Ni No Kuni II Revenant Kingdom Guide
A zing gauge manages how often you use your three equipped melee weapons (each character also has a single ranged weapon). When you score enough hits with a sword, its zing gauge fills up to 100 percent, allowing you to deal more basic attack damage with it. You can also expend that full charge to power up your already strong special abilities. If you want to get even more fiddly with your combat experience, you can delve into the game’s tactic tweaker, which is a way of augmenting how much damage you do to certain enemy types, how much of each kind of loot you gain, what kind of elemental damage you can do, and other sundry effects in combat. You can go deep in this combat system, but you’re also not punished for quietly ignoring it. If you miss the combat of the original Ni no Kuni, you might appreciate Higgeldies. Understood to be phenomena more than individuals, Higgeldies are strange little elementals who help Evan out on his journey. You can equip up to four at a time, and in combat they appear to passively attack enemies and provide buffs for your party. Every now and again they will spread out into a visible area so that they can be activated, and upon activation they will either do a powerful attack (like shooting a fire cannon at your foes) or provide you with some kind of boon (like a healing field). While a lot of your time is spent in combat, that’s obviously not all you are up to in the game. Evan and Roland embark upon a journey of self-discovery and hard political choices, and after some early game soul-searching and general sadness about being deposed, Evan decides that he wants to found a kingdom in which “everyone can be happy.” This being a fantasy game, that generally seems attainable, so Evan travels around the world on a mission to convince all of the different leaders of the world to sign a Declaration of Interdependence that will ensure safety and prosperity for all.
The center of this prosperity is Evan’s own Kingdom of Evermore, a little citadel nestled in the middle of a wide plain. While the depth of combat and the well-written and clever fantasy story kept me hooked into the game, the management and defense of Evermore is really what got me to lock in for hours at a time. Taking notes from both the Dark Cloud and Suikoden series, Ni no Kuni 2 has the player directly managing the population, construction, management and research agenda of Evermore. Like the combat system, you can get deep and fiddly with it. Unlike the combat system, which I enjoyed but didn’t invest too much time into, I fell right into the kingdom management trap. You build Evermore and staff it with citizens that you gather from around the world. Sadly, unlike Dark Cloud, you don’t get to determine where to put the buildings, but you choose the order in which to build them and who to place inside of them. The researchable upgrades in those buildings have effects all across Ni no Kuni 2. Some of them affect item drop rates, character speed, experience gained in battle and a dozen other scattered things. Others allow for better weapons and armor to be crafted. Still others simply gather items like bones, crystals and dairy products to put into your inventory.You need those banal items to get citizens. While items are useful for other side quests and for upgrading your Higgeldies, their real purpose is to be used as enticing objects to bring people to your kingdom. After you get Evermore up and running, there is a near-constant stream of available micro-quests centered on convincing people to live there. A fair number of those quests are based on giving a person a simple item like coral or iron ore. Those items can be manually gathered in the world by the player or they can be passively gathered in sufficiently upgraded buildings in Evermore. You can see the loop forming. Managing Evermore has taken up a significant amount of my 30 or so hours of playtime in the game, despite making enough progress in the game’s story that it feels like the ending is coming right along.
The game’s story is pure comfort food, full of JRPG stock characters and plots. In his travels around the world to get everyone to sign his pact of friendship, Evan learns that there is a nefarious presence going around and corrupting all of the world’s leaders. That presence is stealing the Kingsbond a magical linkage between that person and a magical being called a Kingmaker from those rulers. While each of the thematic kingdoms of the game have their own story acts (all of which are familiar to someone invested in either fantasy or JRPG narratives), they ultimately cohere around giant magical monsters and those who can (or cannot) manage to control them. The level of commitment to specific ideas within those plots, however, is commendable. The story of the kingdom of Goldpaw, for example, revolves around state-based debt, taxation, and what a government will do to preserve itself. Another is focused on the tension between surveillance and freedom. Yet another features a revolt of workers who literally chant “we need workers’ rights!” in the street. I never thought that I would write this, but Ni no Kuni 2 is a surprisingly political game that is more in conversation about real-world conditions than you might expect. Each of the four kingdoms' main dungeons feature unique obstacles that must be navigated, such as riding water spouts down an abyss and activating steam engines and rotating floors made of cogs inside a factory. These, however, make up such a small portion of the campaign that it's hard not to notice the utter emptiness of the game's other areas. Revenant Kingdom's final stretch is especially lacking in ideas, featuring a shrine “maze” (with only a single dead end) and then a gauntlet of uncreative foes. Revenant Kingdom is, ultimately, a tale about the important qualities of a king. Each kingdom introduces and overcomes a specific vice, teaching players that a leader must not be as greedy as Goldpaw's gambling Pugnacious, and that a good ruler like the queen of Hydropolis can save his or her people without constant emotional oppression. But the biggest lesson of all and the one that might be most appropriate to our own times is lost on the game: that a good ruler needs, above all, focus, or nothing ever gets accomplished.
There’s another factor that works against Revenant Kingdom, and that’s the sparsity of both voice acting and fully realised cutscenes. This may come as a shock to anyone who remembers the gorgeous 2D cutscenes at the start of Wrath of the White Witch and the extensive in-engine cutscenes that peppered the game. Those helped sell it as a blockbuster RPG and also went some way to establishing personality for the main characters. Wrath of the White Witch’s Drippy the fairy is the perfect example, as the extensive cutscenes allowed the team to really lean into his dialect and abrasive personality, forcing you to either love him or hate him. That then laid the groundwork for scenes like the fairy comedians which I genuinely enjoyed. Lofty plays a similar role in Revenant Kingdom, but he’s so much less forceful because the vast majority of the time you’re reading text on screen and watching characters stand around. In dungeons the transition into battle is seamless – you simply attack the enemies you come across. When crossing larger distances on the field map, you can still choose to try and avoid or engage enemies, but this too is zippy run into one and you’re almost instantly in combat. They’re big changes, but the combat feels great, and the fact that fallen foes are constantly dropping loot only adds to the action-RPG feel, encouraging you to regularly revisit your equipped weapons and gear to build the optimal load-outs. Of course, this is still very much a straight JRPG in other respects, so back in Evermore you can use the world's plentiful crafting materials to boost the power of your spells and unlock new ones, to create new weapons and armour or upgrade existing gear, and to level up your Higgledies elemental helpers that join you in battle and can serve as additional damage dealers, healers and more.
You can also use points earned in battle to tweak your tactics, allowing you to do things like choosing to be stronger against certain elemental enemy types or less susceptible to specific debuffs. You can even make other adjustments to suit your play style. Like to be nimble? Put some points into the dodge skill to increase the length of time you’re invulnerable while rolling. Want to hit harder? You can choose to boost the damage done by heavy melee attacks. Or, if you want to prioritise earning XP over rare materials from victories, or gear drops over coins, you can make those changes too. There’s even a whole other type of combat in the form of Skirmish challenges, which see you take four units of troops into battle. There’s a rock, paper, scissors element to these encounters as you rotate your units around Evan to try and counter the enemy unit types. I found Skirmishes a little clunky and unrewarding, but at least you’re only forced to play them a handful of times.
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