Such missed story potential

[Lavender Gooms]

I just finished Ni No Kuni 2.

I kind of hated it. The gameplay was a lot of fun, I loved the combat and the item management and the collecting and crafting and kingdom building, and I even learned to enjoy the skirmishes.

But the story was just so, so so terrible. It's like it was written for five year olds.

And that's fine! Nothing wrong with that kind of story, five year olds need stories too. I just wasn't expecting to find a story like that in an 80-hour action-based jrpg full of text.

Obviously, i'm going to talk about the entire game here so spoilers. For the entire game. Just right out in the open spoilers. This also isn't a review because it's going to be way too long and detailed which is why i'm posting it here. I just need to get it out of my head.




There are barely any characters in the game. Evan gets the most focus of course, but even he can be summed up by a few words that don't change over the course of the story. Good-natured. Optimistic. Kind. And that's it. There's no nuance to him. He's always a sweet little boy trying to do his best to rule over his people. And he's always right. Everything he does always works, is always the right decision. His view of the world is always the correct one and never backfires. He sees redemption in everyone, allows everyone to be redeemed, and it never backfires or disappoints him. All of the villains in this game get forgiven by him, even the one who personally murdered his father. Which, again, makes sense because this is a fairy tale written for five year olds.

The other characters get no such focus. We start the game off with Roland so we know that he's the President of the United States some modern country, and he got magically teleported to this world after a catastrophe and is also younger than he was over there. And that's it. For the entire game. 10 minutes in he decides to support Evan in his rule and there is no mention of ever going home, of him missing his family or people, anything. He's just "the advisor". There's maybe 15 minutes in the middle where you think there's a twist but that also is standard and obvious and solved immediately so barely counts as character development. The four other party members are even less fleshed out somehow. They matter, a little bit, in the chapter they are introduced in and then get ignored entirely for the rest of the game. They are always present but it's as background decoration, just taken as a matter of fact that they are there supporting Evan because that's all they exist to do.

Each of the chapters has the same structure. Evan needs the kingdom to sign his declaration, they go there, there's some problem happening, turns out the problem is because the leader is acting weird, the leader is acting weird because of a magic wizard, break the magic wizard's hold over the leader, fight a boss, problem solved forever. This never changes. For the entire game. The structure of Goldpaw is the structure of Hydropolis is the structure of Broadleaf is the... *sigh* structure of Ding Dong Dell.

We have to talk about Mausinger.

Mausinger murdered his best friend, King Leonhardt. He poisoned him and caused him to die a drawn out agonizing death over several months. He then attempted to murder the new king, a 10 year old boy, in a coup that also ended up killing dozens of soldiers and bodyguards on both sides in the process. Once he took control of the country he locked down the borders and stopped any travel in and out. He forceably seized the homes and property of the cat people and gave them to the mice people, as reparations for how the mice people were treated in the past. He rounded up all the cat people and locked them in the sewers with little food or water. If any of the cat people left the sewers he had his guards arrest them on false pretenses, like for shoplifting when the cat person in question was waiting in line to buy the thing they had "stolen". He captures a scout from the protagonist's kingdom and has a double agent murder them to prove their loyalty. He invites the protagonist to the kingdom to offer a trade for a key that he needs only to try to kill them once they arrive.

Mausinger is not under magic wizard control.

They make this explicit. Doloran, the magic wizard, says that both King Leonhardt and Mausinger were too pure hearted for his magic to corrupt them and so he had to take a roundabout method that took a lot longer than he wanted. That roundabout method was using magic to control some dude who then suggested to Mausinger that he do all those awful things.

Mausinger did all those awful things with a clear head, fully aware of his actions, because some guy said he should. That's decidedly worse than him being under magic wizard control.

Mausinger gets forgiven and everyone in the entire world acts like nothing he did happened. None of the cat people are pissed that he locked them in a slum, none of the mice people are mad that their property got taken back and returned to the cat people, none of the cat or mice people have lingering hatreds that go back generations, no one is mad about all the people who died in the coup. The game just washes its hands and moves on. Because it's a fairy tale for five year olds.

