Ni No Kuni Ii: Revenant Kingdom Pc

Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom is a heartwarming adventure that resurrects the wonder and chibi-earth artful of archetype role-playing games like Dragon Quest and Concluding Fantasy. Developed past Level-v in collaboration with former Studio Ghibli character designer Yoshiyuki Momose and composer Joe Hisashi, Ni No Kuni II is an audio-visual care for that leads you through a globe seemingly crafted from a child's imagination. Unfortunately, this $59.99 PC game has some frame rate issues and doesn't offer many challenges.

A Union of Kingdoms

4 major countries comprise Ni No Kuni II'southward open world, with each nation boasting distinct cultures, music, and persons of involvement. There's a steampunk, America-inspired state, an Asian-like country, a sinking Greek-styled city, and the fairytale kingdom of Ding Dong Dell. The protagonist, boy-male monarch Evan Pettiwhisker Tildrum, is driven from Ding Dong Dell by Lord Mausinger, a sometime high-ranking official within the kingdom.

While some kingdoms are more fleshed out than others, about experience large and total of life, with new things to practice every time y'all visit them in your quest to unite the regions. When visiting these ally nations, you lot tin pick up side-quests, purchase weapons and armor, deliver take-out to hungry people, and cook up new recipes native to those regions.

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You can recruit the citizens into the hero's new nation upon completing those tasks. Male monarch Evan and his motley coiffure of protectors venture off into the game's overworld to merits a big swath of state to build the fifth major nation, Evermore, and prevent the master antagonist, Doloran, from committing evil acts. Thus begins the Kingdom Management game mechanic.

Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom (for PC)

Kingdom Management is addicting in the same way that mobile gaming is addicting. It'south a revolving door of level-ups, research completes, and citizen recruitment. Think Farmville, except with a castle and Higgledies, magical creatures who assistance y'all in combat, instead of livestock. The process is repetitive, just entertaining.

Virtually small-scale characters y'all run across in your adventures tin can be recruited into your kingdom, and they accept accompanying citizen cards to aid you know where to put them to work in the diverse facilities. One may excel at War, while another has stiff Ingenuity. Their skills help you build armor and weapons, every bit well every bit expand Evermore's telescopic. The process is not entirely dissimilar the recruitment and structure system in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain .

The Kingdom Management organization is directly tied to the real-time battle system, so the bigger and better your kingdom, the more party-customization options go available. At several points in the game, your kingdom's level, number of citizens, and building count affects your progression through the main narrative. For instance, you might need a certain population count to upgrade your kingdom in order to level upwardly your spell store. The spells you learn there trigger the next story event.

My only Kingdom Direction lament is the lack of customization. When it comes to city-building games, I want to make my own mark on the world. Ni No Kuni Two'due south Kingdom Management has null customization; you lot don't decide where buildings are placed or what their appearances are. You tin just select where citizens work in the kingdom, and how much yous want to level up each establishment. Even the PlayStation 2's Dark Deject, which offered a very similar build-your-kingdom objective, let y'all decide where to build structures. While you couldn't straight customize the buildings in Dark Cloud, you could customize the neighborhoods and brand choices that impacted the citizens' happiness and production. That level of immersion simply isn't present in Ni No Kuni II's Kingdom Direction organization.

A Storybook Earth

Ni No Kuni Ii is a tale of royalty and heroism, simply what immediately hooks y'all is the splendor of its sights and sounds. The game'southward graphical fashion is inspired past Japanese animation house Ghibli Studios, the company that helped craft Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch's wondrous graphics (though Ghibli didn't return for this sequel). The moment you step into the overworld and behold the Rolling Hills' floating islands, you're transported to a fantasy globe in a way that few other games can accomplish.

As well, the impressive score adds to the spirit of adventure. Hydropolis, a city built on the sea, has a theme that's romantic, wistful, and just a bit gothic—the song of a tragic metropolis sinking into the ocean. Furthermore, the overworld has an ballsy soaring sound that compels you to explore all the hole-and-corner nooks and crannies hidden in the mural. And the battle music, which varies by region and story events, increases tension, keeps you lot pumped, and reflects the musicality of a fantasy globe at war.

