Ni no Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom

It's Ni no Kuni 2!

Did I enjoy playing Ni no Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom? Absolutely. Did I fall in love with the world far more than I did in the first game? Yes. Do I think that objectively speaking, Ni no Kuni 2 is a good game? To be completely honest, no. 

Evan is adorable. Not sure about cut-price Lisa Simpson

There are many good points and bad points to this game, the sequel to one of the most notable JRPGs of recent years. For me, the good outweighs the bad. But I am under no illusion whatsoever that many people wouldn't feel the same. This game hit a perfect note for me for two reasons - firstly, the overwhelmingly enjoyable nostalgia evoked by what is almost a reimagining of Suikoden; and secondly, because I utterly adore the cute, girlish, angsty adolescent character archetype so common in JRPGs, but not very popular in the West. I am well aware from characters like Hope in Final Fantasy XIII and Genis in Tales of Symphonia and the hate they get in Western fandoms that I'm in a minority for loving that kind of character. A lot of people cannot stand these often whiny adolescents, so I really wouldn't recommend they play a game like this where one is the main character.

While I enjoyed the original Ni no Kuni, I did not love it. I liked it enough to begin grinding out the platinum, but lost my saved game and never felt like going back to replay it. The world-building was nice, Oliver was a likeable kid and of course the Ghibli connection was intriguing, but I felt that the second half of the game was messy, the combat was slow and frustrating - especially when it came to catching and levelling up familiars - and some of the mini games really were not very fun. The idea of going back to replay the game doesn’t appeal very much at this stage. 

Evan's Oliver cosplay

The sequel is an altogether different prospect. I had fun from beginning to end and even grinding out the platinum trophy was mostly enjoyable. I liked Evan much more than Oliver, too. While both are supposed to be the same age, Evan seems at least 3 years older than Oliver, who to me looked 10 and was written like he was 10. Evan was convincingly 13 … though only the Japanese subtitles of the original trailer reveal that’s his age, and since Level-5 are notorious for putting things into trailers that don't make it to the final project – most glaringly in Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright – I'm not sure his age is canon. Though Oliver has a much more detailed backstory and far more emotional depth, I liked Evan Pettiwhisker Tildrum far more, as he was adorable from beginning to end. 

How cute is he?

It was Evan's introduction trailer that actually made me preorder this game, which until then I had thought I might get sometime in the future on sale. Evan and only Evan convinced me to shell out the cash. He is the most adorable character I've seen in a long while, especially as a lead character. The characters I like tend to be androgynous, optimistic, goofy, shy and uncertain of themselves, but can step forward to meet a challenge when they must. Evan is all of these, with silly cat ears. His appearance fits the archetype to a tee, with that vaguely aristocratic page-boy hairstyle that has come to symbolise the boy prince (and conveniently skirts the question of whether Evan has two pairs of ears or a lot of blank skin on either side of his head). His blue-eyed pretty face would look a lot like Penny from Inspector Gadget with a pair of pigtails. I wasn't disappointed by him, either - he starts adorably diffident and fussy, goes through some angst, but emerges stronger and becomes a capable leader while never stopping being adorable. If the protagonist were the only thing to consider, I'd be delighted with Ni no Kuni 2. The one thing I would have liked to have seen would have been more development, more depth in his reaction to loss, betrayal and sacrifice, which was all kept just a little too light and brisk, even for a game with children as an ostensible target audience. 

Another strength is the visuals, building on the first game's aesthetic to try and make the player feel like they're immersed in a Ghibli world. Natural scenes in particular look fantastic here, mostly in the background of world map battles, and the Chinese-style city of Goldpaw is gorgeous and great fun to explore. 

This just looks beautiful, and fighting dragons is classic fantasy fun

I also enjoyed the combat much more than the first game's turn-based system, even if it's less nostalgic. It's like a simplified Tales game, with lots of hacking and slashing, plus long-range attacks, some of which have to be channelled. The game is certainly easy, though I added to the challenge by insisting on playing as melee Evan, and should probably have had a difficulty slider or at least tougher bosses. By the time there's actually a challenge in combat, the game is more or less over, and there really could have been some Kingdom Hearts-style ridiculous hidden bosses: only one of the post-game bosses was even a little challenging, coincidentally the one you can easily grind levels from as she spawns extra minions, and neither the toughest tainted monster nor the one at the end of the boring post-game dungeon was challenging. The Higgledies also add a small but fun additional layer to the game, and if you take the time to explore the system you do very well. Aesthetically, they’re a great addition, evoking the Kodama from Mononoke-hime, and very cute and entertaining to watch. Though if your brain accidentally interprets the loading screen higgledies as facing towards the camera rather than away from it, you’re gonna have a bad time. But having a summoned Higgledy knight or a huge gravity ball that is then copied by another Higgledy means a huge power spike in battle, which was very rewarding. There probably should have been more of a boost from getting harmonious Higgledy groups, and giving them unison attacks could have been an extra level of fun as well as another throwback to Suikoden, but they were certainly a positive addition. 

