Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom is set a long time after the first game. Featuring a new cast, you don’t have to have played the first game to enjoy this one. The graphics are anime styled but the aesthetics are more in line with Studio Ghibli films. This means that the world is vibrant and colorful, coupled with HDR and 4K if you have PS4 Pro, and it is a stunning game. With a PS4 Pro, you can opt for 4K / 60FPS (although framerate is unlocked and will fluctuate), or 1080p / 60FPS (with the framerate being a lot more solid).
The first thing that hits you will be the fantastic art direction and the awesome graphics. The dungeons, character models and enemies look amazing. Unfortunately, once you hit the world map, it is rendered in 3D more akin to most games, with chibi character models and it looks much duller, bland and generic as a result. Furthermore, there is this odd tendency for texture pop-in as you run through the cities, it’s distracting because the game looks so good overall that this issue stands out.
The combat has been revamped. There are no more Pokemon-esque familiars anymore, you have story characters forming your party of three. In dungeons, battles take place on the same screen, while on world map, it transitions to a separate battle screen. The game is purely action, with a button for weak attack and another for strong attack. You can block and dodge, use items, and hotkey special abilities / attacks. You equip up to four weapons at once, which you can toggle on the fly, and they each have a % next to them, you would want to keep them at 100% as it provides some nice bonuses.
With the normal difficulty actually being very easy, you’ll get away with mashing the attack buttons with a few strategic moments of dodging for most of the game. While you control one party member, AI controls the other two and it’s actually competent. There is also the addition of Higgledies, who are more like ally NPCs, that passively and actively help you during battle. These includes special attacks or healing you. Boss battles are a highlight, thanks to the bigger and cooler designs. They’re visual spectacles, especially with the visual effects of the spells coming into play.
Like the first game, the world map is massive, exacerbated through the slower running speed of your character. As a result, it can feel like a chore at times to travel. Thankfully, there are plentiful fast travel spots. The best parts of the game are definitely the dungeons. While enemies will run towards you to engage you, once you are a sufficient level above them, they don’t notice you at all, allowing you to run past them. This makes exploring and grabbing anything you’ve missed before much easier and faster. Doubly so once you’ve unlocked the increase in running speed on the world map.
The story follows Roland, an adult who is transported from his world to this world, right in the midst of a coup in Ding Dong Bell. He meets Evan, and based on the events, they pair up and eventually rebuild the kingdom. As is usual with JRPGs, the story meanders and easily gets distracted. They’ll meet plenty of colorful characters, with a few of them joining up as party members. Perhaps most distracting is how inconsistent the voice acting is. As in, some scenes are voiced acted, most are not, worse are the ones that are voiced acted for the first sentence and then not for the remainder of the dialogue.
Sadly, the game has this commonality with nearly all of its aspects and that is after a strong introduction, it fizzles out. The story begins strong, as Evan and Roland survive the coup and set out to rebuild their kingdom. And then the story takes massive detour after massive detour while the core story element never evolves. Main story quests end up feeling like sidequests, because you are given an objective and once you get there, something comes up and it splits into three other objectives. So now you are fast travelling to previous areas to grab the items or slay the monsters, before coming back. Then you repeat this a few more times with the same NPC, and you can see that it is filling up time with pointless events that barely advance the story.
There are two major core gameplay mechanics that are kind of like huge sidequests, as they form a big part of the game but aren’t completely essential to the story. The first is the kingdom building aspect. As Evan decides to build his own new kingdom, you end up playing this resource management type game where you build new structures, research stuff to unlock new items and equipment, and grow in size. It can be addictive, and research is based upon real time. However, the downer is recruiting your citizens, which are tied to bland sidequests which are all either fetch quests or monster slaying quests.
The other gameplay mechanic are the skirmishes. These are like army battles on the world map where you take on the role of a commander and move around to destroy the opposing forces. Battles happen automatically, so it basically relies on your stats, and the timing of when you use your abilities. It’s fun the first few times but like a lot of the game, it eventually becomes tedious. However, this along with the kingdom building adds a lot of content, even if it is repetitive and time-consuming content.