Melodic writing flows through the dialogue, plot points, and the flavour text. Major and pocket-size characters are thoughtful beings who react to the world's changing events, and boast their own backstories, manners of speaking, and distinct voices. For example, Batu, the air pirate, and Roland, the dimension-traveling president, frequently butt heads and clearly dislike each other. And much to their childish embarrassment, Rex Evan, and Tani (Batu'due south daughter) must pretend to be in love to save a urban center which has outlawed public displays of affection. While most quests are fetch errands, there's always funny, delicious writing accompanying them to lessen the blow of the simplistic chores.

Some Storybook Woes

Unfortunately, King Evan gets lost in a sea of well-crafted characters and suffers an occasionally cliched story. His wide-eyed naivete and innocence, while sugariness at get-go, proves grating over time. Plus, King Evan's repetitive catchphrases may exist enough to make you pull your hair out over the class of Ni No Kuni II's more than threescore hours of gameplay.

Roland, the fourth dimension-traveling president and the character you control in nigh of the opening chapter, is a far more compelling graphic symbol. In fact, you may want to choose to play as Roland for the entire game, equally he carries an air of mystery. Who is he, where did he come from, and will he be going domicile?

Although, Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is praised for its storybook aesthetic, that same quality hinders this sequel, every bit it skirts the line between invoking wonder and being kittenish. Case in point: the unlikely duo, Roland and Evan, and their overly helpful party of noblemen and warriors, forge a path made from good intentions to achieve their goal of simply living happily e'er after. That's it. Evan's mission is simplistic, and never develops past that blissful and innocent stage. At some level, the game is aware of this, as Revenant Kingdom'southward supporting characters frequently warn Evan that everlasting peace is a hopeless mission.

Sadly, annihilation bad, evil, or wrong is chalked up to being corrupted past the globe's large baddie. Doloran, the primary adversary, taints all the nation leaders then that he can steal their Kingmakers, mythical creatures that legitimize rulers' claims in the world. His goal is to resurrect the Horned One, the greatest kingmaker of all.

Every bit in the Lord of the Rings, morality is a simple blackness or white matter with no shades of greyness. This is in stark contrast to Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, which opened with the main character, Oliver, traveling to Ding Dong Dell from a 1950'southward-manner Globe to salvage his dying female parent with the help and guidance of a rude fairy. Both stories are idealistic, sure, but Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch has a far deeper and more intimate narrative than Ni No Kuni II.

The Higgledy Factor

In a deviation from Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, Revenant Kingdom'southward Higgledies back up your party in battle, non familiars. Higgledies, beyond being plain adorable, come in handy during the existent-time battles. Unlike familiars, Higgledies aren't direct controlled. Instead, you activate them when your character is within enemy range. When activated, a Higgledy performs a singular skill, such every bit healing your political party, attacking enemies with fire balls, or my favorite, building a mini-cannon for ranged attacks.

With Kingdom Management, you can nurture existing Higgledies, create new ones, or notice them in the game world. Higgledies are numerous, with each showcasing a personality that lets y'all develop an attack strategy. You should accept a team with a mix of Higgledy personalities, because the creatures choose when to help you during battles. If i's outgoing, it may ask to be activated far more often than a shy 1. Overall, Higgledies are a fun deviation from the Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch formula.

Difficulty and Existent-Time Battle Organisation

At that place will always be a swordsman, a hammerer, a spearman, a pistolier, a spellcaster, and an archer. These classes correspond the potential combatants in your party, as well as the troops bachelor to fight in Skirmishes (more on those in a chip). Due to this mix of close- and long-range warriors, information technology's relatively easy to create a varied and unique party.

The real-fourth dimension battle system kicks in when you lot come across enemies in the thankfully not-repetitive dungeons, or when y'all square off against overworld foes. The switch is nearly seamless, and the battle mechanics are a lot of fun, like shooting fish in a barrel to learn, and accommodate a wide variety of playstyles. Unfortunately, enemies are likewise easy to defeat. Virtually halfway through the game, I discovered that long-range attacks could exist powered upwards, merely because I was basically killing enemies with ane or two shots, I never needed to use the assault boost. Well-nigh mutual enemies, upwardly to 10 ranks college than your party's current level, are pretty easy to defeat via push button mashing.

