Ni No Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom

[Corrobin]

I've been waiting for this game for a while.

[Jingle Jangle]

Same, I 100% competed the first game and had a great time with it. But sadly it's going to be a while before I can get my hands on the game, due to budget reasons. 

[dragonlordsd]

My quick review:

The good:

Combat is actually better than I expected. Most reviewers have been claiming it's too easy, which I haven't found to be super true. It's about as hard as Kingdom Hearts on normal mode, so not too terrible. Would have liked a hard mode, but it's still pretty fun.

The locations are really well designed, and look really good, even compared to the previous game. Part of this has to do with how battles flow more naturally in dungeons (again, think kingdom hearts, you don't have break away encounters), which makes the dungeons feel a lot smoother. Towns are also a lot bigger, which is nice.

Kingdom building is very addictive. Although I miss familiars, your city in this game is freaking massive. At level 2, you have 44 buildings you can construct, and it just keeps getting bigger.

 

The bad:

Chibi mode in your kingdom. This is the most frustrating thing for me. I want to be able to explore my town and see it close up, but you're stuck in chibi mode way zoomed out, so a lot of the details in your buildings are lost. It grates on me a lot, though I'm still enjoying it.

Higgledies are just weird. The higgledies just don't work like familiars did. Idk. Maybe it's just me, but I really don't like them. Fortunately, you don't have to put any effort into them if you don't want to.

 

The neutral:

Army battles are incredibly simple. I don't actually mind this that much, since they do a reasonably good job of letting you apply your armies and showing off how good all your upgrades are, so I'll let it slide. It's not frustrating, but it's also not exactly fun, you just kind of blow through it without much thought.

Overall:

8.5/10

A quirky fun, great visuals. My main complaints aren't that anything was done badly, but rather that some simple changes could have made it a lot better.

[Bubba Jones]

I’ve been playing it for a bit and the worst I can say is that the story is really twee and a step down from the first (but I knew that walking into it) and the combat is infuriatingly easy.

To clarify on the combat it is much improved over the first.  However it is so simple that as long as you occasionally open the menu to update gear, even bosses become push square to win affairs.  Levels don’t really matter as long as it isn’t a bounty or boss you can easily take down things 10-20 levels higher than you.  Where it gets frustrating is where the encounter rate becomes abnormally high as a bunch of chump monsters go out of their way to chase you and traveling will get annoying as the game constantly loads from combat to map and back again for encounters that contribute largely nothing to character growth.  On top of that, the combat system is actually quite deep and largely wasted on the absence of difficult content.

Otherwise, I’m enjoying it.

[dragonlordsd]

1 hour ago, Bubba Jones said:

 Where it gets frustrating is where the encounter rate becomes abnormally high as a bunch of chump monsters go out of their way to chase you and traveling will get annoying as the game constantly loads from combat to map and back again for encounters that contribute largely nothing to character growth.  

Yeah, this is the most annoying thing. Enemies can ambush you, but as far as I know, there's no way for you to ambush them. They also can always outrun you until you get way late game upgrades.

As bubba said, the combat system itself is actually really good, it's just the game isn't balanced very well, so you don't ever really need to use it.