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[Hide] (1.3MB, 2560x1440) Reverse Playing Ni no Kuni 2. I played it years ago but never finished it. Might as well sort of review it, I got through a significant part of it to begin with, and replaying it just reminds me of all the critiques and praise that I had for it.
It's a surprisingly... good? game, at least in my opinion.
The combat's not all that interesting and is rather repetitive after so many hours, especially with attacks that aren't well-telegraphed. You get 4 skills to use in combat that are your pick, with you unlocking more as you invest in upgrades; you use light and heavy attacks to build a meter to let you cast your skills. I'm not a particular fan of this type of combat, it feels very off to me, but it's not terrible; I just make sure not to play on harder difficulties because it just makes the battles a complete slog to get through.
There are overworld battles that you fight with your "army", which is an interesting concept with no higher depth of complexity. A lot of this seems to be indicative of those sorts of games that are easy to play, easy to master; as long as you don't play the DLCs, which seem to have a terrible reputation of being horrendously grindy.
The kingdom building is neat, if not a bit tedious as time goes on. I absolutely adore games that have town-building or kingdom-building in them, not as the main game enough to be a management game or a strict city builder. I love fixing ingame towns up in those kinds of games, seeing life spring up in it and getting vendors or upgrades or bonuses, or even just more characters and character development in it. This one's a bit odd, like the combat; you can research things but they take real time to research, and you have to use ingame currency to hasten the research, and the ingame currency is gained through time. It doesn't sound strange, I'm sure, but it's an odd choice to me when you have to go out and fight things in relatively unsatisfying battles and come back to kingdom to find out you need to wait 34 more minutes before you get some research to reduce armor costs by 10%; very asian design.
Speaking of asian design, hot damn are there lots of crafting ingredients. You earn them passively through kingdom facilities, you earn them from fights, you gather them in the wild, you buy them from stores. I don't like the ingredient bloat, and it's something several asian RPGs seem to have a fetish for.
The Ghibli artstyle is a big draw; it makes the world inviting, cute, and interesting. The biggest detriment are the set-pieces, the world environment which are by large textured with boring, realistic-ish textures, rather than focusing on a more cartoony look. Not a fan of that.
The story from everything I've played up to is not groundbreaking, it's not filled with political intrigue or anything complex; it's very much written to be played by children or young teens, and I could almost see myself giving it to my non-existent son to play if it weren't burdened with so much superfluous content. It's sufficient though, with an emphasis on the good guys being actual good guys with good guy ideals: unite the world, bring peace, be happy, etc. etc. Doesn't overcomplicate things, keeps it real simple. Same with the characters.
The music is nice, it's not got the brass, the flare, or general orchestration of Dragon Quest XI, but the music matches the childish tones of the game: whimsical and hopeful and tiny.
The grand majority of the game is the side quests, which the grand number of them of involve recruiting new people to your city to fulfill the roles your facilities have. There are plenty of fetch-quests in the game, which can be tedious if you don't like the world; I do, so it's not torture for me, but if you play it and don't like it, then I'd recommend you vamoose, because that doesn't change any time soon. It's not like Trails in the Sky: FC where the side-quests are unique and feel like genuine side-character stories, and it's not like DQ:XI where the side quests are few enough and not important enough where you could do or not do them by your leisure; these quests are greatly necessary to your progression, and the vast majority are "King Evan, I'm a scared little bitch, could you go grab 5 balls of cotton from the field for me? I'll be your best [Farmer] if you do this!" or "King Evan, I'm an actual retard, could you kill 6 Humwings for me? Then I'll [join your Kingdom] and become your [Weaponsmith]!"
Overall, feels like one of those games that you play where you go "oh if this were just a bit more this, and a bit less that, and they changed this, and added that, I'd really like or even love this game." It's a game you could play and wouldn't despise having played it, which is rather remarkable in the modern market. I almost wish there was an Easy mode to make the general game not bogged down with the grindiness of combat. The game goes against my general desire for a game, and overall if this game were taken apart piece by piece and turned into a little Ghibli film, I think it would do better than as a game, but it's an interesting, flawed, and okay game as it is.