Anime Was A Mistake: Let's Dunk On Ni no Kuni 2

Update 6: A King I Am (Not)

From this point on, we control Evan rather than Roland while outside of battle. We can actually ditch Evan from the main party in battle - once we find a third party member, that is. Ultimately, we’re probably going to want to choose between either Evan or Roland because both of them use swords and there really aren’t enough good swords to go around. I’ll show it a bit later on, but Roland has higher base attack stats than Evan does, while Evan has slightly better defensive ones.

Roland: “There’s no Ding Dong Dell where I’m from. And no view like this either…”

Roland: “Hm. I guess it’s… ahead of this world in some ways… and behind in others.”

Evan: “Nella used to tell me a story, you know. When I was little…”

Evan: “It was about another world. One very closely connected to our own…”

This is one of the few nods they give to Ni no Kuni 1 existing, back when the magical isekai kingdom was more like Narnia without all of the Christian symbolism and wasn’t a generic isekai anime.

Evan: “I always imagined it was just a fairy tale, but… I suppose there must have been some truth to it after all.”

Roland: “So I got… lost between these two worlds and wound up here? Does that mean there’s no way home?”

Evan: “What did you do there? In your world?”

So honestly, I think this game would’ve been way more interesting if it was the other way around, with Evan winding up in a modern-day Earth. They could’ve used the whole “what happens in one world effects the other” thing again and it would’ve been a much better and more direct sequel.

Roland, worst president ever. Michael Wilson this guy is not.

Evan: “What?!”

Roland: “Well, a president. It’s kind of the same thing.”

Roland: “Which means I have a little experience when it comes to running a country.”

I think it was about this point when I realized that Roland reminded me a lot of Clancy from Deep Fear.

Evan: “Really? Then perhaps you might be kind enough to share some of it with me? Things may not be the quite the same here as in your world, but still…”

Roland: “What exactly are you planning? A quiet life in the mountains might not be such a bad idea, you know.”

Roland, truly the best president ever. This is one of the things that really bugs me about this game. From here on in, Roland is treated like an expert statesman when he failed so badly as a president that New York got nuked on his watch. You’d think he’d at least feel a scrap of regret.

So now, Evan tells us we need a Kingmaker. You might ask, “Wait… aren’t those just the Primals from Final Fantasy 14?” and you’d be absolutely right because that is quite literally what they are… minus the theme songs.

So now, you might ask, where is Evan’s giant demon thing?

Pretty much exactly where you’d think it would be. You would think that Evan would have mentioned this thing’s existence or tried to secure it before he left. You’d also think that he’d have seen a twenty-foot-tall deer unicorn thing on the way out.

So now that we’ve got a destination, it’s time to set out…

Roland: "So what are we waiting for? Let’s go!’

Evan: “Ahh… just one second!”

Evan… puts on a short cape. This is somehow all he needed to be able to fight. We now have access to Evan as our second party member - but there’s a bit of a problem.

So, to understand what I did here: I unequipped Roland of all but one weapon that does roughly the same amount of damage that Evan’s default weapon does. He’s still a full level ahead of Evan and will probably remain that way for the foreseeable future.

In contrast, these are Evan’s stats. Evan comes with a single piece of armor which I removed for this shot.

It’s not obvious right now (mostly because Roland is higher level) but Roland tends to have slightly better stat growth on level-up in his attack stats (top two) versus Evan who is more of a mage (middle stat). The problem is that they’re both sword users… and there aren’t really enough swords to go around. We could keep both of them in the party: I finished the game the first time I played it without even using zing at all, but there’s generally going to be a huge gap between your best weapon and second best weapon for any given category… so we may want to consider getting rid of one or the other later on.

Since my LPs usually don’t allow for a large degree of audience participation, I’ll allow you, the viewers, to pick which one we get rid of… or if we keep both.

These are Evan’s specials. Kingspin is essentially the same as Roland’s Flatliner skill - except instead of getting a second vertical slash when at 100% zing, it instead reaches a wider area and also does fire damage. It’s hard to get a screenshot of, but you’ll see it next update.

On the way out of the mountain area, we also run into our first warp point. These make the first part of the game, where we’ll largely be going between places on foot, much faster.

And now we’re on the world map. The game has auto-switched us to controlling Evan in combat, though we can change back to Roland at any time. The world map is a lot like Earthbound’s, where enemies are on the screen and will aggro when approached unless your level is way higher than theirs. There are “sneak attacks” if an enemy hits you from behind - this removes any zing you have built up but otherwise doesn’t change much.

Here, we meet one of the handful of enemy types we’re going to run into: Whamsters.

At this point in the game, Whamsters are almost entirely melee-based… except for the blue ones, which are casters. They’re pretty easy to knock down, and don’t have a whole lot of health. Later on, they typically have more casters and add archers into the mix, which can be annoying if there’s a ton of them.

We also run into a second enemy type: dogs. They’re much harder to knock down than Whamsters are, and have more health on average… but spend a lot of time growling, like that one on the right edge of the shot. During the growling animation, they’re wide open to melee attacks.

You can see the yellow market on the map telling us where Cloudcoil Canyon is… but what’s this house? We’ll find out next time, when we get introduced to Ni no Kuni 2’s mascot characters and gain access to our final major combat mechanic.

Update 7: A Useless Side Mechanic Appears!

As soon as we go near that cottage, the game thrusts us into yet another cutscene. I swear, it’s impossible to make a JRPG these days without having it feel like a movie.

Oh no! That grandma and her pikmin are under attack!

The game helpfully tells us how to deal with flying enemies… kind of like this wyvern we’re going to be fighting in mere seconds.

Wyverns are usually mini-boss type enemies that are encountered alone and have boss health bars. They’re spongier than normal enemies are, but the main difference is that they’re one of a handful of flying enemies in this game.

This one starts on the ground, though normally they’ll alternate between a ground cycle and an air cycle. Once we do some damage to it…

So, one thing that I absolutely hate about this cutscene is that the pikmin creatures never actually do this once we get them in battle.

In fact, this is about as useful as these things get - on their own, anyway.

The pikmin things are called higgledies, because absolutely everything in Ni no Kuni has to have a fanciful dipshit name. It’s kind of hard to see what they actually do in combat, but the tutorial for them actually has some good shots.

So, this screen is actually kind of a lie. What happens is that the higgledies spend time gathering power and every so often will form a circle that you can use to get them to do something. The only ones that are really worth it are the green ones, because they provide an AOE heal over time effect.

Their main use is charging your attacks. Any attack that is effected by zing (including Roland’s Flatliner and Evan’s Kingspin attack) can be charged using a certain color of higgledy. This essentially lets you use zing attacks without actually needing zing… at the cost of not being able to move for a second while you charge up.

This allows us to switch to Roland and charge Flatliner repeatedly to stunlock the wyvern to death.

I skipped a bit of this cutscene because this update is rapidly becoming a movie, but you get the idea. I’ll probably upload it to video soon and get it put up here.

Also, we learn that Cloudcoil Canyon is full of pirates.

We also get our first higgledy - they actually come in units of 4 and can be upgraded using vast amounts of crafting materials later on… but it’s not really worth doing.

There’s a warp point right outside the cottage - this is actually the location of our first sidequest, but that won’t happen until after Cloudcoil Canyon. This was where I stopped for a bit, and when I logged back in…

So, in between when I started this update and now, the game updated to have a “hard” and “extreme” mode, which cause enemies to drop far better items at the cost of reducing your damage by roughly 25% on hard and 50% on extreme.

Naturally, I set this shit right to extreme.

You might also wonder what our higgledy’s special attack looks like. This is it - it does roughly the same damage as a single physical attack from Evan… and eventually, Evan will outscale it so much that it won’t even be worth using.

This is the effect of extreme mode: we’re now doing 14 damage when previously Roland was hitting for 50+.

Right away, the drops start getting better. Roland gets a wizard outfit with roughly four times as much defense as the stuff Evan starts with.

Evan is actually the only person in the entire world to be half-furry. It’s really weird that they never delve further into this.

Anyway, Cloudcoil Canyon is right over there. Next time, we’ll go in there and see how much dumber this plot can get.

Update 7: Cloudcoil Canyon

Welcome to Cloudcoil Canyon - a sort of halfway point between an actual story dungeon with a boss and one of the sidequest dungeons that we’ll get to later. I should mention that in between the last update and this one, I built an entirely new PC with much better specs that allowed me to crank everything to Ultra.

Evan: “Yes, and that’s not the only challenge we’ll face. The King’s Cradle is at the other end of Cloudcoil Canyon, on an island near the Heartlands.”

Roland: “So we’ll need to find a boat, too?”

Evan: “… I’m afraid so. But we must worry about that later. First, we need to make it through the valley.”

So Roland, who is supposed to be the sensible person in all of this, just follows along because clearly everything Evan has ever read in a book is true.

Right away, there’s a warp point just beyond the save point that’s visible in the cutscene. The developers of Ni no Kuni 2 were really nice in that most large areas have multiple warp points. This is especially true of Cloudcoil Canyon, for reasons we’ll see in just a bit.

Behind the warp point is this guy, who is this area’s merchant.

Roland: “What’s a merchant doing all the way out here?”

Merchant: “Well, it’s quite a story actually. You see, I was based in Ding Dong Dell, but there was a little… political trouble out that way, and now the mice are in control.”

Merchant: “I didn’t much like the way things were going, so I made good my escape while I still could.”

Evan: “You’re… you’re from Ding Dong Dell, you say…?”

Merchant: “Everybody on Leafbook was saying you’d been killed, so I just assumed the rumors must be true!”

Evan: “Oh, well… umm… not actually. I survived - just.”

Roland: “What’s Leafbook? Is this some other kind of magic you guys have or something?”

Evan: “I’m afraid I haven’t the foggiest idea…”

Yes, Ni no Kuni 2 apparently takes place in a world where modern-day Earth never invents social media, but the magical isekai kingdom does. You know, I think that explains where Mark Zuckerburg came from.

So again, I’d like to point out that a mere six updates ago, Roland pulled out a modern cellphone and attempted to use it. I like to think that the reason Roland got nuked is because he outlawed everything on a cellphone except for making and receiving calls.

Even weirder, this random jerk has a bunch of these magic cellphone things. As we’ll find out shortly, so does pretty much everyone in the magical isekai realm except for Evan.

This is what Leafbook looks like - there’s a dedicated button for it and everything. Strangely, there’s no old people posting about how they think Congress has been taken over by aliens or making arts and crafts with firearms. I’m not going to show this off at all after this point, mostly because it contains spoilers for areas we haven’t been to yet. In fact, one of the pictures on this screen is of an area that we won’t visit until maybe two hours from the end of the game (assuming no sidequests in between).

You can also “like” posts, which I don’t think does anything. This isn’t, say, the email mechanic in Xenosaga where if you failed to answer the first email you recieve (which that game at no point explains how to do) you miss out on the best weapon in the game.

Moving on, we encounter two new enemy types.

The first one is Dynagoo, which is the first elemental upgrade to the basic Goo enemy we fought in the sewers. These guys tend to run away and attack from range, and if left alone for a short period of time will turn silver.

This makes them one of the most annoying enemies in the game, simply because you need magic (not just elemental attacks) to break them out of this state and make them vulnerable to physical attacks again. Evan’s fireball or water ball spells will both do the trick, but Roland doesn’t have any spells yet, and won’t for a while.

The other enemy type is the Sylph, which later gains colored re-skins. Sylves are also ranged attackers, though instead of spamming weaker attacks, they charge up and release a homing bolt that hits for around 75 damage at this level. It’s honestly kind of hard to get a screenshot of the actual projectile, mostly because the sylph will usually die before it ever gets a chance to use it.

