Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom Review (Lunatyr)
One of the most unique looking games I've seen that is ruined by a lackluster world and story.
I initially was interested in this due to good reviews and the lovely artstyle of the game, which hold true throughout the game, never once did I think this game looked bad during combat. The overworld was.. somewhat lacking as soon as you run around, instead of the quality models, you're running around in these poor chibi forms on a realistic landscape. If you can push past that, which I did, the combat encounters will be visually pleasing the whole time. Combat is also pretty fun, action based combat which rewards you more for being on higher difficulties is standard. There's also a kingdom management game and an army battle minigame, though these have little depth to them and I would consider them, side treats to bite between the real meat of combat.
My biggest gripe with this game comes from the story and characters, the story of Ni no Kuni revolves around helping a young prince Evan become king, and you start this game as.. why none other than the president of the USA. This is a rather insane premise, one I had hoped would be brought up more as I explored the world, however, that turns out to never come true. Each town has its own issues, and each town seems to care little about anything going on outside of it. For a game where you are building your own kingdom and recruiting other kingdom's citizens to your nation, the fact so little people seem to care about anything else in the world is.. annoying at best. Compound onto that the characters, your allies, have little to say about the world is worse.
All the allies you meet have some quest they want to deal with in the town you first find them in, but then they have little more to say after recruiting them to your party, soon you find yourself in a party full of the most interesting perspectives in this world, and no one has anything to really say to each other. Even the player stand-in type character, which should be more ecstatic and wowed by the world, has little to say as if he just "gets used to it", your party members barely talk to each other and mostly they just make observations will little insight to their own perspective. By the time I finished this game, I felt like I just picked characters based off their weapon moveset more than caring about their personalities.
TLDR: I do not recommend this game, because for an RPG, this lacks substance beyond visual appeal and decent action combat. The story is very basic and characters barely interact with the world, making it feel hollow.