me, art style is wonderful.

I wonder, is it easy or “easy” to JRPG min/maxing types. I find my lack of optimizing makes RPGs harder than usual

But... if you remove the min/maxing from JRPGs all you got left are the annoying characters and nonsense stories.

I put over 10 hours (somehow) into it this weekend, the regular trash mobs still provide no real challenge, unless you try to head into an area well above your level, few boss fights actually were pretty fun, but not terribly difficult, what did gave me a bit of a hard time is the tainted monsters that are scattered around the world, or are the subjects of some side quests, few of them actually managed to KO my party until I figured out how to use items, even then I had to go through a decent amount of healing/reviving items to get through. The army skirmishes are bit on a harder side for me too, but that could be just me.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the game, despite some minor annoyances such as janky frame rate on the over-world map, (I'm on base OG ps4)

I've been enjoying the game more now that I'm into the kingdom building. It's a good motivation to do these sidequests.

Its feeling like Super Mario Odyssey for me in the sense that the gameplay feels excellent but there is no challenge in the 2 hours I've put in so far. The darting movement from the ranged attacks, the powered up versions of spells (when your melee weapons hit 100%) both feel absolutely fantastic.

I was purposely running upto hard (red) mobs of monsters out in the initial open world area & still taking them out with ease. It doesn't have the charm of the first game thus far but its still really fun, I like Roland but Evan is a tad annoying.

I wonder if they would patch in a higher difficulty in the near future, this game would be epic if it had challenging combat.

I am even fine with easy combat but they needed to add in some challenges for players. Stuff like "win with no damage," "complete in X seconds" etc. Then give people more higglies or more items.

That seems like a great way to have the combat be easy for people but for those wanting to challenge themselves they could try to get the extras.

Started the game last night and all I have to say is..why are the text bubbles so darn small? By the time I make out the first few words, they've already disappeared. I hope they aren't saying anything important since I haven't been able to read most of them :/

Forlorn Hope wrote:

Started the game last night and all I have to say is..why are the text bubbles so darn small? By the time I make out the first few words, they've already disappeared. I hope they aren't saying anything important since I haven't been able to read most of them :/

Yep, pain in the ass. You end up getting a few words into the sentence before it disappears or goes onto the next bit of dialogue that you won't be fast enough to read.

I might shelve the game for the meantime, I've only played it just shy of a couple of hours but the challenge is literally zero & reading the bits of dialogue when your out traveling across the world in the top down view is very problematic.

Has anyone got further in to the point they've had to use their Higgledies in combat? Or that your finding some sort of challenge to the point that abilities are being used, dodging or blocking is necessary etc?

I'm about 13 hours in, and I definatelly had to use the Higgledies and some dodging in the boss fights and the occasional purple swirly monsters. I've been playing more as a wind down game, than something to challenge myself, it has been more of a comfort food thing. But I agree the little bubbles are way to quick to go away, but from what I noticed its just pointless banter, anything important seems to use big chat boxes/voiced.

For those who bit farther ahead, fyi, for longest time I couldn't figure out how to level up my kingdom, as it turns out you can just mouse over your castle and it acts just like another building.

I've had the Goldpaw theme stuck in my head for days...

I fired this up last night and was a little taken aback by it. The combat is about what I expected and I'm okay with that since this is a Level-5 joint and I am always underwhelmed by the combat. What I was taken aback by was the presentation. No, not the graphics, art or music as those are all incredibly high quality, but by how it plays much like the PS3 game. It's clear they're still using the underlying engine from the from the original games, which was a 3DS game. Granted I'm only an hour in, so there's a bunch of tutorials popping up, dialogue breaks, etc., but the way I run for 10 seconds until a scene loads, watch the scene for 10 seconds, then wait for the in-game scene with only written dialog to load is jarring to me, before running and killing three enemies in half a second before another loading screen for more dialogue. I was expecting a bit more polish and growth on that end.

