Reborngamers Ratings: 8/10
IGN: 7.8
Gamespot: 8
Metacritic: 8.4
Review By Guru Sane
Ni No Kuni 2Review
Ni No Kuni 2 Revenant Kingdom is an action role-playing game published by Bandal Namco Entertainment and Developed by Level 5. This is a sequel to the first game. Let’s have a look.
Reborngamers Review:
Ni no Kuni 2 is a beautiful RPG game with amazing animated visuals. In this era of gaming where graphics are considered one of the strongest points in reviewing a game, Ni no Kuni 2 pars it all with its gorgeous eye-catching beautiful world. This game re-establishes thinking of those people who think animated games less interesting than games with graphics close to reality.
Being an RPG game, this game has great content to play. It takes around 35 to 40 hours to complete the main storyline of the game, but it may take more than 60 hours for those who are willing to explore more of the world.
When the game was initially released, it has received reviews of being too damn easy. There were NO settings to adjust difficulty. And yes, it is too easy at some places like in the open world map. But it is also super hard at some other places if the player is willing to search for them. Like for example “Tainted monsters” are one of them.
After the release of patch 1.03, the game now provides difficulty settings – Normal, Hard & Expert. I have to say after the patch, the game now becomes more balanced compared to initial release. My suggestion to any player would be to play the game in “Hard mode”.
There are still difficulty abnormalities are there with the game. In some places, it is too easy and it is too hard in other. Some enemies take more damage easily and other take less damage even if you are close to the enemy level. This is the only technical flaw with the game. Otherwise, the game is fantastic.
There are many RPG elements to the game. You may obtain good damage causing weapons, wear improved armor and accessories to defend and do magic-based attacks. Also one may build kingdom and level the kingdom to further investigate on the innumerable number of RPG elements the game provides. It is really fun to explore all these RPG elements in the game, but the imbalance in the difficulty causes players to not explore much of these attributes and simply hack/slash to move ahead with the story. This causes less farming & grinding which again leads to player completing the game easily without exploring much of the game.
But the game is super vast in content and one should definitely explore as much as possible.
To properly utilize the RPG elements of the game, my suggestion is to play the entire game in “Hard mode”, but also keep switching your difficulty level when and where required. If you feel it too easy, switch it to expert and if you feel too hard, then switch it to normal mode.
This way, you get to make the game balanced in difficulty and you will get interested to explore the world and learn & utilize the RPG elements of the game properly.
Story:
Well, I should be honest in saying that this game is no masterpiece in the story department. It is a very simple story. Evan is the little guy whose father is a king and just died. Evan gets betrayed. He escapes his kingdom and builds a new kingdom.
From this part of the game, logic is less applied. Sometimes it feels more childish than ever. But this is a game and sometimes games are supposed to have silly childish logic. It’s just that this game is more of silly & childish. It is not bad but is just silly.
Graphics and Sound/Music:
As I have already told in the first couple of lines of this review, the animations of the game look very eye candy. It is really colorful to look at. But when the characters move to the world map, the animations are totally minimized to kind of small blocks. This, however, is not that bad, but not that great compared to normal animations. This might have been done to avoid big loading times and players will be able to easily walk through the world map.
The music of the game is also amazing. There are different kingdoms in the game. While the player goes through each kingdom, different music is being played and it is very refreshing. You never get bored with the music. Like many players, I myself liked the music played during my stay in Goldpaw kingdom.
Acting:
This is the place where most gamers get mad. Because the game has very less acting, I mean very less voice acting. Almost 80% of the game with cutscenes is nothing but subtitles. Players have to carefully read the subtitles to understand the story. Only at very important cutscenes, voice acting is implemented.
In this era of gaming, where cutscenes are the most efficient way of immersion in the game, players being forced to read subtitles is disappointing.
And the most I hated about the acting part is, the characters only say very few words like “Oh”, “Thank you”, “Excuse me” etc. And the poses each character puts to say a dialogue is very awkward.
One time I gave a rose to a woman (coral huelboom). She thanked me with her standing in a posture of going to war (One leg front, one leg back and an arm raised till elbow in air).
The game lacks in both visual acting and voice acting areas.
Gameplay:
This is the part where the game really shines. Its gameplay is amazing with all of its RPG elements. Player has to continuously check the inventory for improved weapons and armor and equip them occasionally.
All the party members need to be managed by the player. Players are allowed to swap the active party members to take part in a fight. All the party members get leveled up with each combat we go through.
