Update 19: The Kingdom of Dipshittia
With Ifrit banished to the void, it’s time for us to pray return to the Waking Sands and/or Rising Stones get moving toward what is absolutely the worst mechanic in Ni no Kuni 2.
: “Phew! We’re back!”
: “I suppose that means Longfang really has calmed down… for now, at least.”
: “Guess we’d better tie up some loose ends, eh?”
Pugnacius somehow revives, despite the fact that he had his soul ripped out not even minutes ago.
: “My desire to lift my kingdom out of poverty became an all-consuming greed… that weakness made me vulnerable… and… he exploited it.”
: “Who was he? The one that stole your Kingsbond?”
: “He came to me some months ago. He promised secret knowledge - knowledge of ways in which our nation might be made yet greater - and in return, he sought high office.”
Remember kids, don’t deal with evil viziers.
: “It was he who suggested that the dice be manipulated. Who gave me the means by which that might be done.”
So, this is one of the things I absolutely cannot fucking STAND about this plot is how no one in the magical isekai realm has any concept of personal responsibility. It’s somehow never their fault for any of the shit they do, even though they weren’t being mind controlled.
: “When did I fall under his spell… and how? How could I have allowed such a thing to happen?”
: “We managed to calm your Kingmaker down. But… without your Kingsbond… will you, uh, will things here be okay?”
Kingmakers are also like Primals in that they can’t be killed… except FF14 goes ahead and kills a Primal off anyway. What I’m saying is that Roland should probably just stick his gun in Pugnacius’s mouth and be done with it.
Evan then introduces himself to Pugnacius (which I’m going to skip), but more importantly…
We’ve gotten Niall his forest back. Time to go back to the forest and subsequently clear-cut it for kingdom materials.
: “Now we can finally start building our kingdom.”
: “Wait. Niall - Pugnacius had his kingsbond stolen by a creepy snake-headed weirdo. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
Tani begins showing her racism against green people.
: “Stolen!? Jings, his kingmaker must be tearing the place tae pieces!”
: “Aye, it wanted to, sure enough. But we taught it a little lesson it won’t soon forget. Goldpaw’s safe… for now.”
: “Kingsbond-stealin’s no mean feat, though… he didnae happen tae be infusin’ things with an awful filthy fug, did he?”
: “Yes! A sort of… purple aura?”
: “That’ll be the Horned One’s doing then, right enough.”
: “The Horned One?”
This is a plot point we will not see again until the very end of the game.
: “So we just need to go to this Allegoria place and get the bond back, right?”
: “Ye’ll have a job daein’ that, I’m afraid. Allegoria hasnae existed for… oh… two thousand years or more now. It disappeared along with the land on which it stood.”
: “So he’s the king of a country which hasn’t existed for centuries?”
: “Is he a ghost or something?”
: “Whatever he is, I’d say he’s lookin’ tae pinch people’s Kingsbonds in order tae try and bring the Horned One back somehow. And if he does that, the whole world’ll be filled with purple fug before ye can say ‘We’re Doomed!’”
: “Then we mustn’t let him succeed! We can’t let him bring back the Horned One!”
: “We sure can’t. But if we’re going to stop him, we’re going to need the strength of an entire kingdom - a kingdom we haven’t even started building yet.”
What we are about to enter is what is without a doubt the worst part of the game.
: “Where did all these people come from?”
: “I see greenlings, sky pirates… even a few people from Ding Dong Dell.”
This line is actually a lie - as far as I remember from my end-game save, we never actually recruit a single greenling apart from Niall himself.
: “They must all want to be citizens of our amazing new kingdom!”
: “That they must, right enough, but how did the swabs even know to come a-knockin?”
Man, a kingdom ruled by a ten year old boy with a tiny green gambling addict for a finance minister. What could POSSIBLY go wrong?
And naturally Evan, being a total dipshit, immediately goes for it.
: “So… if Niall’s the Minister of Finance, I guess that makes Batu… the Minister of Defense?”
: “The swab in charge o’ fightin’, ye mean? I like the sound of that a good deal!”
I wasn’t aware getting nuked counted as valuable country-running experience, but okay.
: “No, you shall be my Chief Consul, Roland. I’m no politician. I shall need your help.”