That the game then pulls this same thing with Doloran at the end was entirely unsurprising to me. Nevermind this guy manipulated all the leaders of the world into harming their subjects to steal their Kingsbonds. Nevermind this guy stole the souls of thousands of people to power his magic golem from another dimension. Nevermind he broke open the sky and almost destroyed the entire world.

He did it for love and he's sorry so it's ok we forgive him, he can just start over with a new kingdom.


I don't care about the stuff with Roland and Ferdinand and all that. It was just tacked onto the end and barely mattered so i'm not even bothered that they are both kind of dumb. It amounts to about five minutes of screen time so even though they are right at the end and thus given greater importance because of that, they barely matter or are relevant to the rest of the story so I just don't care.

It could have been so, so much better. The beginning was absolutely incredible. The premise could have been explored and handled in an interesting way. But they just ignore everything about it and tell a bog-standard predictable and rather dull fairy tale.

I'll leave with this.

At the end of the game Roland gets a vision of his world, with his son standing in a field of rubble. It's disturbing and well directed.


I wouldn't have known Roland had a son if I hadn't read the glossary. He is never mentioned once in dialogue prior to that point 70 hours in at the very end of the game.

[Mahou86]

Just nitpicking here: Roland having a son was mentioned in one of the sidequests. And even though it was just glossed over, the narration after Ding Dong Dell chapter mentioned that the conflicting feelings were not completely gone away and need time. Not the best decision, obviously.

The part about the party members becoming more or less background "noise" is indeed unfortunate.

[Orge Lambart]

considering the story was written for pre - teens to understand and you failed to understand it, tells me alot about you as a person.. Also me thinks you as a PC gamer don't understand how J-rpg's work..

ALL j-rpg's follow the mostly same cliche storylines, with the pretty much same Cliche character side kicks.

Go play Suikoden, same general idea, you recruit some characters, they go to your castle then are forgotten about.. Sure maybe not quite as bad as this game because you can dust about 30 or so of them off and have them join your active team, only about 6 - 7 of them are viable as fighters anyway..

The first indication you shouldn't really take the story too seriously is when you heard the Kingdom refered to as Ding Dong Dell..

[Lavender Gooms]

Suikoden has 108 characters.

This game can't pay full attention to six.



As for the other thing.
1: No they don't all follow the same cliche storylines
2: They sometimes write the cliche storylines a lot better so they are still interesting
3: "Other games are just as bad" is a bad response when the argument is "this was bad". That doesn't make anything any better.

[ButtGravy]

Originally posted by Orge Lambart:

considering the story was written for pre - teens to understand and you failed to understand it, tells me alot about you as a person.. Also me thinks you as a PC gamer don't understand how J-rpg's work..

ALL j-rpg's follow the mostly same cliche storylines, with the pretty much same Cliche character side kicks.

Go play Suikoden, same general idea, you recruit some characters, they go to your castle then are forgotten about.. Sure maybe not quite as bad as this game because you can dust about 30 or so of them off and have them join your active team, only about 6 - 7 of them are viable as fighters anyway..

The first indication you shouldn't really take the story too seriously is when you heard the Kingdom refered to as Ding Dong Dell..

He understood the story, the story has not much to understand. You are comparing it to Suikoden wich is vastly different. They have 108 characters, they can't flesh them all out. There is complex stories in JRPG Ni No Kuni 2 is not one of them. Good story in JRPG exist, Ni No Kuni 2 does not have that.

[Bob]

Totally agree with everything said here. This complete lack of compotent story telling and character development brought this game from one of my most anticipated games (I got 100% in the 1st game) to my biggest dissapointment. Nothing happens in this game... you keep waiting for something to happen and it never does. Poorly written and poorly directed, honestly id prefer Mass Effect Andormeda to Ni No Kuni 2.

[SONIC]

true

[Revolucas]

It's a U.N. liberal propaganda piece.

[v4lexx]

100% it's so kind numbingly awful written. If you were at least given the choice to forgive or not to.