Title: Ni no Kuni 2
Platform: PSP
Genre: Action RPG
Language: Japanese
Company: Bandai Namco
Summary: Err I played this sometime early in 2019 I think? I completely forgot to write up a review for it probably because I was too preoccupied with other things later on, nothing particularly big or anything though. I think the game took me around 35-40 hours doing the same as I did for the original game, doing whatever sidequests I could do that didn’t involve too much extra work.
Story:
Characters: Aside from the main Roland and the main lord Evan, the rest of the characters were completely forgettable to me. Except Leander maybe, because he kept reminding me of Hubert from Tales of Graces. I think I just used those three exclusively whenever possible as I didn’t care about the others lol.
Graphics:
Sound: Top of the cake is that I personally liked the battle theme for this sequel a lot more than the original. The beginning is especially easier on the ears, which is important considering how often it’s heard. Can’t think of any particular track I liked enough that I was interested in listening to the OST afterwards, however.
Gameplay: Completely different from the original game where everything is action orientated, while the original had a bit of an RTS element.
Replay Value:
Overall: 8/10. It’s a pretty close 9, but I feel that the biggest thing preventing me from bumping it up to that is the lack of ACTION feels that I would expect out of an action battle system. Slice and dicing feels great as the main character, but the other characters were all super clunky. And even with the main character, dodging felt like a big mess. If I’m remembering right, dodging doesn’t actually give you any invincibility frames whatsoever, so there’s rarely any benefit to dodging versus just reading enemy attack patterns and running out of range of attacks.

I did generally like the Higgledys in the battle system, but the system altogether sort of felt like a giant RNG throw-in gimmick, sort of like Patty’s existence in Tales of Vesperia. The only difference is certain battles actually do rely on them extensively (and artificially).

Kingdom building seemed like a giant intern project for creating a kingdom builder–I guess if you like doing that kind of thing, that’s all cool. It’s not my thing.

All in all, I liked the battle system in 2 much more than the original, but I can’t really say they’re even comparable as they’re completely different systems. That’s generally a good thing to me in this case though, as I didn’t want to play some kind of re-skin of the original Ni no Kuni.

It’s a solid action RPG overall, worth a playthrough and has the offerings for lots more if you’re really into it. My personal tastes prefer something a little more though, and with the current games available to me that offer more… I’m going with those instead.

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Tags: 8/10, Level-5, RPG