Behind a couple of Dynagoo/Sylph encounters, Evan spots… a plant.

You can tell that Roland is getting ready to outlaw these the same way he outlawed social media.

Roland: “This is hardly the time for a botany lesson.”

Evan: “But… I’ve only ever seen them in books before! I… sorry, of course, we should get moving.”

You would think that the cutscene would be there so we’d remember where that clover is… and as you’ll see in just a minute, you’d be completely and utterly wrong. In the meantime, we have another two new enemy types: Porcs and birds.

Porcs are among the tankiest non-miniboss enemies in the game. This one has pretty much the same amount of HP that the wyvern did in the last update.

Really, they’re more of an annoyance than anything - they can block attacks from the front and mostly attack by charging in a straight line, which is really easy to dodge and also offers ample opportunity to hit them with charged special attacks.

They can also charge up and release an AOE explosion. While they’re totally vulnerable to being hit during the charge, they can’t be knocked down.

Birds, on the other hand, are basically flying sylphs. One or two light attacks in air will knock them down, and a few more will kill them off.

Once we get to the end of the area with the first Porc encounter, we run into a bit of a problem.

One short walk down a side path later…

The higgledies start doing something strange, and out comes…

Our first wind-element higgledie! These are pretty much the only useful higgledies, short of a handful of end-game ones, because their activation ability provides an AOE heal over time.

They also give Evan an old twig, which is pretty much what he deserves…

We’ve now learned this area’s out of battle spell. Each of the game’s major areas has one.

Wind Whipper allows Evan to turn the prop clovers into bounce pads that open up new areas.

Now, you might be asking yourself, what was beyond that first clover? Well, let’s find out.

The answer is a bunch of level 20 enemies that can and will destroy Roland in one hit at this point in the game. You might think the developers had that cutscene earlier so we’d remember to come back here later, only when we DO need to come back here, there’s a map marker for it.

The intended route is just to the left of the bridge, which bounces us up to the top of the cliff.

Right at the top is another battle, and the final new enemy type we’ll be seeing for a while.

These are “incarnates”, which are really just elementals. Unlike most enemies, they don’t show up on the map until battle starts, and spend most of their time running away frorm you. They don’t attack, but are impervious to pretty much anything but elemental attacks. Thankfully, Roland has the fire broadsword, which killed this one quickly.

Roland also levelled up to 8 in that battle, which earned him a new technique whose name escapes me at the moment - it’s either Circle Cut or Circle Slice and I forget which. Like its name implies, Circle Cut is a circular AOE attack that hits anything within range two or three times. It can be charged by wind elemental higgledies into what you see here.

One short jump over a gap later, and we’re mere inches from a cutscene trigger… and the end of this update. Next time, we’ll meet the sky pirates of Cloudcoil Canyon.

Update 8: Jumping the Shark

Once we go past the bridge, the canyon turns into a less swampy Valley of Defilement. You might have noticed in the last update that the first Leafbook post has one of those weird stones in it just like the one straight ahead.

These are Higgledy Stones, and are probably the worst-implemented thing in the game. Each stone contains a different Higgledy to collect… only as I mentioned earlier, higgledies are useless - the stones even moreso, because we’ll soon have a way to craft higgledies at will.

Each stone has the same exact dialog. They want a crafting item (ie; all that random junk we’ve been slowly accumulating since the beginning of the game, both as drops from battles and from glowing pickup spots) which is usually something that’s either too rare to justify the expense, or that you won’t have for another 5+ hours after you meet the stone. There’s one particularly egregious example about 3/4 of the way into the game where one of the stones (in an area that is extremely annoying to navigate) wants an item that isn’t even obtainable until post-game.

Anyway, this stone wants a nut - just like the one we grabbed from a pickup spot mere seconds ago.

I’m only showing this because there are a few sidequests later on that will demand we do the same thing - pick the right item from a list. Most of those are safe to ignore.

This gets us a second wind-elemental higgledy. I don’t believe there’s any reason to have two other than to double up on the chance of getting that AOE heal.

Not far from the stone, we find the final prop clover… of this area, anyway. They’ll show up in some other places later.

Oh man, it looks like a boss arena. Could it be…

Suddenly, Roland gets surrounded by what looks like rejected 40k Ork technology. For some reason, he forgets to simply pull out his gun and start blasting.

For some reason, instead of just cutting both of them down with the machinegun on the front, this idiot decides to go for a different approach.

Buddy, I’ve heard of Solid Snake, Liquid Snake, Naked Snake and Punished “Venom” Snake. I swear to god, if these idiots are just Fantasy Outer Heaven…

Roland immediately contemplates passing anti-net laws, and revoking net neutrality while he’s at it.

Evan: “We have important business beyond the valley! You simply must let us through!”

Dingus: “Oh, must we indeed? I’ll tell ye what we simply must do, boy - string up all them as comes a-spyin’ on our secret base!”

Yes, their secret base that even some old lady who lives on the other side of the continent knows is here.

Khunbish: “Aye, me honored colleague has the right of it. Ye’ve contravened rule 7, section D o’ the Piratical Aviator’s Code. An’ the punishment for such a heinous crime is… death!”

Roland: “But we’re not aviators. We walked here.”

Khunbish: “Spare us yer clever words, mister! We’ll not stand here an’ listen to ye wheedle yer way out of it.”

Dingus: “Aye, piratin’s busy work! Less talkin’, more dyin’! Heh heh!”

And oh look, it’s a twelve-year-old version of San from Princess Mononoke. Mostly, I don’t hate this game - it’s mediocre and grindy and poorly designed in a lot of places, but damned if I didn’t finish it. Tani as a character, I absolutely do hate.

Khunbish: “Er… we- we, er…”

Khunbish: “Well now, I never… that is we… ahem.”

Roland: “We wait for an opening, then run!”

Evan and Roland are pretty much immediately taken to the game’s second town, the Sky Pirate Base.

This part is basically a five-minute walk that would ordinarily take something like fifteen seconds at Evan’s default movement speed. From what I remember, the first time I played this part, the pirates walked in front and behind the party to sort of force them along - but in this case, they both kinda decided to fuck off to the side.

Meet Batu. Batu is probably my favorite character in this game.

Batu: “Ye must be the trespassers. Loiterin’ suspiciously in the Canyon there, or so I hears it.”

Roland: “With good reason. Please, hear us out.”

Evan: “W-we only want to visit the King’s Cradle! We won’t cause any trouble, I promise!”

Batu: “Ye caused trouble the second ye set foot on Sky Pirate turf, lad. ‘Tis a violation o’ the code - one that carries the penalty of death!”

So yeah, this guy is an ice cold motherfucker who is going to kill a pre-pubescent boy for trespassing.

Evan: “What? Can’t you-”

Roland: “You may want to reconsider. This is King Evan of Ding Dong Dell. What do you suppose will happen if you execute a royal, hm?”

Batu: “Eh? You’re a wry one to jest so in the face of death, matey.”

Batu: “We’re not so backward that we ain’t heard o’ the young price taking the throne… but we’re not so soft in the head as to believe he’d come traipsin’ all the way up here, neither.”

Roland: “There was a coup. We fled here in fear of our lives.”

Batu: “Is that so? All the more reason to sling ‘em off a cliff an’ be done with it. Whoever’s in charge at Ding Dong Dell’s sure to be pleased as punch at such tidings. An’ it can’t do no harm to stay on their good side now, can it?”

So yeah, ice cold motherfucker.

Dingus: “The wyverns’ve taken her hostage! They said they’ll let her live… b-but only if we promises to pick up sticks right away an’ never come back!”

Batu: “The devils! Pick on a mere slip of a girl, would they? …But if we desert this base, we’ll be sittin’ ducks for any an’ all choose to come at us! The lousy lizards’ll slaughter every last man, woman, and child!”

So yeah, he’s gone from killing Evan to sacrificing his own daughter just so he can stay king of the pirates. I want you to keep this in mind, that this guy is basically one step away from being Luca Blight at this point.

Evan: “But she’s-”

Batu: “She’s the blood o’ my blood’s what she is. I the boot were on the other foot, I know she’d do the same.”

Evan: “Wait! You can’t just leave her to die!”

Batu: “What’s that now?”

Evan: “If none of you are willing to go, I will! I’ll rescue her!”

So yeah, this is the kid who not even a day ago was too scared to fight anyone to the point where he got someone killed as a result.

Evan: “Please, Chief Batu! You have to let us try! Tani saved our lives, we are honor-bound to repay the debt!”

Batu: “Somethin’ tells me that ain’t all yer after, laddie.”

So when I first read this line, I made it my headcanon that Evan has somehow seen Princess Mononoke and had a thing for San, not knowing that the best female character animated by Hayao Miyazaki is actually Fujiko Mine. This entire segment could’ve been avoided if someone had just shown him Castle of Cagliostro.

Khunbish: “Aye! They’re after a way out, boss! You take it from me!”

Evan: “We won’t run away! You have my word as… you have my word!”

Batu: “Just what’re ye plottin’, laddie? I don’t have time for none of your trickery.”

So I’d like to point something out here. This line, right here? The one by Batu about the “blighted lands” being “rife with misery and war”? This is something that is absolutely NEVER SHOWN IN THE FUCKING GAME AT ANY POINT. The only unrest we’ve seen so far is the coup at Ding Dong Dell - and that’s a civil war at best, not an international one. In fact, Evan’s entire motivation setup here makes absolutely no goddamn sense! None! But no, from here on out, there will never be shown at any point a war between two nations.

… And it’s only going to get worse from here. I’d also like to point out that Batu of all fucking people is the ONLY PERSON IN THE ENTIRE GAME to question the wisdom of having a 10 year old boy run a country.

So yes, readers, we have just officially jumped the shark.

Batu: “What’s that? Not just a king indeed, but king of the whole blessed world, eh lad?”

Evan: “If that’s what it takes, I have to try! And I can’t stop trying until everyone is able to live happily ever after!”

Batu: “Silence, ye mangy curs! Ye were sayin’, lad?”

Evan: “If I can’t repay my debt to Tani, I don’t deserve to be king. I don’t deserve to live! So kill us if you must. But at least give us a chance to save her first. And if we do… grant us safe passage to the king’s cradle.”

Anyway, we’re now given full access to the pirate stronghold. There’s not a whole lot interesting here apart from a merchant who sells soreaway, but at this point I had already blown all of my money on soreaway from the merchant at the start of Cloudcoil Canyon.

All we can do now is touch the warp point to activate it, and blast off to strike against the evil wyvern empire… in the next update.

Update 9: Never Do Bossfights on Extreme

We’re now on the world map just outside the Sky Pirate base. This is where things can get a little iffy if you’re playing on Extreme mode, as we are.

So, one of the things that’s different about the world map than most other areas is that enemy levels are somewhat randomized - you’ll usually find them at a set level range (for this area, it’s roughly 5 to 9)… but sometimes, you’ll find an “elite” enemy who is much higher level. Take this level 14 Whamster, for example.

There’s also a warp point here, mostly because there are chests here we won’t be able to get for a long, long time.

The problem is that on Extreme mode, you can run into this: a pack of wyverns with one being level 14. I was actually wrong about one thing: wyverns actually don’t appear alone. Those are “elite” wyverns, which are more of a boss/mini-boss.

Anyway, the level 14 wyvern essentially no-sold every attack I threw against it that wasn’t Circle Cut… and then killed Roland in two hits.

The worst part is, I almost had it down, then got hit once and game overed. This is the danger of playing on Extreme mode - honestly, I shouldn’t have bothered cranking the difficulty setting up for better drops just yet, because we haven’t run into this game’s equivalent of the Covetous Gold Serpent Ring.