I feel like I'm playing a remastered PS3 game is likely the tldr version. I'm okay with that, but my expectations were for something a little more refined. Expectations are a Female Doggo sometimes.

Definitely a different experience on PC. Everything is extremely snappy for me, and on high settings, the PS3 had nothing that looked this good (that I recall).

Pardon the horrific formatting, lists just wouldn't work for me today.

Just finished the game, my summary;

* Played on PS4, very few noticeable performance hits
* 45 hours, some side quests
* Not the same level of "joy" playing it as the first, art style doesn't feel as tight
* Combat is button mash easy at first, but requires more effort, thought, and planning later into the game, probably the high point of the game in the end
* Polish is very high for a real time combat JRPG, no huge annoyances, I had to grind a couple levels toward the end. As with all JRPG's quest text was unreadable after while.
* I agree with Garion's assessment about the jarring presentation, lots of unvoiced text, pop up text bubbles etc. In the end I ignored all the tiny text boxes and ploughed though unvoiced text as quick as possible.
* Pacing was good, the game didn't make me feel like it had a mortgage o my life. Finished at just the right point.

I'd recommend it, if you like JRG's.

I've actually set it aside because I'm finding The Alliance Alive to be such a good game. I'll probably pick it back up when my oldest and I have some time to sit down together because he'll probably enjoy watching it.

garion333 wrote:

I've actually set it aside because I'm finding The Alliance Alive to be such a good game.

You sparked a bit of reading from me..... From Wikipedia

The aim was to create a game that would evoke the character-focused narrative and role-playing experience of the Ultima and Wizardry series, in addition to classic RPGs from the genre's golden age.

You had me at "hello" The Alliance Alive.

I ended up finishing it last night, I pretty much agree with everything Sikk had said about it few posts up, very solid game, I can see myself returning in a few weeks or a month to work on some post game content.

I am barely 2 hours into the game. Looks ok so far...

But.. am I the only one that get annoyed with the text boxes that appear.. they seem to last a short time.. or maybe i cant read that fast?

You are not alone. I ended up just ignoring them after a while.

The game looks good but feels different than the 1st... hope i end up loving it

5ish hours in.. I think so far.. I like the 1st game better... hard to tell

I played for about 5 hours when the game came out, but I dropped it as I became engaged in other games and I was waiting for the guide to come out. This week I reached Chapter 4, after about another half hour, and holy wow does the game open up after that. I've been burning time building my kingdom and recruiting citizens. I really don't mind the easy combat, as this has become a most relaxing game for me. Lots of fun!

Aristophan wrote:

I played for about 5 hours when the game came out, but I dropped it as I became engaged in other games and I was waiting for the guide to come out. This week I reached Chapter 4, after about another half hour, and holy wow does the game open up after that. I've been burning time building my kingdom and recruiting citizens. I really don't mind the easy combat, as this has become a most relaxing game for me. Lots of fun!

Similar story for me. I just received the nice hardcover guide in the mail and that brought me back into the game. Over the last week I've had it on in the background while doing some work from home and have run the game clock up from 15 to nearly 50 hours. I've now hit a wall needing to level the Kingdom up to level 3 before I can do much more. That requires 50 citizens and so far in chapter 5-2 I've only been able to find about 29. I expect that a side effect of doing so much 'kingdom grinding' up front will be that the game becomes even easier, but that's absolutely fine with me.

Focusing only on kingdom management is pretty mindless aside from trying to optimize your progression with the limited number of citizens available. I like the conceit of having to help citizens to bring them into your kingdom as it's a nice way to have side quests that provide some longer term meaning through the named characters you recruit.

I bought an edition that came with the season pass - has anyone heard any details about what it'll be?

No, Ive been curious about the season pass too.

I just got my guide on Saturday.

I ended up canceling my guide pre-order as I beat the main story and good portion of side missions weeks before the guide came out.

sometimesdee wrote:

I just got my guide on Saturday.

I got my guide today. It is huge! I've been impressed by Future Press guides in the past, and this looks to be great so far.