Ni No Kuni II - PlayStation 4 Standard Edition

Great old school RPG. Transports me back to the early 90s SNES days. Loved it. Fun turn based combat, tons of exploring colorful vibrant locations, likable characters, good story, and emotional. It's very FF like, I've never played DQ before, now I'm questioning why

Amazing. Usually sequels mess things up, but this one flipped the game on its head while keeping the main mechanics and theme. I was a little shook about the lack of familiars, but it made up for it with the Glock lol

Good RPG. I had fun but No voice lots of times.

A friend suggested this game as my intro to the series and ive been loving it. Its been the main game iv'e played lately and even bought the season pass off playstation :)

Ni no Kuni is a mixed bag of an RPG series for me. I played the original (Wrath of the White Witch) back on the PS3 although it was something of a slog because I didn't care for it's Final Fantasy XII-ish indirect combat style. I finished it because the 70 plus hour main story was loaded with charm, and it absolutely nailed the look and feel of a Studio Ghibli movie.Ni no Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom also has that Hayao Miyazaki vibe but I put down after around 20 hours, exactly in the middle of the 5th of 9 chapters. I doubt I will pick it back up.Here's what Ni no Kuni 2 does right:1. Improved combat - gone is the indirect style from the first game. It's been replaced by a real-time action combat system sort of like the Tales series. It's not super complicated, but I feel its faster and more engaging than issuing commands to those puppets from Wrath of the White Witch.2. Excellent overworld map - Full of nooks and crannies packed with secrets, this is an overworld map done right. While many games taunt open worlds that are full of nothing or ditched them altogether so that game feels like it runs on rails, NnK's expansive world is full of secret areas that always have something to offer. You might run across a stretch of beach that circles around a plateau to find a hidden cave or a treasure chest you couldn't see until you rounded the bend. There are reasons to explore everything and you will always be rewarded with something even if it is only a resource collection node.But it has a bunch of sticking points that aren't really deal breakers:1. Despite looking like a Ghibli movie, the presentation cuts many corners - Honestly, it feels like a downgrade from Wrath of the White Witch. I suspect they were working with a smaller budget this time. Gone are the animated sequences from the first game. The sequel barely has any proper cutscenes. Instead, they go for this jarring hybrid system where maybe 30 seconds are properly voiced and then it will transition to text boxes with the characters saying a stock phrase like "Oh my!" to reinforce whose speaking.2. Story has a banger of a opening but fails to establish any real hook - I had high hopes after a barn burner of an opening sequence. In a world that sort of looks like ours, the president of an unnamed country is injured by a car bombing. Transported to the world of Ni no Kuni, he arrives (de-aged by about 30 years) in the palace of the Evan Pettiwhiskers, a young prince with cat ears, who is about to be killed during a coup-de-tat in progress. Luckily for Evan, Roland (the president) packs heat and is able to help the prince escape. They flee the country, but Evan decides he will found a new kingdom that's even better than the one he was just exiled from.The story quickly pitters out. Two chapters later they literally find an abandoned field and found the kingdom of Evermore. Boom. Evan is now a king with the world's most saccharin politics. He wants to make people happy and to have everyone get along. The bright tone is to be expected, but in trying to make Evan's goal look anything other than painfully naïve, it prevents the story from ever developing any real stakes or urgency. Not even the introduction of a shadowy figure who is trying to strip the kingdoms of the world of their kingmakers, mystic beings who confer the right to rule, gives the main quest a sense of danger or intrigue because of the point below.3. So much of the game is a giant fetch quest. After the second chapter, the game becomes a a series of fetch quests. To progress the story, you have to do fetch quests. To do the side quests, you have to do fetch quests. Sometimes there are fetch quests within fetch quests. And it's hard to feel like you are on an epic quest that will alter the very destiny of the world when Evan spends so much time running around doing random errands. Hard to worry about what evil scheme the bad guy is cooking up when the characters seem more concerned about delivering packages for NPCs than what he's doing off-screen.4. Cellphone game mechanics - One of the big features of Ni no Kuni 2 is that Evan must manage and grow the kingdom of Evermore. But this is done via a system that is very similar to one of those time-wasting cellphone/social games like Farmville . It even implements a second currency system where the kingdom builds wealth and resources that can only be used to expand the kingdom. And wealth is created in real-time. Run out of money? Wait 30 minutes for it to build back up. Some aspects of bettering the kingdom even have wait times. Want to expand your weapon store's inventory? Come back in forty in-game minutes after they research new swords.I hate these kinds of games and I'm frankly shocked to see their mechanics in a console RPG. To its credit, at no point did the game bombard me with offers to pay money to lessen the grind-time. During my playtime I didn't reach a point where the story was gated off until I got the kingdom to a certain level. Unfortunately, I can't guarantee that you won't be punished for neglecting the kingdom building sim in one of the later chapters.If none of these where deal-breakers I will tell you what was:The RTS mini-game. Starting in chapter three, you have to play a real time strategy mini-game where you control a rotating ring of four different troops. They can be ranged units or melee units, and each weapon type is strong and weak against other weapon types. The key to victory is rotating the troops so they target enemy units they are strong against while avoiding ones they are weak against. And I hate this mini-game so much.After the first skirmish, I prayed it was just a tutorial battle for an optional side quest. At first it seemed that might be the case as the earliest side missions are little flags on maps that give you the opportunity to engage in more of these RTS battles. Of course, in the next chapter I had to fight another one of them and because I had not done the side quests to level up the troops (it runs on its own separate leveling system), I had to scurry to find those missions scattered across the map to grind up to the recommended level for the mandatory mission. After clearing that hurdle, I made it to the mid point of chapter five where I was again roadblocked by another one of these!That was when I put the game down. I could live with the rest of the annoyances, but that RTS mini-game was just too much. Many RPGs have very involved mini-games that span the entire the length of the game, but at least they never demanded you play them beyond once or twice to advance the story. And you only miss out on a reward if you lose instead of getting halted in your tracks until you win.The Ghibli charm can only compensate for so much, and this was honestly my breaking point. I might have stuck it out if some of the other quibbly bits had been a bit better, but the game is just too flawed in too many places to be worth the headache.