This area is absolutely littered with wyverns. Fortunately, I levelled up a bit offscreen. Grinding for levels in Ni no Kuni 2 is kind of a slow process and isn’t really encouraged, but I did it mostly to see if I could get some better weapons to drop.

On the way there, I got a little confused and wound up here. Crookneck Cavern is actually a dungeon in and of itself if I remember right - there’s like four caves with the same name and three of them are only used for sidequests we don’t have yet. We might want to remember where this is though, because it’s part of a sidequest I might do off-camera near the end of the game.

The path we want is on the other side, and is full of level 13 wyverns. The one behind it was also level 13. These weren’t quite as bad as the level 14 one was, and I suspect that’s because the game adds a hidden defense multiplier to enemies that are at a certain point above your level to discourage you from trying to kill them.

Once we get closer to the Wyvern’s Den, there’s a side path with some mushrooms. These are actually the equivalent of those prop clovers, only for the next area after Cloudcoil Canyon.

You might think the Wyvern’s Den is a dungeon, but it’s actually just a boss arena. In the pre-arena room, near the save point, there’s another higgledy stone. I picked up the item it wants in a chest near Crookneck Cavern, and it’s an element we don’t have, so we might as well grab it.

This one is dark-elemental, which we’ll need to power up a couple of Roland’s attacks down the line.


Before we go in, I un-equipped the best sword off Roland and put it on Evan. You might ask why I didn’t bother equipping three weapons: that’s because zing is fucking useless once you gain the ability to use higgledies to charge attacks… and because I primarily use Roland in combat and the AI doesn’t tend to use zing very often even when it has it available.

Roland, on the other hand, gets a new gat that has a higher damage rating than anything else we’ve found so far. This is what we want, because the AI will spam ranged attacks like crazy in the upcoming boss fight.

I’m pretty sure this arena (and in fact this whole area) was ripped out of Nausicaa, but I can’t prove it because I’ve never actually seen that movie.

Oh look, it’s the Bell Gargoyle. By the way, I’d like to mention that at this point, I had fucked up and forgotten to set the difficulty back to normal mode. Why is this important? We’ll find out in a bit.

The boss begins the fight by flying upward like a coward.

He then summons a bunch of lower-level wyverns to make this game hell for speedrunners. These go down fairly quickly - I took this shot I think two or three seconds into the fight, and even with Roland having the second-best equipment he still nearly killed one before I did anything.

On normal mode, this is a fairly easy fight - the boss mostly attacks by running around in circles swinging his axes. The obvious strategy is to get behind him and spam light attacks… though he is capable of turning pretty quickly and can hit some of the area behind him. This, by the way, is the special for most of the wind-elemental higgledies. In case you’re curious, the reason Evan’s HP is so low is because I took uh… maybe two attacks from the boss?

The reason I gave Evan the best sword is because he learned a new ability at level 10: Flurry. If you’ve played Devil May Cry, it’s basically a renamed Stinger, complete with that “Breakdown!” strike at the end which does a pretty significant chunk of damage. Flurry is a crit machine, but it has an extremely long animation and leaves Evan totally vulnerable until that animation is complete.

At 25% HP or so, the boss flies up again and does the “drop trash mobs on you” strat. This does not end well for said trash mobs.

Once the boss came back down, I happened to get the dark-element higgledy’s attack to go off. This just straight-up creates a black hole that hits for a large amount of damage. I believe this one hit for 190, when most of Evan’s attacks are still in the mid double digits.

A few Stingers later and the boss explodes, boosting both Evan and Roland to level 11. This, by the way, is why we don’t do bosses on extreme: not only do they become extremely damage spongy, but their drops are fixed regardless of difficulty.

This is the armor the boss dropped. I went through my save from my first run and confirmed that it’s exactly the same drop. Compared to the difficulty-boosted armor drops, this thing is hot garbage.

Evan Pettiwhisker - human footstool.

Evan: “Little boy?! You can’t be much older than me!”

Tani: “Heh heh! Alright, keep your hair on, umm…?”

Evan: “Evan. My name is Evan.”

Roland: “And I’m Roland.”

Tani: “Evan and Roland, eh? Well, thanks for coming to the rescue! I didn’t have either of you down as the reckless type, but you must be to have come here.”

Tani: “Speaking of which, why didn’t that grizzled old coward Batu come down here and get me himself?”

Evan: “We made an agreement: in return for securing your freedom, he promised to grant us safe passage to the King’s Cradle.”

Tani: “Really? He said that? Ha! I knew it!”

Evan: “I most certainly do not!”

Tani: “You most certainly do, too! It’s like you can both see something… that no one else can…”

Tani: “Yes, boss! Sorry boss!”

Batu: “Evan, lad! Ye were as good as yer word, so I shall be as good as mine - ye may pass freely through the canyon!”

Evan: “Thank you very much, Chief Batu!”

Roland: “One step closer to the King’s Cradle, huh?”

Tani: “So you really are serious about going then? To the cradle?”

Evan: “Yes!”

Tani: “Well, the quickest way there is to fly, of course… but what are you going all the way up there for?”

Batu: “This one here’s set to hook himself a Kingmaker, an’ become lord o’ the whole wide world, don’t ye know!”

I only included this shot because Tani’s face looks like someone is dangling a donut off a fishing pole just off-camera and she’s trying to eat it without using her hands.

Tani: “Blimey! You have some pretty big ideas for such a pipsqueak.”

Tani: “Well, you’ll only end up getting lost if you go off on your own… alright, I’m coming with you!”

We now have our third party member… who also happens to be the absolute worst character in the game. Strangely enough, we won’t see her in combat until after the next update, as there are no random encounters between this cutscene and the King’s Cradle unless you purposely go back into Cloudcoil Canyon to grind.

Skipping ahead a bit, we can head down to the bottom level and finally get this story on the road. Just before we take off, though…

An overprotective anime dad re-appears.

Batu: “But there’s not a soul been to that cradle and made it back unscathed. If she comes home with as much as a scratch, I’ll have yer hide, understand?”

Evan: “Y-yes, Chief Batu! We’ll be very careful. Tani will be safe with us, I promise.”

I said the same thing back when I was a teenager. Ah, the memories of taking my horrible anime love interest to a dungeon so I could summon a 50-foot-tall hellbeast to conquer the world for me.

This story is kinda boring, so I’m just going to start making up my own. Once, there was a janitor who worked in the same office building that Hayao Miyazaki rented out when they were producing Nausicaa, back in the early '80s. The janitor’s name was Fred, even though this is in Japan so that would make no sense. Fred worked at the same building until 1998, after Princess Mononoke was released.

Thirty years later, Level 5 wanted to rip off Ghibli without actually paying the exorbitant amount of money they paid for the first Ni no Kuni, so they hired anyone even remotely connected to Ghibli to do character and environment design. Fred had always been friends with some of the lesser animators, and he even did some art on the side, so he was a shoe-in for a position on their new game.

Fred was happy with his six-digit salary working at a job where all he did was draw a bunch of blatant Mononoke ripoffs, but was a little concerned about how all his boss wanted him to do was ape someone else’s style. One day, he went to his manager and voiced his concerns.

There is literally no angle at which Tani does not look horribly deformed.

Fred’s told his manager, “Boss, aren’t we ripping off Mononoke a little too much? Can’t we, I dunno, come up with something original? Wouldn’t that be better?”

Fred’s manager looked at him, befuddled. “But that might actually require us to hire animators who could do something other than rip off Miyazaki… nah, fuck it, we’re ripping off Mononoke too much. Start ripping off Nausicaa instead.”

And that’s how this cutscene came to be.

Anyway, next update, we’ll go into the King’s Cradle and witness as the game rips off both Sonic 2006 and Gravity Rush 2 at the same time.

Update 10: Boy Sampson

So, Batu warned us that the King’s Cradle is so dangerous that no one who has come here has ever returned. Clearly, we should be ready for a boss fight on this massive staircase, because that is absolutely something the early Final Fantasy games would’ve done.

Any second now, we’re going to have some big, dumb-looking boss swoop down from the skies and…

Okay, maybe not on the big staircase. Maybe it’s on that OTHER staircase. Definitely.

Nope, no bossfight. That would be giving this game more credit than it deserves. Instead, we get a 15-second or so walk up to the Cradle with absolutely nothing on the way there.

Evan: “Yes… if we can prove ourselves worthy.”

When I heard this line for the first time, I was absolutely prepared for a time skip or something, like how in Ocarina of Time Link isn’t ready to wield the Master Sword when he’s a kid. Like, we’d just walk up to that Shenron ripoff in the back and get told “Nah kid you’re like, ten years old and ten year olds are horrible kings, come back in ten years” but that’d be good writing.

So here we are. There’s nothing else here apart from the giant statue in the back, so let’s check it out.

Evan: “What’s this?”

Roland: “Talking statues?! What’s next?”

Roland is immediately fascinated by a statue that could easily just be a speaker and some LEDs.

Wait a second… this isn’t going to be like that moment in Sonic 2006 where they had Sonic do stupid trials as filler, is it? (that’s exactly what this is)

So here we are, in… a blatant ripoff of the final chapter of Gravity Rush 2, a game that not only did this same thing better but also had better music. By the way, go fucking buy that game and play it because it’s a hundred times better than this trash heap even with the online disabled.

Anyway, now that we’re here, the first thing we want to do is check that glowing pedestal. There’s an overly long tutorial thing for this, but I’ll explain it as we go. Essentially, there’s three rooms. Each one has one of these book pedestals at the start. Instead of a gravity block puzzle, we get a thing where we have to make an Euler circuit (that’s doing a circuit around a room without ever doubling back) and hit checkpoints to match the story.

Here’s the first story. Now, you might ask me, “Hey Timrod, is this foreshadowing for the rest of the plot?” and the answer is no. I have absolutely no fucking idea what this is supposed to be. It SOUNDS kind of like the plot to the first game, only it clearly isn’t because the main villain of the first game was the white witch.

We can press Z to get an overhead view of the maze. The little blue spheres are “bonus orbs” that award items if you pick them up and complete the puzzle on the same run. We can also hit Tab to reset the puzzle. The blue sigil thing will warp us back to the Cradle. So yeah, hard to see how anyone died here.

Stepping on a tile causes it to fall as soon as you step off it, and we need to make a complete circuit, touching those three yellow circles in order. However, this one has a bit of a twist… we need to turn the orange statue to face the red one. What I’ll do is post the solution in the overhead view first, then the screens of what the stuff looks like up close.

It’s hard to see from this angle, but the “fairy” statue looks a little like Drippy from the first game. But again, there was no dragon in the first game as far as I know.

After each segment, the game will ask you if you want to move forward just in case you didn’t grab all the bonus orbs. I honestly shouldn’t have bothered, because the rewards are uh… a soreaway, a “strong sixth censer” which restores MP and is useless, and a leather armor that is okay if you’re playing on normal, but we’ve already got better stuff on extreme.

Once the puzzle is solved, all of the floor tiles spring back up and the door at the end opens.

So again, this isn’t foreshadowing. We’ll actually have six party members by the end of the game - and none of them are a wizard or a bard of any kind.

So as you can see, this statue looks nothing like anyone in the party.

The pistolier looks nothing like Roland either. For finishing this puzzle and collecting all the orbs, we get a wand for Evan that does about half the damage of Roland’s gun, a three-leaf soreaway, and another sixth censer. Three-leaf soreaway is basically a hi-potion, and we won’t be able to buy those until way later in the game.

With a name like Mornstar, I’d suspect the kid is actually the Demifiend and this is an allegory for Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne.

This last puzzle is so large that I can’t actually show the solution on one screen… and actually, I can’t because I forgot to take overhead shots after rotating the dragon statue. The idea is that you start on the left, and then use the switches to turn the dragon.