Higgledies are just one more part of what makes this such a happy, cute world

Speaking of Suikoden, the core of the game beyond the central storyline was pretty much directly lifted from the classic series. Around the world, various characters can be found who ask you to do different fetch quests, and in return they'll join your cause. Some just ask for cooked dishes, or for you to kill off a boss, but some ask you to do very lengthy tasks or to give them something you won't find until the endgame. They fill up your city and can be set to gathering materials or researching various perks. At first, I absolutely loved this system, but in the end it's executed a little poorly. You only get to a stage where it starts to feel satisfying and you're eager for it to continue when you're about to finish the game, and it's a definite disappointment you can't max out the kingdom before you watch the end credits, four necessary recruits not showing up until afterwards. The city-building should have been more flexible, the rewards more varied, the possibility of levelling up the whole kingdom far more frequent (or automatic) and the Stars of Destiny - erm, I mean the Evermore recruits - able to give more interesting bonuses. 

Uhhhh

I also quite enjoyed the army mini-game. There was one of these in Suikoden, too, which was also oddly cute for such a serious matter (and you could permanently lose allies in those battles!). Here, the same rock-paper-scissors system prevails, only you roam the countryside engaging in battles, taking down structures and occasionally having to chase or escort another unit. A lot of others online hate this mode, especially the necessary number of battles for the trophy. But I liked it, mostly because I imposed a rule on myself not to use the square button. The square button in this mode is the win button. It's so much more fun not to use it and actually having to strategise which troops met which enemies where. Of course, when you can summon a dragon to the middle of the battlefield it becomes a bit moot, but I had a blast with this mode using this condition. At the same time, obviously the mode would have been way better if I didn't have to artificially increase the difficulty. 

All these elements were delightful and I have no complaints about them. For the rest, however, I wasn't so impressed. 

The mysterious look

The story itself is unoriginal and unsatisfying. There was so much potential to explore this world and these characters that was not realised. Everything starts out very well, in classic JRPG style and not a million miles from Suikoden. The young king is overthrown on his coronation day, saved only by a mysterious man from another world who appears in his room and a Seirei no Moribito-style female guardian. In the aftermath, Evan decides to found his own kingdom and unite the world, not by conquest but by alliance. Some have taken his quest to be Hitler-esque but it's really more of a case of starting the United Nations. The rest of the game is spent going between the different nations, finding that luckily they have a huge problem caused by an outside force, saving the day and forging an alliance. Then there's the matter of who is causing all the world's problems. It's nothing new, you soon get tired of Grima Wormtongue scenarios over and over again, and with only five kingdoms, it doesn't take very long to get through and has to be padded out with things like a three-part fetch-quest-cum-minigame-tutorial to get a library card. The ending just isn't very satisfying and the game length is too short, especially when there were so many interesting questions: what about kingdoms who want nothing to do with Evan's system? What about kingdoms who would leave if Evan allied with old enemies? Should Evan's privileged birth really make him the great saviour of the land? Then giving the real triumph of the ending to a character the audience doesn't care about in the least (tied into the story with a bizarre throwaway superpower) irritated me quite a lot. I really hoped for more from the final act of this story, and can only hope future DLC is more satisfying.

Evan, you can't just go into people's houses and do that

The game also has a very weak supporting cast. The other party members, for some reason all human, are extremely bland. Compared with the casts of the Tales games, Chrono Trigger, even goddamn Popolocrois, these characters are flat and boring. Batu is just a musclehead. Leander has pretty much no character beyond that he is smart, Bracken has some sparkle but never gets decent development. They try to spark some chemistry with Tani and Evan with a fake romance scene but there's absolutely no connection between them so it falls flat. Only Roland gets a modicum of development, but the chapter devoted to his actions is wasted with next to nothing new revealed about him, his superficial appearance in this world is never explained and only the first game's premise makes him even being in this game anything less than completely bizarre - and given that the first game is referenced largely only in old statues, place names and a single early puzzle (the game's only fun, vaguely challenging traditional RPG puzzle), that doesn't feel like enough. 

