Ni No Kuni: Shiroki Seihai no Joō

[TheFlyingGerbil]

yay, can't wait. The original was one of my favourite games last gen plus another Welsh sidekick is a bonus.

[deanb]

I've been playing NNK:II lately and really loving it.

 

It's just a nice pleasant kid-focused game. So many quality of life features: you go back to a previous area the enemies leave you alone (if you're levelled above them). Fast travel is unlocked early and a breeze, which is super great for some of the silly sidequests where you need like one thing from an area; just pop there and back and presto done. The Higgledies and Kingmaker can help with challenging fights so you can sort of feel a bit like you're struggling but then kind of pull it out the bag (though with type advantage I'll cover more below). And if you want more depth there's the "Tactics Tweaker" which lets you fine tune your play style a bit.

Building up the kingdom scratches a nice itch in me. Sort of a bit like the settlements in FO4. Combined with the fast travel it's nice to be able to go down a quest/side quest and if you want a break just pop back to your kingdom and play king for a bit. Oh and so far the diplomatic policy of poaching key citizens from neighbouring kingdoms then foisting a treaty on them is a bit ...awkward. So far i've only gotten one kingdom in my treaty but the route to getting it was:

Spoiler

- Go to build my castle

- find the forest has been swindled by another king

- accuse that king of deception and taking too much taxes (and cheating the ownership of the forest)

- prove the accusations and weaken his rule that the magical manifestation of his ruling power is stolen.

- build my castle...with the help of the forest spirit king thing (who has since let me have some prime wood for boat building too...he's not very pro-forest)

- side quest for a bunch of citizens and nab them to my kingdom, which includes getting like 12 battalions of soldiers out of it too.

- Turn up and issue a treaty and have him sign it (while ignoring what is essentially their kingdoms constitution).

 

Also the kings chief adviser suddenly turned up during a coup and will readily admit he's not from around their world and has no idea on anything yet none the less is held in high esteem.

 

My only beefs are:

Music - it's just naf. Like a lot of it doesn't seem to fit any of the areas at all, in a few places it's almost what I'd expect from battle music.

Type Advantage isn't fully explained. Even worse for the skirmish battles which are infrequent enough you don't remember it and "hammers beat swords beat spears" isn't obvious enough to pick up right away.