Thankfully, at that place are dozens of tougher opponents, known every bit Tainted Monsters, that are wreathed in the aforementioned evil, purple free energy that envelopes everything in the earth. When you lot run across a Tainted Monster, the game motorcar-saves and then drags your party into an interdimensional arena to face the super-powered versions of common-place monsters. Occasionally, defeating Tainted Monsters is mandatory for completing certain quests. In like manner, Dreamer Doors — tiered dungeons with challenging monsters and special mechanics — up the difficulty. Dreamer Doors and Tainted Monsters are solutions to Revenant Kingdom's difficulty issue, but you can still defeat them with ease if your team is over-leveled.

The well-nigh interesting real-time battle system implementation appears when you battle rogue Kingmakers. These tin can be defeated with the help of special Higgledies that perform situationally unique attacks, such as forming a Gatling gun that yous aim and shoot. It makes for an entertaining experience, and you might die a few times before figuring out the best strategy to defeat some of the more difficult Kingmakers. Your own Kingmaker, Lofty, a silly lilliputian creature with a bastardized Scottish accent, supports your team with buffs.

A Tale of Two Chibis: Skirmishes

Skirmishes are a specific game mode in which Evermore'due south armies face off against bandits, accompany couriers through the overworld littered with monsters, or perform mock boxing exercises confronting allied nations. While a promising idea due to the kingdom-building mechanic on which the game sits, Skirmishes tin can get super irritating as Evan leads his troops into battle, breaking downwardly walls, defeating combatants, and sieging command posts. That'south it. There's not a lot of variation. Skirmish opponents are usually bandits or monsters, and it seems like a missed opportunity for a game about kingdoms. Information technology would've been cool if Skirmishes immune face-offs against rival kingdoms or the ability to siege strongholds to add to your demesne.

The worst part nearly Skirmishes is that your armies' ranks are carve up from your political party or kingdom levels. That means a lot of grind, and since armies don't share experience, yous'll probably play with the same one the entire game. That said, Skirmishes are worthwhile battles, especially in the early stages of Evermore's development, equally each victory awards King's Gold, or KG. Early in the game, before your coffers are built upward, this can be really helpful.

My Kingdom, My Kingdom for a PC Port!

Ni No Kuni II mostly runs well on PC, with nary a crash or gameplay glitch in sight. The keyboard controls are a niggling unintuitive, but thankfully Revenant Kingdom offers full controller support.

The biggest issue with the game is that even on a PC that surpasses the recommended specs, Revenant Kingdom suffers frame-charge per unit hiccups. The game's Steam page recommends that your PC pack at least the Windows 10 operating system, 4GB RAM, 40GB of storage, an Intel Core i54460 or AMD FX-6300 CPU, and either a Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 or an ATI Radeon R7 260 GPU. My gaming laptop, which has an Intel Core i5-4440 CPU and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 GPU, produced frame rates that dipped beneath 30 frames per second on the overworld and during Skirmishes. Exterior of those areas, however, the game ran close to threescore frames per second in my testing.

A Virtually-Archetype RPG

Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom takes a relaxing and delightful journeying through nostalgia boondocks, making its classic RPG forefathers proud in the process. In a sea of realistic games, Ni No Kuni Ii is an enchanting stand-out fantasy, with fairy-tale-like graphics, humorous writing, and engaging game mechanics.

If you're looking for a challenging experience, you'll probably want to skip this game. But if y'all're new to RPGs, desire to share this whimsical experience with young gamers, or just seek an calorie-free take chances through a beautiful world, Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom is a worthwhile purchase.

Ni No Kuni Ii: Revenant Kingdom (for PC)

The Lesser Line

Ni No Kuni II is a mannerly, family-friendly JRPG set in an endearing open up world, merely it doesn't quite live up to the spirit of its predecessor.

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