Now we face the second part… the boss fight that really isn’t much of a boss fight. I also may or may not have accidentally forgotten to set the difficulty back to normal. Whoops.

Thogg is a normal, if somewhat rare, enemy type. They’re almost exactly like the Porcs in Cloudcoil Canyon - high HP but very slow. Thankfully, I left the best equipment on Evan… though the game is nice enough that you can warp out and get stuff off Roland if you have to.

The Thogg only has three real attacks, the first of which is a series of slow punches while moving forward in a line. This makes it very vulnerable to Flurry.

The second is a charge attack that fires off a large projectile. It’s easy to avoid because it’s telegraphed for upwards of 5 seconds, and you can stun him out of it using a zing-powered attack (since we don’t yet have the right higgledies to power up Evan’s attacks).

Finally, it has a flying tackle that does a lot of damage and has a very wide hitbox. Most of the damage I took in this fight was from this attack, because even rolling usually isn’t enough to avoid it if you’re in the line of fire.

The best tactic for this fight is simply to stay behind Thogg at all times and use Flurry when he finishes his punch combo or charges up his projectile. You’ll notice that Roland and Tani both levelled up despite not being in the fight at all - that’s because this game works like Final Fantasy 7 in that even characters not in your party gain EXP from fights… albeit at a reduced rate.

Speaking of, both of them get warped in just in time for…

Oh man, I can’t wait to get a 50-foot-tall murderbeast in the party.

No, instead, we get this fucker. This is Lofty. He is, as you will soon learn, the worst character in this already mediocre game. I mean, he’s that Boy and Mom Sampson costume in pseudo-Ghibli style.

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Part of what makes him so annoying is his appearance, but also the fact that he has a stupid “low British” accent that makes his text annoying as hell to transcribe. Thus, I’ll be doing as little of that as possible. If I could somehow edit the screenshots to pretend Lofty doesn’t exist, I would.

So anyway, he confirms that he is indeed Evan’s Kingmaker, and gives us permission to build a kingdom… but first, we need to make a “kingsbond” which is basically a Pact straight out of Drakengard… with the unfortunate side effect of not being as cool as it was in Drakengard. What I’m saying here is that I was fully hoping that this would lead to a darker future in which Evan becomes a Caim-like figure and starts out by throwing Lofty into a meat grinder.

My canon explanation for why this scene sucks is this. Actually, I’ll just write another fanfic. Fuck this game.

So one day, Fred gets assigned to work on the storyboard for this segment of the game. He looks at his folder of concept art, and realizes that really, this is just that one part from Sonic 2006. So Fred goes to his boss.

I love Roland’s smug-ass grin, as if even he realizes how dumb this scene is.

“Boss,” Fred says. “This scene makes no goddamn sense! Why did Oakenhart let Mausinger use a sword to swear the oath over, but Lofty forces Evan to use a twig? We could’ve had a really neat mechanic where the player chooses a weapon and has it grow as they develop their kingdom!”

“No,” says his boss. “That would make this game far too original. We’re doing the 4Kids thing and keeping the stick.”

“Well,” Fred replies, “we could at least do a thing where the stick sprouts leaves and a flower, like they did in Okami with Susano’s sword. I mean, people fucking loved the art direction in that game and I’m sure I could-”

“No,” says his boss. “Just draw a scene where they both look really constipated and add some lighting effects in post.”

As shit as Lofty is, he does give us one very important item: the Tactic Tweaker. Remember how in the last update I said farming for the better gear that playing on Extreme gets you was pointless at the time? This is the item that will make farming for gear work.

This is it right here. Each time a character levels up, you get a number of “battle points” - I’m not sure what determines how many you get or if it’s even random at all. The tweaker is divided into four sections, each of which can be levelled up using battle points to allow you to move the bars further from their starting positions.

The top-left quadrant is for “monster affinities”. Every monster in the game is divided into one of six types, and moving the bars allows you to do more damage to monsters of that type.

Next up is the top-right “elements and ailments” section, which is purely for defense. Status effects in this game are few and far between: I think in a complete playthrough, I only saw maybe a handful of them late into the game. The other side of each bar corresponds to an element, and reduces elemental damage taken. This actually IS useful, but is not a top priority.

What we’re interested in right now, especially with the difficulty-boosted drops, is the bottom-left quadrant. This segment is all about drop manipulation, and contains four categories that can only be levelled up once each. I first unlocked this one, Cash vs. Kit, for 5 points and naturally set it to “kit” because money is useless in this game.

I then levelled up this one for 10 points. We’ll be setting this to EXP because again, money is useless.

Finally, I spent 15 points to level up this bar, which we’ll be setting to maximum equipment droprate. High-end crafting materials are used for certain sidequests later in the game, but crafting itself is as useless as money.

Shortly afterward, we’re warped back to the sky pirate base… where we’ll pick up next time, when we get introduced to yet another mechanic we will see once and then never, ever touch again.

Update 11: The Plot Climbs Mount Dumbass

So we’re at a point when the plot is about to go straight up Mount Dumbass to Dipshit Peak.

Batu: “And by the look on yer face, ye didn’t come home empty-handed!”

Evan: “No. This is my Kingmaker, Lofty.”

Batu: “Arr… is it indeed?”

Lofty: “OY MATE I’LL HOOK YA ONE RIGHT IN THE GABBER SWEAR ON ME MUM MATE”

So yes, Batu has gone from “Oh hey this kid showed up time to make like a North Korean dictator and execute him” to throwing Evan a feast because he brought Boy Sampson back with him.

I’d like to imagine that Fred went to his boss at this point and was like “Boss, we already have a ton of cutscenes. Couldn’t we just… you know… show them feasting rather than just having a text screen?”

His boss replies “What are we, Naughty Dog? We don’t have the budget or the talent for that, get back to ripping off Nausicaa.”

Evan: “Y-yes?”

Batu: “Well now. There’s a thing. I see something in ye. And I’m not the only one.”

So yes, the plot just reached Dipshit Peak and is raising the celebratory flag. Batu and all of the pirates, who I remind you again were ready to execute a ten year old boy for no reason, now decide to swear their eternal loyalty to him after knowing him for maybe a day.

Oh boy, another cutscene for morons!

Evan: “I am! It happened just as you said it would! I met lots of new people, and made lots of new friends.”

My theory here the first time I played it was that the blue-haired kid really is a Watcher and was using cthonic runes or something to mind control the pirates so they can later feed the giant pregnant demon lady and her flying demon babies in Ending D.

I took a photo of me flipping off this screen but I think it got deleted. Oh well.

Batu: “Now, that’ll be an awful pain in the neck, won’t it? Why, ye could just raid a village somewhere, use that as yer base…”

Roland: “We’re not pirates, understand? Anyway, if we’re going to build a kingdom, we’re going to need a good spot. Location is everything.”

I swear to god, the first time I read this I thought Roland was going to pull what the author of Fables did when he had Bigby spend no fewer than three full pages talking about his views on Israel. That’s an actual thing, by the way.

Roland: “The only way for it to grow is to put itself somewhere out of harm’s way. Anywhere else, and you’ll be overrun before you know it.”

He acts like this is something he actually has experience in.

Tani: “So what kind of place do we need to look for, then?”

Roland: “Someplace difficult to invade, for sure. And with plenty of natural resources. If you’ve got both, you have a chance. Someplace like…”

So yes, there is apparently an area of the world that is perfect for settling… and no one has done it yet.

We’re now in Chapter 3, where we’ll begin Evan’s master plan to conquer the world.

Roland: "Can we fly there?’

Batu: “Well now, it ain’t exactly that we can’t fly there, but it’s the winds o’ Cloudcoil Canyon that set the ol’ sky-skimmers a-soarin’, see. Beyond the bounds o’ the valley, things can get a mite… hairy.”

Evan: “I… see. I think I’d prefer to walk.”

Batu: “Goin’ by land ain’t necessarily much the safer, lad. There’s a gaggle o’ bandits been botherin’ folks down around the ruins there as of late.”

So, someone on Twitter pointed this out because it wasn’t something that I really thought about at the time, but Batu implies that there are already people living in the Heartlands, and…

Roland: “Bandit versus pirates, huh? Sounds like quite the showdown.”

Minus twenty points from Roland, no stupid meme references on my watch.

Tani: “Yeah, and it won’t be pretty.”

Batu: “Then we’ll have to go mob-handed! We’ve a couple o’ halfway decent leaders o’ men among our number.”

So yes, Evan is about to raise an army to go conquer the Heartlands and kick out the existing inhabitants to claim it as his own… so that he can create a world without war where everyone can live happily ever after.

Posting that video was practically obligatory.

KhunbishDingus: “BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE FEED THEIR SOULS TO SLAANESH! WE DO IT FOR CHAAAOOSS!”

We also have Gerel join in. Gerel is actually not part of Evan’s army - she’s the item store owner in the pirate base, and is going to be our first completely willing and not at all forced on the pain of death and the execution of everyone she has ever loved citizen of the new kingdom.

And, in addition…

We also get Batu! I’m going to end this update before we actually reach the pointless minigame section coming up, because it’s time to decide who our party is going to be.

Right now, we have Evan, Roland, Tani, and Batu. As much as I hate Tani, both Evan and Roland use swords… and usually, it’s more efficient to have no more than one party member using a given weapon type at the same time. However, I’m going to let the audience decide.

On my first playthough, I used Evan, Roland, and Tani up until I got a different party member that we won’t be seeing for… probably another 50% of the game.

Tani uses spears, which typically have a lower attack rating than swords but have different specials that usually focus on ranged attacks. She shares a ranged weapon type with Batu - both of them use bows - but that’s not as big of a difference.

Batu, on the other hand, is a hammer user - hammers have the highest attack rating of all melee weapon types, but are also incredibly slow and leave the user wide open to attacks. They’re hell to play as, especially on extreme, but not terrible as party members.

Tani has a bunch of skills that are very difficult to screen capture. She’s the only party member capable of stealing items - though even with items to boost her success rate she’s still pretty bad at it and there’s no good unique steals like in the earlier Final Fantasy games. Interestingly, both of her weapon skills use her bow rather than her spear. One of them fires an AOE explosive arrow, while the other fires a piercing arrow that hits all enemies in a line.

Her spear also has a wide, sweeping arc that can hit flying creatures from the ground.

Batu, on the other hand, only has one useful weapon skill - I have absolutely no idea what his second one does. His weaponskill is… if you’ve ever played DOTA2, it’s Juggernaut’s ultimate. He spins in a circle with his hammer, doing damage to anything caught in the arc.

I’ll leave this up so people can vote on party members. In the meantime… I’m going to need to grind a bit offscreen. You’ll see what I mean.

Evan needs to get used to delegation, so I vote Roland, Tani, and Batu.

Well, there’s only one vote, but it’s the one that counts. We’re going with Roland, Batu, and Tani… right after this update, that is. It won’t matter for this update, and you’ll understand why pretty soon.

Update 12: Pointless Side Mechanics

We’re back outside the pirate fortress again. This time, instead of going to the right (which leads us down to where the wyvern boss was) we’re going to head to the left.

This is largely uneventful… except for this chest here. These blue chests are special - we can’t unlock them until we have a spell that we probably won’t have for another… well, let’s just say several hours of grinding several updates from now. In any case, even once we have that spell we don’t necessarily want to go hunting these down right away because there is a MUCH easier way to do it later on.

From here on out, we’ve unlocked “skirmish battles”. If you’ve played any of the Suikoden games, you probably remember the “strategy battles” that used your party members as units in a turn-based strategy mode. Skirmish battles are to those what Tetra Master in Final Fantasy 9 was to Triple Triad in Final Fantasy 8. By that, I mean it’s a side mechanic that has absolutely no effect on the main game whatsoever.

Skirmish battles look like this on the map - they’re a raised battle flag that glows as you get close. They’ll always have a name and a recommended level that are shown before you go in… but ultimately, that doesn’t matter for reasons I’ll explain as we go through this horribly thought out side mode.

Each skirmish starts out like this, with an overview of the map (all skirmishes take place on the world map with minor alterations) and a count of your units versus theirs. This is not accurate at all: most skirmishes have more than one stage, and this only shows the enemies in the first stage. The numbers next to the crossed swords are “military might” - basically your army’s HP.

Our opponents are some dipshit bandits in masks.

Skirmishes work a little differently than a normal RTS. Evan (and it will always be Evan leading the army even if he’s not in the party) can have up to four units orbiting him. We start with two: a unit of swordsmen and a unit of archers. In addition, there are hammer and spear units as well as gun and wand ranged units.

In battle, Evan has no direct control over his army, other than that we can rotate their positions. On paper, this is because of unit type matchups. In the top-right, you can see the matchups for melee: swords beat hammers, hammers beat spears, spears beat swords. I don’t know what the matchup chart is for ranged weapons because they’re all weak to melee and at high levels skirmishes tend to devolve into you getting surrounded by clusterfucks of units and the whole type thing goes out the window.

There’s also a fourth melee unit type that isn’t officially named but that I’ve termed “crap” - it’s a weapon type only NPCs have that is weak to everything. These guys we’re fighting here are all crap units.

I’ll post the tutorial for this mechanic because it’s something that’s hard to see if it’s not on video: the “might gauge”. This bar automatically refills over time and can be used to either make your units sprint or to make your units attack harder. Most of the time, we want them to be attacking harder. This also helps ignore the whole type matchup thing: if you’re using the might gauge, type matchups go out the window.

So, one of the main problems with this mode is that the AI is absolutely godawful, especially on the ranged units. See these palisades? Palisades register as enemy units: the enemy won’t attack them even if they’re in the way, but at the same time, your ranged units will lock onto them and will keep going until all those walls are down.

I should also mention that the number of soldiers in each unit is kind of like an HP gauge: as they take damage, you’ll lose soldiers and need to spend military might to replace them. The soldiers do not, however, stay near their unit leaders. When I went through this part, I had a single archer stick to the fences and just keep shooting them while the rest of his unit was halfway across the map.

At the top of the hill is more crap and two gun units. Typically, we want to engage ranged units first, since they’re a lot more effective for the AI than they are for us: when the AI uses them, they typically run off on their own while you’re busy fighting off the melee units.

Behind all of the crap units, we run into Stage 2, where this asshole comes in. Apart from being named after a character from NieR, this asshole shows up for his own line of uh… probably six skirmish battles.

We also get the final weapon in our arsenal: special tactics. These absolutely suck, as they cost military might that is better spent on replenishing our ranks and don’t do a whole lot of damage even when they hit.

Chingis (the sword unit leader) can call in the weird Nausicaa planes to do a bombing run. Wait, didn’t these assholes say that the planes don’t work outside Cloudcoil Canyon? Anyway, the bombing run isn’t that big and doesn’t do a whole lot of damage. Khunbish (the archer leader) has a stun that works in a small AOE that would be decent if he was a melee unit, but he isn’t.

You might be asking what’s stopping us from just pulling a Resident Evil and running past everything until we get to the boss. The answer is these gates, which won’t open until all the enemies nearby are dead.

Next up, we have siege towers. Siege towers do (as far as I can tell) a fraction of the damage an archer unit does but have a bit more HP. They’re usually pretty harmless - most of the time, we can just kite the melee units away from it and then deal with it later (or run past it.)

We did lose a bit of military might killing off all the cannon fodder, but there’s usually pickups hidden around the map. Destroying the tower dropped a “medium” boost that more or less restored all of the might we lost getting to it. You might notice the white flag in the middle: enemy structures can be rebuilt for military might, though this isn’t something we typically want to do because of how useless towers are.

Here, we run into the second type of enemy structure: the command post. Command posts will spawn units as long as they are up: though they won’t start spawning until at least one unit is dead - in other words they’re limited to how many they can have out at once. In this tutorial battle we can’t rebuild them, but in regular skirmishes we can. They add a small amount of military might every few seconds and are usually not worth it because it takes a while just to pay off what you spent to rebuild them.

Before we move on to the final stage of this battle, we get a tutorial about shock tactics. This is a bar that builds up as Evan’s army kills things, and once full causes your units to always be effective against all enemy unit types and slows down how fast the might gauge goes down. If you combine this with the “all-out attack” feature of the might gauge, you can do a lot of damage very quickly. So clearly, we need to activate this and…

Actually, there’s no real reason to activate shock tactics here, as all of Tyran’s units are hammers and thus already weak to swords. In addition to that, there’s a tiny little oversight that will allow us to win this fight without taking damage. Not that we need to - I just found this amusing.

So, remember how I said that the palisades count as enemy units, and thus the enemy will not attack them? They won’t attack them… but they’ll still try to attack you if they can see you, even if they do not have a clear path to actually reach you.

Naturally, we just stand on the raised ground just to the right of the palisades - keeping our archers outside of the range where they can attack them. They CAN, however, still attack the units on the ground, and due to an exploit in the way the projectiles work, they can reach Tyran while the wand units on the ground cannot reach them because arrows can arc and fireballs cannot. I went and got a drink and the fight was over when I got back, with no soldiers lost.

Easy money. Our units both level up to 3, which is great because this is the last time we’ll be using them. This is, as far as I remember, the only required skirmish battle in the game… and even if there wind up being one or two more, we’ll have units with better abilities later on.

One final note on these by the way: skirmishes are scattered all over the world map and vary wildly in level: there’s one that spawns not far from where this one ends that is level 20. The trick is that if you’re underlevelled for a skirmish battle, you can simply go in, let your units kill a few things to level up, and then lose. Your units keep any levels they gained even if you game over… so you can just keep grinding those for like half an hour and you’ll be at level 20.

We do get some small crafting material rewards, but nothing too unique. I also went ahead and changed the party over. We’ll stop here, since next update is going to start with a cutscene.

Update 13: What Natural Resources?

Welcome to the Heartlands, where we are about to be sent on a nonsense quest that has no reason to exist other than to advance the plot. I’d like you to notice in these shots that there are a whole bunch of trees in this grassy steppe we’ve taken over.

All hail Evan, king of what is basically a hobo camp in the middle of nowhere.

Roland: “But we can’t live in tents forever. We’ll need to think about putting something more permanent in place. And for that, we’ll need natural resources.”

Well that’s great! We’ve got all those ruins you could probably repurpose for worked stone, and trees all over the place.

Evan: “Ah yes, building materials.”

Roland: “Right. Some high-quality wood would be a start.”

Great! We’ll just send Batu out to chop some of these trees down and get a lumber mill going and…

… What. The ENTIRE REASON you built here was because of the natural resources! There are trees literally all around you!

Tani: “You can’t just go chopping down trees willy-nilly! What do you think Niall will have to say about that?”

Roland: “I’m guessing he’s the owner of this forest?”

Tani: “Yes. He’s the leader of the greenlings - they’re the creatures who live there. Nothing happens in his woods without his permission.”

I mean, we do have an army here… and a pile of corpses rotting probably several hundred feet away. What’s a few more corpses for the pile? Raise the army, boys!

Evan: “Then we must go and speak with him. I’m sure he’ll give us his blessing if we explain the situation.”

Batu: “Ha! Ye’ve clearly not met Niall, lad! He’s an incurable old skinflint. Tighter than a hangman’s noose, he is. Ye’ll get nothing out of him for free, mark my words!”

So yes, we just built a kingdom in a spot where we apparently do not have access to the materials needed to actually build the kingdom.

Now we’re off to the Forest of Niall, which is a bit of a walk from our hobo encampment. In the meantime, since all the images for this update up to this point were actually taken when I was doing the prior update, I’d like to talk about something I just saw, namely the announcement about DLC for this game.

Ni no Kuni 2 launched with a Season Pass for DLC, which I absolutely did not buy. The game has been out for almost five months and only just had an announcement about it: essentially, most of the DLC is costumes and a single dungeon that’s coming out sometime this winter, with the actual story DLC not coming out until probably March or April of next year. Hopefully, I’ll be long since done with this game by then, but if not, don’t expect me to do the story DLC unless it’s really, really good.

I had to reload this area a few times to get through it. You might notice that Goo enemy is level 15 - Tani is only level 9, and Roland and Batu are both 12. I was getting oneshotted by common enemies and the game was being really stingy with weapon drops.

There’s also a new enemy type not far from the new kingdom - the Manitcore. I got these things confused with Wyverns: these are the enemies that are always encountered alone and have boss HP bars. Note that I was dumb enough to do this one on extreme. They aren’t QUITE so instakill happy on Normal, though they still do a ton of damage.

Their main attack consists of jumping a bunch and (on extreme at least) instakilling anyone who gets caught when they land.

They do have one weakness: they like to roar after their jump combo, which gives you a few seconds to hit them before they start instakilling your party again.

Thankfully, Boy Sampson dropped an Awakening Orb. It’s kind of hard to see due to the background, but they’re glowing yellow orbs that Boy Sampson will occasionally toss out in battle. There’s a way to raise his chances of doing it, but it’s not really worth the grind.

Collecting one of these before they disappear causes your character to temporarily go Super Saiyan, complete with a powerup cutscene.

You can see that my MP gauge is now replaced with a yellow bar - this is “awakening mode”. In this mode, special attacks do not cost MP and are guaranteed to knock down enemies. The problem is that I was playing as Batu, who only has one knockdown attack… which is at the very end of his spin attack that has an extremely long animation. It was kind of a miracle I was able to knock this thing down.

The final attack these assholes have is a charge-up followed by an AOE explosion that can and will instakill people.

At this point in the game, even after levelling to 13, Roland has about 550 HP. That attack just did 667 damage to him. The Manticore killed Tani with a jump attack not even seconds later.

Thankfully, its HP was low enough that I could just barely kill it before it started jumping again.

On our way to the forest, we find this fucker - this is called a tainted monster, and is basically a superboss. Unfortunately, even on Normal, we stand absolutely no chance against it.

This was ONE ATTACK from the boss.

Thankfully, shortly after, I found a weapon for Roland that was good enough to bring him to Batu’s level.

Welcome to the area just outside the Forest of Niall. There’s a couple of things here we won’t be seeing for some time. For right now, we’re going to take the most direct route we can to the forest.

This is where we start running into the first palette-swapped enemies: Grimchillas are upgraded Whamsters, and Sylphies are purple versions of those fairy enemies we fought in Cloudcoil Canyon. I grinded a bit here and got Roland and Batu up to level 15.

With this new sword, Roland does pretty respectible damage… for extreme mode.

The forest itself is just over there.

Tani: “That writing - those are the weird squiggles they use in Goldpaw, right?”

Roland: “Goldpaw?”

Evan: “It’s a kingdom on the other side of the forest. There are even more people there than in Ding Dong Dell.”

Right he is. The Forest of Niall is a dungeon, though we’ll only be seeing the first half of it right now. The route that takes us to where Niall himself is will allow us to bypass most of the enemies that spawn here, but there is a new (and highly annoying on expert) enemy type here. There’s a tainted one of these much later on that I don’t think I ever bothered to kill on my first run.

Meet the Mumshroom. If Dark Souls taught us anything, it’s that you should never fuck with sentient mushrooms unless you have a giant fuckoff greatsword or can hurl soul spears. Mumshrooms are immobile, and spend most of their time crapping out giant white spore balls.

