Ni No Kuni 2 - Review @ RPS

Rock Paper Shotgun reviewed the J-RPG Ni No Kuni 2:

Wot I Think: Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom

Most RPGs cast you as an intrepid interloper, the Only One Who Can Help a series of desperate quest-givers beset by increasingly elaborate problems. Personally, I’ve gotten a little sick of piloting a party of unlikely heroes as they roam from ruined land to ruined land in search of these conundrums, slaying worthy foes and draining tombs of ancient loot. When the scourge of the realm falls at my feet and the last coins of its horde lie safely in my pocket, I find myself wondering: should I really leave matters in the hands of the feckless village chief who can’t even summon up the will to leave his house and take care of the slime-infested meadow over the hill? Well, probably not, but I don’t get a choice. The mysteries of government and management aren’t my field, and besides, there’s a Big Bad lurking over the mountains who’s plotting to blast everything to smithereens unless we get a move on.

[...]

It’s tempting to indulge the cliché and say that Ni no Kuni 2 is more than the sum of its parts, but that’s not entirely accurate either. Rather, Revenant Kingdom is essentially just the sum of its parts and nothing more. They’re nice enough parts, and they mesh together to create one of the better JRPGs I’ve played over the past few years, but as I watched the credits roll by, I could already feel the experience seeping from my memory like a sieve. Almost anybody can mine out 40 or 50 hours-worth of honest enjoyment from the quest to build Evermore, and I certainly encourage genre fans to take the plunge. Just don’t be surprised if it fails to make much of a lasting impression, like a sandcastle going out with the tide.

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Thanks henriquejr!

More information.

Seems to be selling well, too. Meanwhile, FF15 has dropped way down. I wonder if it could sell better than FF15, despite having far less marketing and graphics?

Personally, I'm wary of it because it looks so childish. I already suffered through Tales of Berseria's many MANY life lessons.

I know that I'm a huge Final Fantasy fan, and own all the games from the first to the Zodiac age, but I'll never buy thirteen, fourteen, nor fifteen based on what I've heard and seen about each. The current games just are way too silly for me, and would just lead to me bad-mouthing them. I'll stick to the ones I know and love.

Zloth said:

Seems to be selling well, too. Meanwhile, FF15 has dropped way down. I wonder if it could sell better than FF15, despite having far less marketing and graphics?

Personally, I'm wary of it because it looks so childish. I already suffered through Tales of Berseria's many MANY life lessons.

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Nothing can sell more copies than FF15. That game has classic GTA5 syndrome. Mediocrity all over the place, but yea, looks good, sounds good, so there, who cares if it's so boring you'll disclocate jaw after so much yawning during it.

I've left FF15 alone (done with the main game, not a chance to go grind leftovers, but need to play through those sidekick DLC before I make a final judgment).
Won't uninstall it though. Remember, I still have some friends who don't want to trash their sacred consoles and they need to see it here on 60FPS and all those eyecandy new stuff.

Suffered… Berseria? I guess you don't like when a game trolls you, when it trolls it's characters and when it trolls the very game itself. Or you couldn't notice what it does - I guess you played with wrong voiceover. Not to mention that while a tragedy just like FF15, Berseria's finale delivers. It's combat is atrocious, but what else do you expect from originally console games? It's either autoaim/autoexecute or QTE there. Some people probably like that.

Ni No Kuni 2 is bought and installed. It'll wait till I finish ToCS2, means a day or two.

Sorry for doublepost.

Gave the game a try. Just a few hours to taste it.

Anyway… RPS continues to amaze me with low quality articles/reviews. Why?

I first played Level-5’s original Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch several years ago
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Pokemon-inspired monster raising of White Witch
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Final Fantasy XII (selfnote: does this one exist on PC?)
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Persona 5
…
Links in the Persona series

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Horrible review that tells absolutely nothing about the game but about the reviewer.

So I fired it up and what I got is chibi openworld with chibi story. Didn't expect that, LOL. I mean, you don't see screenshots of that openworld nor you read about cringy dialogues in reviews. Especially in this one that trolls a PC user with listing several nonPC titles.
Other than that trashmobs respawn in openworld after a while and aren't easily avoided like in FF15 or ToCS so you'll grind unintentionally.
You can save anywhere outside of combat except you can't while in "dungeons" (but there are checkpoints inside those).
Loot, except pots and sellables, contains tons of eqipment varieties as if it was Diablo.
Banter (while in openworld) is often displayed for too short time to read it whole which is bad as not everything got voiceover (at least not in dubbed version, yea I'm playing with english dub since it doesn't sound bad).
Usual consoleports sin, motion blur, is again turned on by default. If you put highest preset you'll still have to manually switch antialiasing setting to best possible. The game is heavy on GPU or CPU, dunno exactly as I didn't check, but I heard fans rolling in my machine during those few hours I played the game.
K+M UI is not the best possible but is very good and you won't have any problems adapting to it. An oddity is menu mapped on T and not on TAB or Esc.
Etc.

Did RPS review mention any of this?
This is yet another RPS review PC audience should ignore completely. IMO ofc.

I picked it up because the kingdom building sounded interesting, and it is. Unfortunately I haven't found anything else to like about it. Combat is action based but not in a good/interesting way, mostly I just spam the attack button over and over until the enemy is dead. Given how much combat there is, if I'm not enjoying it it's hard to enjoy anything else.

Dunno what to say about combat, earlygame it's easy and basically what you said - later I get close to hostiles then fire either skill mapped on 1 or 2, it instakills most of trashmobs from the group so no need to click-o-rama… Plus I already have 4 of those overpowered "brownies" from Stribor's Forest…
I've set the "president" as default starting character in battles as I can't "feel" that catears kid for some reason.

On steam forums I've read that fights become more challenging over time, can't confirm that.

I've had some harder fights where I had to use healing items or where the monster took awhile to kill. But I've never had a fight that seemed fun or challenging in anyway, just ones that were longer and required some resources. Mostly it's just button mashing and big explosions of color.

There is a fair amount going on with statuses and elemental weaknesses and the weird brownie things and the tactical sliders. I just don't feel like I can appreciate it with all the button mashing.

Ni no Kuni 2 has captured my attention recently, but I've been reading in a few corners of the internet that state it lacks difficulty throughout a large portion of the game, and that does concern me a bit (apparently, though, there are hidden "bosses" which put your skills to the test).

Still, I'd be interested in giving it a go.

I'm curious about this one but waiting till a few other venture into it first. My back log is currently full enough to keep me quite busy, even so I'll be keeping an eye and ear watching on this game.

I wanted to try again one those JRPG but as many have said the fight is not interesting at all, and there is a lot of it and not enough of the rest to compensate. FFXV is boring as hell.
Both have been refunded

Which other? Last Remnant? Dragon Dogma? Zestiria? Symphonia? Ys7? Neptunia?

FF15 is boring, I agree. If you're not graphics whore, stay away from it.
Buy it's OST though, it's worth every penny. I wish battles were epic as the music is:

Etc etc, another example, remember Gothic 3 Vista Point? Well, FF15 has Vista Point of it's own that kicks in here and there: