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GAME: Ni no Kuni II:Revenant Kingdom

Oh, wow. Surprised to see such a tepid appraisal of NnK1... I, too, felt it was a disappointingly mediocre game... but have encountered little else but unwavering praise for it from others.

Anyway, NnK2 sounds like an improvement in every respect, and as tedious as the town building may be, it still seems less tedious than the combat of the first game, and may well be less of an issue for casual play—IE people who aren’t obligated to get a review written up by a certain time. 30 hours from start to end would be... an extraordinarily short game by JRPG standards.

The lack of voice acting feels pretty odd, though. Wasn’t NnK1 fully voiced? It’s equally a shame about the princeling—seems to be a dull character in every respect (character design, voice, personality, goals). I laughed at that “peacefully unite the world” bit... this is the kind of fantastical, surreal setting where you can have a “good” character “conquer the world” without getting bogged down with conventional real-world morality (it’s call hyooma, mah good man)... and, frankly, I’m sick to death of the of the extremely childish Japanese postmodern take on anti-war messaging.

Whereas the original game was a traditional turn-based RPG, this time around the developer has opted for an action RPG approach, something more akin to Kingdom Hearts in execution.

In addition to grinding through standard enemies, you'll face a variety of epic bosses. They all provide a decent challenge, and several of them even have battle-specific gimmicks. Some of these work, such as one battle that finds you equipped with a Higgledy-powered gun to take down an airborne foe. Some do not, such as one boss that ends with a frustrating platforming sequence. But the effort made to mix things up and keep it interesting is appreciated.

Controlling Evan, and flanked on all sides by your troops, you barrel into enemy forces. Each unit of soldiers specializes in one type of weapon, be it bows or swords or hammers or spears. There's a simple rock-paper-scissors mentality to these battles, with spears having the advantage against swords, but being weak against hammers, and so on.

But where Ni no Kuni II drops the ball is by making this kingdom builder mandatory to progress in the game.

One thing I found odd was how little voice acting there is. A handful of important scenes are fully voiced, but the vast majority are text only. It's a bit of a rough juxtaposition, with the sweeping score, the gorgeous graphics, and the old-school text box crowding out the bottom of the screen. The production values elsewhere would have suggested a fully voiced game, and the text-only scenes are robbed of some of their dramatic potential. Plus, sticking voiced scenes in the middle of seas of text makes the game feel strangely uneven.