Said spore balls do a shit-ton of damage if they hit, and also spawn these smaller mushrooms. The mumshroom also has an attack I wasn’t able to capture where they just kinda breathe at you that does some 500 damage on extreme.

Niall’s house is maybe two minutes across the map.

The dipshit cat is Floyd, who will eventually become Evan’s royal chef… once we actually have a kingdom.

If it were up to me, I’d stick this guy in idiot prison and just go on with the game.

We now have our second all-too-willing citizen. Floyd is one of the only citizens we’ll get for free, and also one of the most worthless.

Next time, we’ll visit Niall and head on to Goldpaw.

Update 14: Niall

Now that we’ve rid them of their Floyd problem, we can go in and see Niall.

Niall is basically the answer to the question, “What if Master Roshi was a Saibaman, and also Irish?”

Evan: “Um…yes.”

Niall: “Good luck with that, pal.”

Niall: “Next time, instead of sending some snotty wee urchin tae do his dirty work, tell yer king tae come and ask me himself, eh?”

I like how he can look down on Evan when he’s wearing what appears to be a pile of shit on his head. Seriously, tell me that doesn’t look like a cartoon turd.

Evan: “I… I am the king.”

Niall: “Oh, aye? D’ye think I was born yesterday? Nope. I’ll speak tae yer king and none other. And I’ll make no promises even then.”

Evan: “I said, I am the king!”

Roland: “He is. This is his Kingmaker right here.”

Lofty: [incomprehensible gurgling]

What he means is that Evan didn’t call him out on wearing a pile of shit on his head.

Evan: “You… you don’t see any of those things in me?”

In addition to being the worst character, it’s almost impossible to get a screenshot of Tani where she doesn’t look incredibly constipated.

Tani: “And now he’s trying to build a whole new kingdom! And it’s going to be amazing!”

Niall: “Crikey o’blimey! That’s a right auld tale! So ye’re tellin’ me ye’re young Evan? The lad t hey were sayin’ perished in the troubles over that way?”

Niall: “Well, that’s all well and good - I love a bit o’ drama as much as the next man - but I cannae give youse what ye need. Auld Puggie’s the one youse want tae speak tae.”

In voiceacting form, Niall’s VA actually manages to (mostly) keep the accent stable, but in subtitle form it sounds like he’s half Irish, half 1930s Chicago gangster.

Tani: “You mean Pugnacius? From Goldpaw?”

Roland: “Who’s that, exactly?”

So, as soon as we get to Goldpaw, you’ll learn that as much of a terrible and completely unrealistic idea as Evan’s new kingdom is, all of the other kingdoms in the world are even dumber.

Niall: “Aye, that’s the fella! Invited me over for a wee shake o’ the auld dice, and before I knew it, I’d lost ma shirt!”

Niall: “Now his flunkies are trampin’ through mah lovely wood, stickin’ nonsense on trees and tryin’ tae boot me out on mah behind, the heartless devils!”

Roland: “So, those things on the trees… they’re eviction notices?”

Evan: “Which means the Forest of Niall is now the Forest of Pugnacius.”

Batu: “I’ve a inkin’ ye’ve been biled, old-timer. The games over in Goldpaw’re said to be rigged to beggary.”

Sometimes I swear that there’s some sort of multi-million dollar industry revolving around the use of apostrophes, and said industry was paying the writers every time they used one in dialogue. Only way to explain why there’s so fucking many of them.

Niall: “Aye, that they are! Crooked as a dog’s hind leg, the lot of them!”

Roland’s expression here tells me that the first thing he’s doing when he gets back to the post-apocalyptic U.S. is having the Pentagon develop rigged dice so he can try to con the Italian government into wagering Rome on a dice game. Something tells me Italy would go for it.

Roland: “I have a proposition for you, Niall. We need wood- lots of wood. If we get you your forest back, will you give us what we need?”

Niall: “Are ye jokin’? If ye get me mah forest back, I’ll chop down the trees meself!”

After a little more dialog (which I’ll skip, but it’s basically Roland pretending to ask Evan for the okay) we’re off to Goldpaw.

Goldpaw is on the other side of the Forest of Niall. It takes… maybe five minutes to get there walking.

The area outside is shaped like a giant zen rock garden, and is filled with enemies. There are actually more than a few manticores in here, which we want to avoid because we’re playing on Extreme still.

Other than that, most of the enemies are the same things we’ve fought before. In fact, there are only two “new” enemies here - both are fire-themed recolors of enemies from the forest.

Apart from being a different element and doing more damage, they’re really not any different than the ones we’ve fought already.

We mostly want to avoid combat on the way in, because as far as I can tell, the game decides when to start dropping better equipment based on your progress in the story: the drops I got from the monsters on the way in were identical to the ones we were seeing even as far back as Cloudcoil Canyon, but once I got past the series of cutscenes we’re coming up to, the drops changed.

Also, I kind of played a ton of Monster Hunter World, and kept getting the controls confused, so there’s that too.

We also definitely want to grab this trip door - there are a number of sidequests that take place out in the giant zen garden later on.

Welcome to Goldpaw, the Chinese/Japanese fusion town populated entirely by dog furries.

Tani: “I heard Goldpaw was showy, but… blimey…”

Lofty: “Beautiful, en’t it? I have a feeling I’m gonna like this place!”

Roland: “So the government runs the casinos, huh? Guess we’d better go find Pugnacius.”

Roland immediately forms a plan to rebuild post-apocalyptic New York as a giant, government-run casino.

Evan: “Yes! I’m sure if we ask nicely, he’ll soon see sense and let Niall have his forest back!”

Evan: “Although, I’m not exactly sure where to look for him…”

Tani: “It’ll be the big castle-looking thingy up at the top of town there, wouldn’t it? That looks like where a Grand High Roller would live to me.”

Goldpaw is so large that it has trip doors of its own. I shit you not that when I was recording this, I actually thought to myself “Oh right I have to grab all of them so I can get the ones that lead outside” and then remembered that no, this is not Final Fantasy 14. Realistically though, we do want to grab all of these because Goldpaw is home to just over a third of all of the sidequests in this game.

We also run into our first restaurant - there’s one in every major city, though later on we’ll be able to make our own meals. These are basically the food buffs from Monster Hunter: you eat them and you get a timed buff. I honestly never used these at all during my first playthrough.

Also of note is the first real weapons shop in the game. Most of the time, stuff you buy from the store sucks, but I found a spear for Tani that doubled her damage, so I went ahead and got one of those.

Just north of the shops is the inn, which works like it does in any JRPG. I’m not sure why you’d ever use it, because in most cases it’d be cheaper to just heal with items.

There’s also the casino, which disappointingly does not allow us to gamble.

One final trip door before we reach our destination: the “Goddess of Fortune” statue.

Evan: “It sounds like a festival of some sort.”

Batu: “And what happens then?”

Tani: “You’re joking! How’s anyone meant to afford that?”

You know, it’s a wonder that Goldpaw has not yet collapsed from its own stupidity.

Roland: “Wow, that sounds… risky.”

You know, I can’t help but feel that somehow, this is kinda racist.

There are a lot of things I really don’t like about this scene, mostly because there’s something that should be in this scene that isn’t, and it kind of ruins the consistency of things.

Since I don’t have the ability to record, the die lands on five but then makes a very obvious jump to the six.

Next time, we’ll watch Evan spiral into a gambling addiction and find out the very obvious solution to this mystery.

Update 15: Stupidity In Action

Yes, yes it was. We now need to go attempt to meet with him, only…

There’s this asshole in the way.

Roland: “How about we play you for the chance to see him? Put the decision in the hands of the Mistress of Fortune.”

Now, if you’ll remember from all of one update ago, Batu said that all of the gambling in Goldpaw is believed to be rigged. In fact, Roland himself saw mere seconds ago that the die on the statue is rigged.

The game makes a big deal out of this - the guard all but tells us to go and save before we do anything.

For this point in the game, 1000 guilders is actually a fairly sizeable sum of money. Most enemies at this point are still dropping money in the single or low double digits. Right now, we have about 3000 guilders, but most of that came from chests or selling all of the junk equipment I picked up off-screen.

The game goes into a short explanation of how this works, but it’s basically a modified version of cee-lo, which you might’ve seen in Suikoden or Yakuza. In theory, the way it works is that this dipshit rolls two dice, and then Evan gets the chance to gamble on whether the sum of those two dice plus a third one will be greater than/equal to (“Red”) or less than (“Black”) 11. All 1s counts as Red, while all 6s counts as Black.

So, if this is your first time playing Ni no Kuni 2, you might think “Oh shit, this is going to be one of those Leisure Suit Larry moments where you have to play the slot machine to get enough money to actually finish the game and can game over on the slots”. That’s actually kind of how I thought, even though on the whole the game is generally not that much of a dick. The guard will actually repeat the rules if you ask.

Strangely, though, there’s no mention of what happens if the dice land on exactly 11.

Roland: “They seem fair enough. Slightly in our favor, if anything.”

Batu: “That’s a fine set o’ dice there, matey. They’ll be worth a pretty penny, I shouldn’t wonder.”

Anyway, he starts us off by rolling two dice.

At 7, we theoretically have a 50/50 shot at being right - a 1, 2, or 3 will make Black win, while a 4, 5, or 6 will make Red win. Now, we’ve already seen that the big statue is rigged. Care to guess what happens next? I picked Black, by the way.

The die comes up a one, and then in a very un-natural fashion the third die shifts back to six, causing us to lose. I couldn’t really capture it very well here, but we actually have to do this two more times. No, seriously.

Evan: “Oh no, we lost! Uh… might you consider playing another round?”

Now at this point, Roland, being the responsible adult in the party, should probably step in and stop the ten year old boy from gambling any more. But no.

Aaaaand… Evan’s already a gambling addict.

Roland: “What are you doing, Evan?!”

Lofty: “Go on, son! Waste all of Roland’s money on dice games! Slash his tires! Maim! Burn! Kill!”

The second time around, the guard will roll two ones. Naturally, you’d take the non-sucker bet that has a 5/6 chance of winning. Instead though…

Who would’ve guessed that a guy using loaded dice would… keep using the loaded dice to win? The game really hits you over the head with this. We actually do it one more time, and you can more or less guess how that goes.

This is actually a Lupin III plot, by the way. This entire section of the game rips off a lot from Lupin (which Hayao Miyazaki and some other Ghibli employees worked on before Ghibli existed).

Evan: “I’ll do it this time!”

Tani: “Seriously, Evan, are you a complete numbskull?! Give up!”

Evan: “Wh- but I’m doing so well!”

So now Evan gets tasked with stealing a diamond from some Chinese mafia guy who keeps it in a safe that has been eaten by a shark that lives in a skyscraper that gets pulled around Tokyo by helicopter. He spends the entire episode getting it, gives it to the dog, who pulls off his mask to reveal he’s actually Fujiko Mine in disguise. Evan then walks away and points out to Batu that he replaced the diamond with a diamond-shaped explosive. Fujiko loses the fake diamond in the breeze and it explodes on Zenigata, who was sitting in the sewers the entire time. Roll credits.

Batu: “Ten million?! Ye dog, ye! T’was only a thousand a minute ago!”

Evan: “W-we don’t have anywhere near that much!”

So yeah, this guy is just straight up playing Yu-gi-oh now.

So yeah, these little shits are called duebills, and even though we never saw a single one on our way into town, we’ll now see that most people in Goldpaw have one.

Roland: “So, about that dice game - I couldn’t help noticing something fishy about how the third die was moving.”

Tani: “You spotted it too! I was thinking the exact same thing.”

Evan: “Really?”

Batu: “Heh, I was so lost in the game there, it slipped me notice, I have to say.”

Roland: “It wouldn’t surprise me if there were more to that die than meets the eye.”