We have higgleheides in the game, which really play a very important role. Players tend to forget using them and simply hack/slash the game. But if we properly use the higgleheides, it really helps a lot in taking down high-level enemies.
We also have “Tactic tweaker” in game, which enables the player to invest their battle points properly in increasing attack power or defense power. One can also adjust tweaker to have more rewards or more XP gained and so on.
The game offers players to build their own kingdom. This is a mandatory thing & not optional. One needs to invest their time in building their kingdom, building facilities in them and doing research in each facility to have more advantages. For instance, a player can build Weapons facility to make advanced weapons. We can also improve the weapons we currently have in the weapons facility. We can build Magic facility and do research in it, so as to make our current magical abilities stronger.
Kingdom building seems a bit tedious but if we get into it, it feels like a mini-game in itself. I have rather enjoyed myself building my own kingdom.
One more thing that requires player’s time is doing skirmish battles. Since we have our own kingdom, we also have our own army. We need to invade other areas and defeat other armies. While this is fun to have our army do battles/wars with other armies, it is a bit tedious and gets boring very fast. The more we do skirmish battles, the more the level of the army unit increases. Since the game requires our kingdom army to be at a certain level to finish the game, the skirmish battles cannot be entirely skipped.
Combat:
This game takes a different path from its first installment. While the first Ni no Kuni had a turn-based combat system, this game, however, features an active combat system, which is great in my opinion.All boss battles are very gorgeously flashy & never get boring. It feels great to see the visuals of our special attacks and magical attacks.
We get play hack/slash while using strategy. We need to prepare for a battle, have our potions ready in hand and equip the most recent weapons and armors for each boss battle.
The game also provides “Tainted monsters”, a very rare kind with a purple ring around them. They won’t attack the player until we reach this ring and accept the quest. But the levels shown for these tainted monsters are to be taken seriously. These monsters are incredibly strong and cause great damage to the player while they themselves take very less damage. But these are best for grinding and leveling up. Once defeated, these monsters provide good rewards, which are very useful.
Side quests:
This game has many side quests which are NOT entirely optional. There are a total of three kinds of side quests.
One is where you do something for a character in another kingdom and he agrees to become a citizen of your kingdom. Recruiting citizens is key to building and leveling up our own kingdom. And to finish the game, we need to level up the kingdom. So these side quests are not entirely optional and you will have to recruit a couple citizens for your own kingdom.
The rest of the two kinds of side quests are either fetch something for a particular NPC or help an NPC by defeating a monster. So it can be said that the side quests are some of the basic fetch quests with a very minimum story. If there is any story to them, players will tend to skip it due to laziness in reading subtitles.
Replay Value:
While this game is vast in content & there is so much to cover in the game, the game definitely has replay value from the gameplay point of view. So if you are a player, who likes the combat & mechanics, grinding & farming, kingdom building & skirmish battles etc., but gives very less importance to the story, then this game is definitely recommended for replay as there is so much to explore and discover.
But the story & acting are so much less inspiring causing any of the casual players to play it as much as possible for the first, but not again.
Verdict:
This game has its own flaws with story & acting but is brilliant in its RPG section and fantastic in its gameplay. Though the side quests are basic fetch quests, recruiting citizens can be quite fascinating. Boss battles are very satisfying to fight, with each boss attacking in a different attack pattern. There is so much to explore in the kingdom while building & leveling it up.
This is a onetime must play for any RPG seeker, who wishes to play with all the deep mechanics of the game with amazing animated visuals and great music.
Pros
Beautiful animated graphics
Soothing music
Amazing gameplay
So much to explore in the world
Cons
Story is average
Very less acting& less inspiring
Watch The Trailer
Release Info :
Initial release date: 23 March 2018
Developer: Level-5
Composer: Joe Hisaishi
Series: Ni no Kuni
Designer(s): Kengo Shibata; Yuichi Murase
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Microsoft Windows
System Requirements:
Minimum
CPU: Intel Core i5-4460 / AMD FX-6300
CPU SPEED: Info
RAM: 4 GB
OS: Windows 7 SP1 64bit, Windows 8.1 64bit Windows 10 64bit
VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti / AMD Radeon R7 260x (VRAM 2GB or higher)
FREE DISK SPACE: 40 GB
Recommended
CPU: Intel Core i7-3770 / AMD FX-8350
CPU SPEED: Info
RAM: 8 GB
OS: Windows 7 SP1 64bit, Windows 8.1 64bit Windows 10 64bit
VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 / ATI Radeon R9 series(VRAM 3GB or higher)
FREE DISK SPACE: 40 GB
