40 Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom
In which a boy named Pettiwhisker must be somehow taken seriously
PC, PS4
Can Level-5 do it again without Studio Ghibli’s involvement? When the original Ni No Kuni arose from the doldrums of indistinguishable JRPGs in 2013, it did so on the strength of its looks and score, and with wonderfully localised characterisation that introduced the world to, among other delights, Drippy, the Welsh, lantern-nosed sidekick. These were firm foundations for any would-be franchise, yet they’ve been mostly abandoned for this sequel.
It’s not a completely clean break. Ghibli’s character designer Yoshiyuki Momose and composer Joe Hisaishi, veterans of the original game, reprise their roles here, and their touch is immediately evident in the first breathy string motif that accompanies cateared protagonist Evan Pettiwhisker Tildrum wherever he goes. Evan is an unashamed analogue of Ni No Kuni’s Oliver: like his predecessor, he’s a wide-eyed and almost impossibly earnest young boy who must summon his inner strength to answer the call, with the help of an otherworldly guide. Unlike Oliver, whose hometown Motorville felt for all intents and purposes like the world we inhabit, Evan’s home is the fairytale Ding Dong Dell itself. His otherworldly guide, the 48-year-old Roland (who looks no more than 21), is a more traditional accomplice than Drippy by orders of magnitude. The effect of framing this tale having already ‘crossed the threshold’ in hero’s journey terms, and with a deeply familiar JRPG chap in tow, is underwhelming. Journeying into the fantastical with Oliver set up the original so wonderfully, after all. As much as it feels like spitting in a charity collection pot to temper any enthusiasm for a game as innocent as this, our limited taste of the story didn’t demonstrate anything above or beyond the original’s remit.
Mechanically, however, it’s a very different story. There are new and beguiling wrinkles
everywhere in Revenant Kingdom, all proudly twee and all, on this evidence, truly for the better, rather than simply complicating ancient JRPG procedures for their own sake. Higgledies, for example – did we mention it was twee? – are new and colourful little mites who litter the floor of each battlefield, arranging themselves in groups in order to offer Evan buffs and abilities. Periodically they’ll signal that their given power-up is ready, whereupon Evan skips over to their particular zone to activate it. Since Higgledies come in four elemental varieties, the nature of their helping hand differs accordingly. Fire Higgledies can be harnessed to create an enemy-proof flame barrier, and coordinating this mid-boss fight to avoid a particularly potent attack feels like a thoughtful way to expand a traditional battle. They’re only as tactical as the player approaching them, though. Running haphazardly between groups of coloured Pikmin-alikes, activating buffs at random, has limited strategic value.
Looking at combat from more than six inches off the ground, Ni No Kuni II plays more recognisably. Foes come in ‘disconcertingly cheerful animal’ and ‘enormous fiery beast’ varieties, the latter indicating a boss encounter while the former makes up the numbers as you progress across the world map in chibi form. Bosses benefit from some visual flair and more characteristically brilliant voice acting (a nest of lizard-like foes we encountered relished in rolling every ‘r’ and stretching out every ‘s’ to pantomime extremes), but it’s the Higgledies doing the heavy lifting to make their encounters memorable, not the boss’ behaviour itself.
Boss fights don’t represent anything like the high point of combat spectacle here, though. That honour belongs to Skirmish mode, in which Total War and the JRPG join hands and commune in surprising harmony. Evan, a king after all, commands units of troops on the battlefield during these encounters, rotating their positions around him on the fly to create a favourable matchup with whichever enemy troops are up next. Bringing archers to the fore while foes are at a distance, and then swapping them for swordsmen just before the crunch of handto-hand combat, makes this entire mode feel worthwhile. If there’s greater tactical depth than this simple bait-and-switch in the final release it’s not yet evident, nor is it apparent how Skirmish mode fits within the broader framework of the game. What is clear is that its inclusion alongside fellow newcomer Kingdom mode (see ‘The royal we’) is a statement of intent from Level-5, which is evidently determined that this game will play tangibly differently to its beloved, but mechanically straightforward, ancestor. Perhaps this is the sensible point of emphasis, too: five years after that Ghibli collaboration resulted in such a delightful playable movie, fans will take the production values and the clever narrative throughlines for granted now.
Boss fights don’t represent anything like the high point of combat spectacle here