Totally blending right in

You might notice that I used all the English names here, whereas I insisted on using the Japanese names for the first game. Actually, yes, I played through the game in English, something I have never done before when given the choice. I even got undubbed roms of older games when I could. But Evan's voice was one of the reasons I fell for the game, and the acting is very good here. I love all the regional accents, with Welsh fairies returning but also plenty of Yorkshire, Scottish, Estuary and even Australian accents rendered (sometimes so thickly I wonder if non-British audiences can understand). That said, sadly there isn't nearly enough voice acting here. Sometimes at very strange moments, recorded speech ends to be replaced by grunts and that bleep-bloop-in-vaguely-the-pitch-of-the-speaking-character familiar from many other RPGs kicks in. The first game had way more recorded speech and animated cutscenes, so lovely as the rendered world is here, this was a real disappointment in a sequel on a next-generation console. Other problems include the speech boxes during army scenes being tiny and disappearing too fast and the effort put into rendering character movements noticeably declining over the course of the game - Evan's final rousing speech is delivered in such a robotic way that you wonder if the scene was meant to be animated and then they couldn't get it done so slapped together a basic scene in the in-game engine. 

Given that one character is canonically an English speaker and Evan has a very British boy-king feel to him, playing in English made sense. Plus to be honest, the Japanese version has really silly names. Tani's Japanese name is 'Shirty'. On the other hand, I wish the main antagonist's name had been kept, as the English version seemed to be designed to spoil a twist for any player who knows how Japanese morae work. Still, when I play it through again, I'll do so in Japanese. 

This guy is such a troll

The world-building also suffers as the game goes on. Ding Dong Dell is a fun classical fantasy city, though the fish theming is pretty hilarious and the Grimalkin must get hungry a lot as they go about their business. Then Goldpaw is absolutely gorgeous - though with Sino-Japanese relations not at their best just now, I question the wisdom of making a city that's clearly based on China and then having it populated by dog-people with names like Fai Do and Bau Wau who love gambling but are suffering because of their leaders' corruption and cheating. Hydropolis is pretty but nothing particularly original. For some reason too many JRPGs have to have a futuristic world amongst all the swords and sorcery, from Chrono Trigger to Tales of Symphonia, and it's always the ugliest and least fun part of the game, and the same happens here. The tone doesn't fit well and fighting robots after all the majestic dragons just isn't very exciting. Much better to keep it simple and high fantasy, and maybe throw in a ninja village or a vampire castle or something. Wait, that's Suikoden again. 

Evan needed more friends

Though Ghibli was not involved this time, key personal stayed on. Momose Yoshiyuki did a great job with the character design, perhaps my favourite element of the game, but I was disappointed by Hisaishi Joe's input. I adore his work, own several of his OSTs and image albums, and the themes that reappear from the first game are great. The rest...is lacking. Most of the city themes are simplistic and repetitive, lifting from Carmen and, of all things, Kraftwerk, and the battle music is unmemorable. I think what extra work was done here was phoned in. 

Go, my knights!

With the game barely marketed and most of the revenue coming from big fans of the first game shelling out for hugely overpriced limited editions, I don't know that the sales here are going to inspire much confidence in a further sequel. I wouldn't be surprised if Level-5 just stick to their safe cash cows like Inazuma 11 and Professor Layton, both of which are about to have new anime adaptations (woo!). Maybe they'll even go back to Dark Cloud. But I would certainly enjoy seeing more from Ni no Kuni, especially with more Evan or perhaps some sort of event where Evan and Oliver can work together. I’m keen for what the DLC will bring. But when I'm being completely honest, I cannot say that this game was well-made or worth returning to over and over again, and the quick, easy platinum is testament to the lack of depth and substance here, even if it's far less frustrating than the first game was. There’s some more endgame content for a 100%, more weapons and outfits to get, but since absolutely all of them are obtainable only by grinding items in the extremely boring final dungeon, I don’t see myself bothering.

Ta-daaa, it's the platinum

I loved Evan and had more fun with the first half of the game than I have with any other game I can think of in years. But ultimately I was left feeling a little unsatisfied, even disappointed. And the honest truth was that if Evan had looked like Kratos I probably wouldn't have cared for the game at all. Still, after finishing off the game I felt like something was missing from my life that no other game can quite fill, so that’s definitely a sign I enjoyed the world. I’m very keen for the DLC and will absolutely buy it. But I categorically wanted more, and I have to say, this game didn’t quite deliver.