Batu: “The swab said they was special dice, only for bigwigs or somesuch, did he not?”

Evan: “If we could get our hands on one, we might be able to find some proof that he was cheating.”

Roland: “Why don’t we take a look at the casino? The government runs it, right? So it’ll be full of government employees - and dice.”

Tani: “Motion seconded!”

Evan: “Erm… thirded!”

I think what Roland is thinking of is his state department, since that would explain how New York got nuked with zero warning and without him having any idea who or why, but sure.

We now have a new objective. There’s a trip door right outside the casino, but I actually forgot to grab it on the way in. Even if we had it, it’d be locked right now.

So you might be asking “Isn’t this just a single really, really long cutscene?” and you’d be absolutely right. This entire scene from the point where we entered Goldpaw to where I saved after I took the screenshots for this update is about 40 minutes long. I’m going to skip the inside of the casino, because it’s just reiterating what we already know.

Evan: “And it seems they really are a little fishy…”

Batu just picks up the idiot ball and eats it. Seriously though, the game might as well be a VN at this point.

Tani: “… You didn’t, did you? Oh, you did, you big wally!”

Batu: “Gah! I couldn’t help meself! Stand by an’ watch while there’s fun to be had? That ain’t me way, girlie!”

Lofty: “Aaand how much did you lose exactly, if youell excuse me a little pry.”

Batu: “Oh, ah… mere pennies, little feller, mere pennies!”

Tani: “Pff. Well, let’s forget about our friend the genius here for a moment, shall we? There’s something I want to show you. I can’t do it here, though. Shall we take this somewhere a little quieter?”

The casino isn’t actually that far from the inn, but we can get there “instantly” after a load screen if we use the trip door.

Tani: “Heh, heh! Your favorite little scallywag only went and swiped herself a dice!”

Evan: “You mean you… stole one?”

Tani: “Pah! Stole, borrowed, whatever helps you sleep at night.”

For some reason, none of these shots turned out that great, but Tani shows us the mystery of the dice.

Basically, each side is a button that when pressed, causes the die to come up on that side.

Roland: “This is how they’ve been doing it, huh?”

Batu: “The scurvy mutt blockin’ our path to Pugnacius had the selfsame dice, so he did!”

Evan: “Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s go and tell him his secret is out!”

Roland: “He’ll just deny it. Besides, it’s better he doesn’t know that we have it for now.”

Lofty: “I see where youer goin’! Very crafty! I likes it.”

There’s a scene of Lofty mumbling with the party just before this, so that’s the context.

Next time, we’ll give the guard a taste of his own rigged dice game.

Update 16: Boy Sampson Strikes Again

Evan: “No, I’ve come to play another round.”

Evan: “Oh, I’m not losing this time! I’m counting on you, Lofty!”

Evan: “Red!”

Somehow, I have the distinct feeling that if Miyazaki had anything to do with this game, he would’ve absolutely vetoed this scene.

So yes, we are at grade school levels of juvenile at this point.

Tani: “How would we have done that, exactly? It’s yours! You rolled it!”

Tani: “Or are you saying you had some nasty little trick up your sleeve and it didn’t work?”

So yes, for those keeping track, we are still in cutscene land. At this point, the save I’m using for this is almost four hours in. Oh, and now we find out that Pugnacius has a grand vizier. Say, don’t you remind me of somebody?

Oh, right. In case you haven’t played Final Fantasy 14, that’s Lahabrea, the main villain of both A Realm Reborn and the Heavensward ex-pac.

Pugnacius: “Well, well. And what exactly is going on here?”

Interestingly, I don’t think we ever actually meet the vizier or learn his name other than this one text box.

Evan: “Master Pugnacius! How glad I am to meet you at last. We were sent here on urgent business from Niall!”

Tani: “Yeah, but your stupid gatekeeper tricked us into owing him a fortune, and he still won’t let us in!”

Roland: “Is this how Goldpaw treats its guests?”

Pugnacius: “Forgive my foolish underling. If my good friend Niall sent you, it can be no trifling matter. That much should have been plain.”

Pugnacius: “And to resort to base deceit? An unforgivable transgression. Your debts shall be annulled, of course.”

RIP annoying-ass bird. I find it kind of funny that he also gets rid of Batu’s, despite the fact that Batu got his from the casino rather than from the doorman.

Pugnacius’s castle is now open to us. There’s nothing here - just a hallway leading straight to the throne.

Evan: “We have come to ask that you return his forest to him.”

Pugnacius: “Ahh, but of course. He has sent you to beg for it on his behalf.”

Pugnacius: “And why would I simply return it? I won it from him in a game of chance. It was as fortune willed it.”

Roland: “Was it? We couldn’t help but notice how much cheating goes on in this kingdom of chance.”

This feels like it could be a Phoenix Wright case, with all these weird twists and turns.

Roland: “Huh?!”

Pugnacius: “Our friend outside may have been capable of base trickery, but the Mistress of Fortune? I think not.”

Batu: “So he wasn’t even playin’ with their pifflin’ casino dices?”

Evan: “No, the one we saw in the ceremony is much bigger.”

Roland: “That doesn’t mean someone couldn’t have messed with it.”

Pugnacius: “You would accuse our most sacred symbol of trickery? It is a preposterous idea. But you are welcome to examine Her if it please you.”

Pugnacius: “I would warn you to proceed with the utmost care when doing so - the people of Goldpaw will not take such an intrusion lightly.”

Roland: “Thanks. I think we’ll take you up on that.”

I’m going to skip a small bit of this cutscene because it has gone on for way too long.

Evan: “Have you found anything, Lofty?”

Lofty: “Nothin’ much, no. Unless you count the biggest flippin’ jumble of wards an’ charms an’ magic-repellin’ doodads as I’ve ever seen in my life!”

Lofty: “Other than that… wood’s nice, all smooth and shiny. Yeah, it’s quality stuff, this.”

Lofty: “Oy! Watch who youer callin’ a pet, pally-o!”

Evan: “Master Pugnacius gave us permission to look at the die and-”

Tani: “And make sure there’s no funny business going on!”

This old guy doesn’t seem very laid-back.

Roland: “It sure is. I’ll bet the statue must take some serious looking after. And that die, too.”

Long story short, we need to go back to the forest. I feel like this entire segment is way too long for what it is.

Thankfully, we can warp to just outside Niall’s chamber. The game is always nice enough that it will mark the closest warp point to whatever objective it is you have. You can even do this for sidequests… not that we have any.

Evan: “Umm, well… we didn’t manage to get your forest back quite yet…”

Roland: “But we did find out the game is rigged all the way to the top.”

Niall: “I knew it! The crafty wee roasters!”

Tani: “Now all we need is to get some proof that there’s funny business afoot with Lady Luck as well.”

Evan: “You haven’t noticed people from Goldpaw doing anything strange in the woods lately, have you?”

Niall: “Well, they were up to something toward the Auld Woods there, but to be honest there were so many of the beggars traipsing in and out, I couldnae keep track of 'em all.”

Roland: “Maybe that’s where they’re making the dice…”

Quicken Growth is another spell like the one we got in Cloudcoil Canyon. This one lets us make mushrooms into platforms.

On the way out, we can see that one of Niall’s idiots got scammed as well.

On the other side of Niall’s tree is this: a wall going over a convienient rift in the ground. Even without Evan in the party, Roland can cast the spell.

No, Evan, that’s called puberty and - oh, you mean the mushrooms.

The Auld Woods is actually a pretty sorry excuse for a dungeon. It’s really just a small maze with all of three groups of enemies inside, all of which we’ve seen before.

Near the end is a trip door and save point. If you ever decide to play this game yourself (please don’t) you’ll want to equip Evan with your second-best equipment even if you’re not using him, because we won’t have another chance to do it once we get past this point.

That’s what we’re looking for, the secret Goldpaw dice factory. One thing I don’t like in games is when an area is designed where there’s no reasonable way people could get through it - there’s an entire factory of workers back here who managed to cross that rift in the ground without casting quicken growth and going over it or leaving a bridge behind.

Evan: “So this is where they’re making the trick dice…”

Tani: “How shall we do it? Charge in shouting our heads off?”

Roland: “No. We can’t draw attention to ourselves. We need to slip in undetected and find out what they’re doing.”

I thought about this for a second, because logically there shouldn’t be cellphones or other electronic forms of communication in a medieval isekai realm, but then I remembered that they have tablets and social media.

Batu: “Hide yerselves! Some swab’s a-comin!”

Batu: “Arr, I’ve a mighty fine idea all of a sudden.”

So yeah, this is entirely ripped from 70s-era Lupin III, where this exact scene is something Lupin did at least once per episode. In the new series, not so much. Just try not to think too hard about the fact that Evan and Roland, who are both human, are trying to sneak into a factory belonging to a country where probably 99% of the permanent population are anthropomorphic dogs.

Evan: “Are you sure this will work?”

Batu: “Only one way to find out, lad. We’ll keep watch out here. Off ye go and sneak into that there dice factory!”

Next time, we’ll sneak into the dice factory, have a mini-boss fight, and then probably have our first real boss fight.

Update 17: A Trash Mini-Boss

There’s a really brief shot of a dog-man passing them by as they enter. It’ll be in the mini-boss video at the end.

Roland: “All right, we need at least two forms of proof. The first is some kind of evidence tying Pugnacius directly to the deception - some kind of documentary evidence would be ideal. The next is evidence of how they’re manipulating the dice. I’m guessing they’re not using magic.”

Roland: “Oh, there are ways. Where I’m from, we have a few different techniques for manipulating things from a distance. It wouldn’t surprise me if someone here developed something similar.”

You can’t see it here since I forgot to screenshot it, but this building is shaped like a Y.

I think you’re meant to just examine everything the first time you play, but it’s kind of obvious where the stuff is when you think about it. Also, have a shot of the one token human who works here so this entire facade kind of makes sense I guess?

The first branch of the Y has a rack of meticulously kept ledgers along with a signed “I DID IT” letter.

By “these”, Roland means the source code for this game, and by someone, he means “literally everyone at Level 5 except Fred.”

If you look at the minimap, you can see the other end of the Y where we found the letter. No points for creative level design here.

I feel like there’s a few different ways they could’ve done this part better - maybe had this area be a dungeon and scattered the items a bit better. But no, it’s just a Y. Let’s just leave this hole and go punch that stupid dog right in his-

Well, shit. This is why I said you want to equip Evan with your second-best (or best) gear before you go into the factory - we are required to use Evan and Roland for this fight.

Meet the Mossy Monument. This is essentially a mini-boss: we’ll encounter a bunch of them as regular enemies soon enough.

Now, those of you following the LP closely might realize I forgot to do one very important thing before fighting this boss.

That’s right, I forgot to take it off Extreme difficulty. Whoops. This enemy type is easily one of the most annoying in the game. Most of the time, it’s either doing a puncho combo or spinning around and punching shit, meaning that it is very difficult to get MP back.

I spent most of my time getting exploded until Roland and Evan died, at which point I quit out and reloaded on Normal.

Here’s a video of the Mossy Monument fight, not that anyone is going to watch it. After the fight…

Tani: “Looks like the people in the factory didn’t notice either. We got lucky there.”

Batu: “Well, did ye find yer precious proof?”

Evan: “Yes! We found the device Pugnacius uses to control the die’s movement!”

Batu: “Arr, that’s the stuff, lad! Now we can hang this swindlin’ dog out to dry!”

So, this is actually completely out-of-character for Roland, and I’m wondering if the writers added this in specifically to address how incompetent Roland looks as a leader.

Roland: “If it doesn’t go well for us, things could get ugly. And if they go really badly, you could be making an enemy of an entire nation. Are you willing to take that risk?”