If you don’t want to waste your time doing all the repetitive sidequests, the game actually goes by as a fairly decent rate. After an early section where you’re constantly retreading the same areas, it then unlocks new ones at a fast pace. Furthermore, you’ll get new methods of travel which greatly speed up the process even more. Unfortunately, if you do this, then you will end up being severely underleveled, which feels like a cruel punishment given all the additional optional content that the developer thought you’d do is actually really boring and tedious, that there wasn’t much value in doing them in the first place. It doesn’t help that you quickly encounter the same generic dungeon maps and locations, as well as the low variety of monster types so you’ll be fighting palette swaps for most of the game.
The game’s story takes around 25 to 35 hours to complete. This really depends on how much of the additional content you tackle, because the endgame utilizes pretty much all of the different gameplay elements, you’ll probably need to spend a little bit of time to grind up those aspects. As it is, it’s not a long JRPG by any means, and the story ends up being flat. Unlike other JRPGs which tend to favour melodramatic plots, this game tends to be a gigantic fetch quest that doesn’t escalate the urgency at all, which is its most disappointing aspect.
Post-game is where there is a distinct lack of planning from the developers. You can easily finish off the final story boss at around level 60 or lower, but even finishing off a bunch of the optional bosses and sidequests, you’re still around twenty levels away from the hardest bonus dungeon. That’s not including the DLCs which require even higher levels than that. So you end up mindlessly trying to grind your levels up, which is tedious as there is no fast and easy way until you hit a certain point to try a specific method.
There are three major pieces of DLC for the game. The first one, the Adventure Pack, is free. It introduces additional floors to the post-game randomized dungeon with a new harder boss, and as well as a chain of story quests that fleshes out a little bit extra of the lore of the game. The first major paid content is Lair of the Lost Lord. This includes a 100 floor randomized dungeon, very similar to the post-game one you have been playing, but now with no time limit, and sidequests that expand on the backstory of the playable characters.
The third and last DLC is The Tale of a Timeless Tome and this contains a lot more story content. While it will still eventually get repetitive, as it reuses the same monsters and environments as the main game, while adding a few more, it feels more worthwhile. The story itself gives us even more backstory of several characters, and also an insight on the reasons on how certain things were done in the game. It does take at least two hours to play through if you rush it, but you’ll probably spend more on just levelling up to get to a level where you can easily beat it. Finally, it adds in an arena with multiple levels but just like its name, it’s a slog. For some reason, the developers seem to favor heavy grinding in order to get rare items to create better equipment, by which point you don’t need them anymore. Both paid DLCs include additional elements to the combat system, one of which makes fighting against bosses so much easier, and is something you would have wished was available in the main story as it makes combat a lot more fun and engaging.
The problem with the DLC is that they are too focused on some of the more boring aspects of the post-game. When you’ve already gone through the randomized dungeons a few times, you wouldn’t want to go through yet another 100 floor one in the hopes of better loot (although the loot is pretty great, stat-wise). The amount of story content is very low and ultimately inconsequential. The worst part is how the game assumes that you have spent a lot of time grinding for levels so in order to beat the content, you’re going to be needing to gain 30 to 40 levels from the point of beating the main story. This is ridiculous and the time wasted on grinding those levels, isn’t worth the times you’re going to get bored playing the low-effort DLCs.
Overall, Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom is a solid game, despite all of its flaws. It’s got a bland story and the whole game is chock full of repetitive filler, yet it manages a somewhat addictive gameplay loop. It’s not for everyone, since it is a grind heavy game, and what makes it even more so is that there is a separate grind for each gameplay aspect, from the Kingdom building, to the skirmishes, to the actual combat, it can feel never-ending. The DLCs are lazy pieces of content for the most part, and aren’t really worth your money. The game itself is still a worthwhile experience and it is one of the most beautiful games out there.
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