BABY'S FIRST JRPG
The cover art for Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom tells a comforting half-truth. It promises a colorful, open-ended fairytale drenched in Studio Ghibli–inspired art direction, accompanied by a tasteful score composed by Joe Hisaishi—much like the music that elevated Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. What the cover does not reveal is the game’s far less flattering side: a JRPG core so feeble it fails to hold its many features together.
The tedious exploration loop, the naïve story, and the simplistic combat bored me to the point of procrastination. Instead of pushing the narrative forward, I spent hour after hour entrenched in the game’s kingdom simulator—one of its two fully fledged mini-games—which does absolutely nothing to advance the story.
I was supposed to liberate the world, yet I constantly returned home to micromanage my own little domain. I got stuck in a loop of expansion: building structures, researching upgrades, and completing menial sidequests to recruit new citizens. In a deeply story-driven title like Ni no Kuni II, this is devastating. Eventually I forced myself back onto the critical path. It never improved. After nearly 65 hours, the end credits rolled, and I felt genuinely sick of it all. In a moment of weakness, I briefly swore off video games altogether.
The story is a pacifist fairytale with wishful thinking at its core. The opening cinematic initially tricks you into believing the protagonist, Roland, is a modern-day president. As his capital city is nuked, he ends up lifeless beside his wrecked limousine—and is promptly transported to another world. He awakens in Ding Dong Dell, a lush fantasy capital populated by humans, monsters, and anthropomorphic animals. Somehow, he’s also much younger now.
Roland finds himself in the private chambers of a newly crowned boy king, Evan Pettiwhisker Tildrum. Evan explains that his father has just been assassinated in a coup orchestrated by his closest advisor, and that traitorous guards are now coming for him as well. The prologue doubles as a tutorial barrage, introducing real-time combat, stealth, loot systems, abilities, and more, all while you escort the boy to safety through a clumsily written opening act.
Although I like the idea, Ni no Kuni II relies on a tired narrative habit: spelling everything out, leaving no room for the player to process emotions on their own. Barely thirty minutes in, alarm bells started ringing. Evan loses a close friend. He collapses beside her body and repeatedly screams her name, louder and louder, as if volume alone could substitute for emotional weight. The scene had the opposite effect on me—I burst out laughing.
It baffles me that writers still lean on such clichés, hoping sheer insistence will provoke sincerity. There’s no stunned silence, no delayed horror—just immediate emotional overexertion. I realized then that this is, at heart, a children’s game. Level-5 clearly wants to shield its younger audience from life’s harsher truths. But for an adult player, this is an unconvincing and dull start to a story that rarely recovers. It’s an unrelatable take on mature themes, rendered as a fable so naïve it borders on soporific.
This also reveals Level-5’s broader design philosophy: if we can’t make it deep, let’s make it wide. Forget dual-wielding—Ni no Kuni II lets you switch freely between three weapons in combat. It also contains three major gameplay pillars: a JRPG, a real-time strategy skirmisher, and a kingdom simulator. None of them have any real depth.
The game is bloated with sidequests, none of them memorable. You can’t walk ten meters without tripping over crafting materials for equipment you’ll soon replace with something better. You can construct and upgrade dozens of buildings in your kingdom, each opening new research paths that grant barely perceptible bonuses to your already trivial combat encounters.
Completion demands an absurd amount of time, yet very little of it matters. Enemy encounters—including most bosses—are laughably easy. New spells, weapons, and summons (the Higgledies) quickly become redundant. Standard attacks and dodge rolls carry you through most fights effortlessly, while the game showers you with serviceable gear simply for exploring and killing monsters.
Once the prologue ends, Evan becomes the uncontested protagonist. He seeks out a “Kingmaker”—a majestic being that grants him legitimacy—then founds a new kingdom called Evermore. From there, he travels the world attempting to unite rival nations against the armored antagonist behind the initial coup. Party members join steadily, but they are dull, interchangeable, and largely forgettable.
This is where the kingdom simulator truly takes over—and it’s undeniably more addictive than the main game. It theoretically influences everything else: spell research, crafting materials, armor availability, summon upgrades. In practice, it replaces meaningful character progression with bureaucratic busywork.
You don’t grow stronger because of narrative or combat mastery—you grow stronger because timers finish ticking down. Income and research progress in real time, and I often found myself waiting idly for meters to fill.
Those moments—staring at progress bars—were truly the golden age of my gaming career.
The tragedy is that none of this effort leads anywhere. The kingdom simulator is a time sink, not a pillar. Very few upgrades noticeably affect the main adventure. It tickled my RPG-compulsion, sure—but Level-5 doesn’t even pretend it’s anything more than that.
The RTS skirmish mode fares no better. You command small armies in chaotic, overly long encounters that demand little tactical thought. Outcomes hinge more on unit levels than player skill. It’s mildly challenging, but entirely self-contained. Its rewards only matter for future skirmishes—another closed loop.
What frustrates me most is how competently everything is assembled on a technical level. Transitions are smooth. Controls are responsive. Animations flow nicely. The ideas themselves aren’t bad. The problem lies in the tuning. Everything is off by degrees: combat is too easy, skirmishes too long, exploration too unrewarding, and the kingdom system too intrusive.
And when all these elements are combined, the result is shallow and inconsequential. Every side activity interrupts the experience without justifying its existence. You can rush the story and reach the end, but the writing is so poor that doing so likely makes the game worse, not better.
I spent dozens of hours in this so-called Revenant Kingdom, and I barely remember any of it. My strongest memory is lying on my couch, scrolling through real-world news on my phone while waiting for Evermore’s income meter to fill. Unsurprisingly, the real world held my attention more.
That is not praise for a game about escapism—a game that promises refuge in a beautiful fantasy where every conflict is resolved with ease. It is, instead, a quietly damning indictment.
Comments
Post a Comment