Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom Prince’s Edition

Genre: Action-RPG

Players: 1

.

Review:

Ni No Kuni II was first released on PC and PlayStation 4 in 2018 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2021 in this “Prince’s Edition” that includes all of the game’s DLC content. This game is an Action-RPG with some minor Real-Time Strategy and Management Simulation elements well into the game. While this game takes place in the same world as the first Ni No Kuni, and has some similarities in its presentation and story, this is a very different game from its predecessor, and players need not have played the first game to fully understand what’s going on here.

.

Once Upon a Time…

Ni No Kuni II’s story takes place hundreds of years after the first game, and starts by following Roland, a President from our world (while his country isn’t specified, the imagery used implies he’s the US president) who gets caught on the edge of a nuclear bomb’s explosion, and is shortly afterward transported somehow to the fantasy kingdom of Ding Dong Dell. There he meets Evan, a very young, naive, and idealistic prince who is in the midst of his kingdom being usurped by treacherous rat-people. With Roland a stranger to this world and Evan suddenly needing to flee for his life, the two band together on a journey that will see Evan trying to found a new kingdom, his goal being to unite his world in peace.

I have to say I was a bit disappointed to see the story shift its focus from Roland to Evan not long after it starts – Evan’s optimism and naivete make him far less interesting a character than the savvy and calculating Roland, and not only does Roland accept being in a strange world full on animal-people and magic surprisingly quickly and without much struggle, but he also doesn’t take long to decide to just let Evan call the shots. And with such an idealistic youth leading the story, the plot quickly gets aged down to his level – what started out as Game of Thrones-esque skulduggery quickly becomes Saturday morning cartoon fare.

.

Paying a Princely Sum

The rest of the presentation here is excellent, albeit with one major caveat. Like the first Ni No Kuni, characters here are cel-shaded anime-style characters that are reminiscent of Studio Ghibli’s art style (although this time around Ghibli is not directly involved in the making of this game). The art style looks great, the animation is fluid, and the environments have some wonderful detail, lighting, reflections, water effects… but all of this comes at a heavy cost.

While there are frequent moments of beauty in Ni No Kuni II, this is dragged down significantly by some absolutely atrocious framerates, not to mention some really bad pop-in, and regular loading times that aren’t too great either. You can feel the Nintendo Switch chugging while it tries to get this game to run, and it really makes the entire experience worse as a result.

The voice acting here is good, but it’s highly inconsistent. And by that, I don’t mean the quality, but its mere presence – sometimes you’ll be reading text with little more than grunts from the speaker, sometimes you’ll get a cutscene that’s fully-voiced, and sometimes you’ll see the game oddly go back-and-forth between one and the other. This ends up being pretty distracting.

As for the music, this game retains Studio Ghibli’s legendary composer Joe Hisaishi, but honestly this felt like a half-hearted effort to me – the best music here is just variations of the first game’s main theme recycled here, and often you’ll find a place accompanied by music that just doesn’t fit what’s going on, such as ominous music in a location that isn’t supposed to be particularly dangerous or worrisome.

.

An Adventure Befitting a King?

The combat in Ni No Kuni II is quite different than the first game, with that game’s Pokemon-esque elements replaced here with a party system that allows you to swap between your party members at will, with some decent Action-RPG combat. This game also adds a combat element called Higgledies, little friendly spirits that swarm the battlefield to help you, at times giving players an opportunity to utilize a special move by heading to their position to press a button. This makes for an interesting element in combat, giving players a reason to retreat from enemies to command their diminutive forces.

There are other gameplay elements at work here, but these come much, much later in the game – you have a “tactic tweaker” you can use to bestow bonuses on your party, further adapting their abilities to your need. There are vaguely Pikmin-esque RTS sections of the game where players command an army orbiting around them, although the strategy here seems minimal. Finally, there is a kingdom-building gameplay mechanic that’s sadly nowhere near as in-depth as what was seen in Level-5’s earlier game, Dark Cloud 2 – you’re mainly just investing money into different buildings to enhance your characters’ abilities, access to shops, and so on.

Don’t get me wrong, all of these elements definitely improve the experience here, and add a lot of great potential for depth to the gameplay. But it takes so long for all of these elements to be introduced, and players will be muddling through a much more simple gameplay experience for hours before they’re able to access any of this stuff.

.

Worth a King’s Ransom?

Despite all my complaints, I really like Ni No Kuni II, but it feels like just about every area of this game suffers from some issue or problem designed to make things worse than they should have been. So many of the gameplay elements that add depth to the game are locked away until later in the game, the most interesting character in the game gets sidelined early on, and the game’s wonderful visuals are hard to appreciate when they’re clearly bringing the Nintendo Switch to its knees to even get the game to work.

Despite these issues, and despite the game being 3 years old at this point, it is still being sold for $60, and even with the added DLC content, that seems overly high. Yes, the PlayStation 4 version bears a similar price without the DLC included, but it also goes on sale at a better price than the Nintendo Switch version has thus far, and it doesn’t suffer the same performance issues the Switch version does.

The sad thing is, I genuinely think that this is a better game than the first Ni No Kuni, or at least, it has a better game nestled away inside somewhere. Unfortunately, getting to that excellent Action-RPG requires a great deal of patience. I still recommend this game to JRPG fans, but if at all possible, I suggest you get it on a different platform.

tl;dr – Ni No Kuni II is an Action-RPG that takes place hundreds of years after the first game and features very different gameplay. There’s a lot of depth here, including some light RTS and Management Sim elements, but these elements aren’t accessible until well into the game. What’s more, the Nintendo Switch version of the game suffers from some pretty atrocious performance issues. As a result, this is a game that I still recommend, but only if you have the patience to get to the game’s better features, and if at all possible I recommend you get the game on another platform.

Grade: B-

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are MB, Andy Miller, Johannes, u/RamboFox, Exlene, Eli Goodman, Ilya Zverev, Stov, Connor Armstrong, and K.H. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}