: “Well, that’s very kind of you, Evan… I just… I don’t know if I’ll be…”
Roland ALMOST feels like he’s trying to take responsibility for getting New York destroyed, but then gets over it immediately.
: “It’s a king’s job to appoint his ministers, correct? Then I hereby name you Chief Consul.”
You might ask if Evan ever finds out about the whole getting nuked thing, and I’ll tell you right now that the answer is no.
I’m going to skip a couple of pointless dialog lines since I think we’ve both seen enough of this bullshit. I started Disgaea 5 recently, and the writing in this game is maybe a half-step above any given Disgaea game. All it’d need is Roland complaining about not being the main character and Evan constantly screaming about how much he loves curry.
I vote for “Dipshittia”, after the fact that not only is this country being founded on a totally unachievable political goal, it’s also run by a dipshit.
Yep, Dipshittia it is.
Evan then gives a speech that I’m going to skip about half of, because it’s just the sky pirates getting into line.
They’re really trying hard here to have him channel JFK, and it just doesn’t work.
By the end of the decade, we will put a man on the moon! By man, I mean anime, and by anime I mean we’re banning all anime, anime is over.
Another question you might be asking at this point: does the whole idea of a kingdom being founded on a completely unachievable idea run by a ten year old being a really bad idea ever get brought up as a plot point?
I’m not going to answer, but you’ve seen enough of this game to know what the answer is.
There’s another cutscene with Bluehair McPlotruiner that I’m going to skip.
Welcome to the worst part of Ni No Kuni 2: the kingdom management minigame. The kingdom management game is to NNK2 what, say, Item World or Chara World are to Disgaea… except instead of having a direct effect on gameplay, kingdom management only really affects itself.
Oh, and we’re in Chapter 4 now.
Roland starts off by giving an extended tutorial on how this works, but I’ll just handle that for you. Kingdom management is basically one of those clicker games.
We start off with the castle, and a large barren wasteland with nothing in it. Unlike the main game, kingdom management has its own currency called Kingsguilders (KG). KG is gained at a set rate per hour based on your influence (top-right).
You’ll notice that we have a limit as to how much KG the kingdom can hold. We’re not actually limited to how much we can have, but the kingdom can only store 3000 before it will stop generating more. This means we have to come back every hour to claim our KG… or lose it.
At the start, you’re forced to build four basic buildings: the Spellworks, the Armory, the Blacksmith, and the Higglery. The spellworks researches spells - this is how we upgrade things like Evan’s fireball spell to do more damage. It’s that building in the back, with the gold dome on top of it. If you’ll remember, back in Cloudcoil Canyon we found a locked blue chest. The spellworks is how you research the unlocking spell that unlocks said blue chests.
The armory and blacksmith are used to craft stuff - the armory is the helmet-shaped building to the right of the spellworks. Crafting in this game is pointless.
The building in front of the spellworks is one of the few useful buildings in this mode: it’s the general store, which allows us to (eventually) stock up on high-level healing items we can’t find anywhere else.
Over here, we have the blacksmith (left), the higglery (back), and the barracks (green roof).
The higglery is where we can upgrade our higgledies and make new ones. It’s almost totally useless apart from a few end-game upgrades that require way more KG than we have right now. The barracks is for upgrading stuff for skirmish mode.
All of the other buildings are resource gathering points, which will gather resources as long as they are staffed. Right now, we don’t have the people to do that.
Each building allows you to staff it with characters we’ve recruited - all of our major party members are recruits, as are a bunc h of NPCs from the sky pirate base, Niall, and Floyd.
Each character has four aptitudes: combat, crafting, higgledies, and magic. The explorer’s guild here does have one useful upgrade that increases the speed at which we move on the world map… but we can’t research it yet. That’s because each character has a unique skill that unlocks things depending on where they’re placed.
Some characters, like Floyd here, can only be placed in one particular building. In Floyd’s case, that’s the restaurant. You’ll also see Gerel, the store owner from the pirate base, standing in front of the general store: that’s her specialty. No one else can run the store.
Anyway, that about does it for this update. Next time, we’ll start on the godawful sidequests we’ll need to do in order to level up the kingdom.