One of my absolute favorite games!! I would definitely recommend playing if you have some extra time on your hands to sit down and just enjoy playing. The art and storyline are phenomenal.

Played the first when it came out but I only remember the british accent on the sidekick. Solid old school jrpg for 20 bucks its a great game!

So like the original Ni No Kuni, I enjoyed the cartoony art style of the characters and the world. But it devolves into an endless series of fetch quests taking you back and forth over the whole world. This is a kind of time-wasting thing used by MMORPGs that doesn't have a place in a console game. There's no need to keep us busy for ages to get subscription dollars - there's no subscription. Maybe they didn't realize that quests like that aren't there for fun, but to keep things going endlessly.The combat is mostly the same the whole game through. The higgeldies are a nice addition, but they don't make a huge difference to combat. Rather than mashing the attack buttons and occasionally casting a spell, you can also run over and trigger a higgeldy ability. The game has a cooking mechanic that provides combat buffs, but it's not necessary or all that helpful. There's also elemental attacks and protection against elements, but none of these seemed to make much difference.I played on Hard mode, since Normal mode was waaaaay too easy. I logged about 72 hours because I wanted to get through the main story and level up my kingdom to level 4 (not really worth it), but by hour 45 it was feeling more tedious than fun. This version came with the expansion, I think, but it looks to be a huge grind to level up enough to get to the new final boss. I never much liked the Dreamer's Mazes, and it seems a giant one is the main ways forward once you beat the main quest line.I also didn't like the army battles either. Endless and tedious. They're the first thing I stopped keeping up with. There was no real strategy except trying to remember which of three attacker types was stronger against each other.Overall, I enjoyed it for a while, but then it ground me down until I just can't stand to play another minute of it.