Evan: “We have to give the people of Goldpaw their country back!”

Roland: “…You really are starting to sound like a king, you know that? All right, our leader has set out his policy… and now it’s time to implement it!”

Before we leave, there’s a Higglestone here that we can get fairly easily.

This gets us our first water-element higgledy, which is useful because it automatically applies a defense down debuff to all enemies. It absolutely sucks for anything else.

We might as well just warp right back to Goldpaw.

Evan: “Master Pugnacius! You have deceived Niall and your own people! The very people you’re supposed to serve!”

Pugnacius: “More wild accusations? And where is your proof, hmm?”

Pugnacius: “Did you find evidence of trickery? Some ingenious device hidden inside Lady Luck, perhaps?”

Roland: “Come on, you know we’re onto you. Why not drop the act?”

Pugnacius: “There is no ‘act’ to drop. I am innocent, as the Mistress of Fortune herself will attest.”

Pugnacius: “Hm. It sounds like a very fine idea indeed. Yes, this is the way of Goldpaw. All matters of state, be they legal, political, or otherwise, are decided by a roll of the dice.”

I know there have to be people at Level 5 who have played the Ace Attorney games, because that is more or less exactly what this sounds like, specifically Spirit of Justice on the 3DS.

Pugnacius: “Do you accept my terms?”

Evan: “We do!”

Next update, we’ll have ourselves a sham of a trial, followed by a sham of a bossfight.

Update 18: Primal Judgement

I’m back from vacation, and it’s time to dunk on this pile of garbage once again. We do get a confirmation prompt here, but what we’re about to enter is a sham of a bossfight that is almost impossible to lose even on Extreme.

So you might be asking, “If the idiots in Goldpaw use dice to decide everything, why the hell don’t they just roll and be done with it instead of having a long, pointless cutscene that is stacked onto 45+ minutes of solid cutscene with very minor gameplay interruptions?”

The answer is because Level 5 hates me, and by extension you.

Yeah, this isn’t totally just going to be a repeat of the last… how many cutscenes were there with the rigged dice? I want to say three.

Roland finds his purple suit that I’m pretty sure he discarded back at the beginning of the game. I should mention that I’m fairly certain we can unlock his suit as an outfit for him… but not until the very end of the game. Don’t ask me why he has it in the story if he can’t use it in battle: my guess is because Level 5 really wanted everyone to just forget the whole isekai anime thing.

Roland: “Because this is a court of law.”

I don’t know why Roland even bothers playing along.

Roland: “Further, I will show that he distributed devices among his accomplices which were used to carry out deception on a grand scale through the manipulation of dice rolls.”

Pugnacius: “I do not, have not, and will never engage in dishonest practices of any kind, and to accuse me of such is to defame my character and call my good name into question!”

Roland: “Perhaps you will permit those present to withhold judgment on the matter of your innocence until I have presented my proof?”

There’s a reason that Wright x Layton was absolutely the worst Phoenix Wright game, and that’s because Level 5 wrote it… at least, I’m pretty sure. Phoenix’s part in that was the only redeeming factor for what was otherwise trash.

Roland offers up the signed “I DID IT” letter.

Pugnacius: “B- What is the meaning of this!?”

Roland steals one of Phoenix’s poses which pisses me off because he is not even half the goddamn character Phoenix is. Phoenix Wright would’ve had this shit resolved two hours ago.

Roland: “Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the prosecution’s key exhibit: written instructions for the assembly of manipulable dice, clearly signed by Master Pugnacius.”

Pugnacius: “Only that my prior outburst was merely an expression of shock at the brazenness of this shameless act! I have never seen this document in my life!”

Pugnacius: “To stoop to the fabrication of evidence is a pitiful tactic indeed! It is a forgery, plain and simple.”

I’d also like to mention that the second worst Ace Attorney game was the one to use evidence fabrication as a plot point. At least Capcom clearly regretted ever making Apollo Justice a thing and gave him the whole Raiden treatment in Dual Destinies.

Roland: “Why don’t we let Lady Luck be the judge of that?”

Pugnacius: “By all means.”

So here is my entire problem with this scene. One, it’s a repeat of a scene we’ve seen twice already.

Two, it’s something we’ve seen already that is being tacked on to what is now well over an hour of solid cutscene.

Several seconds of the die jumping around later…

How absolutely none of the spectators surrounding the trial haven’t seen the remotes yet is beyond me.

Your brains! Something is wrong with your brains!

Roland: “The prosecution was able to visit the place where these devices are manufactured, and to procure one for its own purposes - namely the demonstration of this fraud.”

Pugnacius does the only thing he can do - begins banishing himself to the shadow realm.

What’s that up in the sky? I’ll tell you what it is - a blatant Final Fantasy 14 ripoff. Pugnacius has just summoned his Primal, because that is EXACTLY what the Kingmakers are.

Evan: “It’s their Kingmaker - Longfang!”

Batu: “He doesn’t look happy…”

Honestly, this is the part that made me question the entire purpose of the Kingmakers. If they’re not supposed to be anywhere near the city, what the hell is the point of their existence? You’d think that they’d be the equivalent of a nuclear deterrent, but… yeah.

You know, just once I’d like to see a story where the vizier isn’t evil.

I was honestly hoping that this guy was just going to rip Pugnacius’s heart out of his chest. This is Not-Lahabrea’s true form, with an outfit that looks so dumb that even Organization XIII would probably question it.

Seriously though, how does he even move with that stupid snake headpiece?

Longfang Discount Gamera is not pleased with this turn of events.

I feel like somebody should just put Longfang out of its misery. It’s so dumb-looking.

Evil Green Man makes a ball out of Pugnacius’s kingsbond and teleports away while smirking, because of course he does.

Meanwhile, Pugnacius is super fucking dead.

Oh, and Longfang is still here.

What you can’t see is Roland, who is now wearing a chef hat and basting Evan with a light gravy.

Sin number 38: how does a quadrupedal dragon bake anything? It doesn’t even have thumbs! This has been the CinemaSins presentation of Ni no Kuni 2.

We’ve been sent to The Fiddy Zone an “inter-dimensional dimension” to either kill Longfang or die.

Evan: “What!? Then we have to stop Longfang!”

I’m also not sure if I pointed this out, but Evan somehow knows a hell of a lot about Longfang for a kid who didn’t know much about Goldpaw when they first got there.

Lofty: “BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE! RIP! MAIM! TEAR!”

So yes, not only is there a term for out-of-control kingmakers, but apparently it’s so common that even Batu knows it. Makes you wonder how often this happens.

Boy Sampson then goes on about how we should hit the glowing goddamn weakpoint. There’s even not one but TWO tutorials about this. I’ll spare you.

If you’ve played FF14, you’re probably thinking “Wait, isn’t this just the Ifrit fight?” and you are absolutely right because that is exactly what it is, only more dumbed-down. Longfang starts the fight in the lava, outside of weapon range.

He’ll then get mad and start shitting out rocks from the lava pool. Ifrit does this exact thing in FF14 only they’re giant metal spikes.

Unlike Ifrit, we could theoretically do this battle without ever hitting any of the rocks - they’re destroyable once they hit the ground.

Each Kingmaker fight also has “higmakers” that hide in the boss’s destructible garbage. They can unleash a special ability (just like regular higgledies) once there’s enough of them around. For this fight, we could actually ignore them completely.

Since we have nothing better to do before Longfang opens up his weak point, I spent a few seconds smashing rocks to get higmakers so I could show off what they do.

Eventually, Longfang starts smashing the ground for no reason, opening up his weakpoint.

I remembered to turn the game back to Normal difficulty, so the party actually does pretty good damage against him.

Hitting his weakpoint enough causes Longfang to fall over, which opens up a second weakpoint: his face. Here, you can see Batu critting for over 400 damage.

I managed to get about 2/3 of Longfang’s health depleted in one cycle, which causes him to start his second phase: making giant geysers of flame sprout from the ground. They’re pretty harmless, though they will light people on fire if they get caught.

After a few more rock cycles, we have enough higmakers to use their special ability…

Said ability is completely worthless. The falling rocks are simple to dodge and don’t hit that hard. It would’ve been better to just keep rushing the weakpoint.

One more cycle, and Longfang is done for.

Next time, we’ll see what happens to Niall’s forest… and start the worst part of Ni no Kuni 2. Probably.

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.

Tani: “Phew! We’re back!”

Evan: “I suppose that means Longfang really has calmed down… for now, at least.”

Roland: “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.

Pugnacius: “My desire to lift my kingdom out of poverty became an all-consuming greed… that weakness made me vulnerable… and… he exploited it.”

Evan: “Who was he? The one that stole your Kingsbond?”

Pugnacius: “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.

Pugnacius: “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.

Pugnacius: “When did I fall under his spell… and how? How could I have allowed such a thing to happen?”

Roland: “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.

Roland: “Now we can finally start building our kingdom.”

Tani: “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.

Niall: “Stolen!? Jings, his kingmaker must be tearing the place tae pieces!”

Batu: “Aye, it wanted to, sure enough. But we taught it a little lesson it won’t soon forget. Goldpaw’s safe… for now.”

Niall: “Kingsbond-stealin’s no mean feat, though… he didnae happen tae be infusin’ things with an awful filthy fug, did he?”

Evan: “Yes! A sort of… purple aura?”

Niall: “That’ll be the Horned One’s doing then, right enough.”

Roland: “The Horned One?”

This is a plot point we will not see again until the very end of the game.

Roland: “So we just need to go to this Allegoria place and get the bond back, right?”

Niall: “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.”

Evan: “So he’s the king of a country which hasn’t existed for centuries?”

Tani: “Is he a ghost or something?”

Niall: “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!’”

Evan: “Then we mustn’t let him succeed! We can’t let him bring back the Horned One!”

Roland: “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.

Evan: “Where did all these people come from?”

Roland: “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.

Tani: “They must all want to be citizens of our amazing new kingdom!”

Batu: “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.

Roland: “So… if Niall’s the Minister of Finance, I guess that makes Batu… the Minister of Defense?”

Batu: “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.

Evan: “No, you shall be my Chief Consul, Roland. I’m no politician. I shall need your help.”

Roland: “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.

Evan: “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.

Update 20: Go Fetch Grandma’s Dildo from Item World

With all of the buildings we were able to construct, there’s only one we don’t have a person for, and that’s the higglery.

Evan immediately makes a suggestion that requires us to go back and visit that annoying goddamn old lady because of course he does.

Once we hit the road, you can see that the overworld model for Evermore has changed since the last time we were here. There’s one thing I didn’t explain in the last update, and that’s kingdom level.

Evermore has total of four kingdom levels, which cost a (usually huge) amount of kingsguilders and are only accessible once we recruit enough people. The game actually locks progress behind this - you cannot finish the game past a certain point without your kingdom being level 3. Right now, we’re at level 1.

I have a theory that at one point, the developers intended to implement microtransactions for kingdom management mode but backed down because of the outcry over EA and the way they handled Battlefront 2.

If you’ll remember from… how long ago was that again? We grabbed one of our first trip doors right outside of Martha’s cottage, so we can just warp there.

This entire segment is an introduction to sidequests. Roughly half the sidequests in this game award us a recruit for Evermore, though many of those are part of a different mechanic we won’t see until much later. The rest award crafting materials, and are largely not worth doing apart from one.

Evan: “We’ve… um… a favor to ask. We’ve started our new kingdom, you see, and we were wondering if you might like to come and live there. We need someone who knows about higgledies.”

By the way, all of the sidequests are blatant fetch quests, apart from a handful related to skirmish mode and a few that task you with killing superbosses.

Except… and there’s always an except…

We need to find the old lady’s magic dildo, because that is absolutely a name for a dildo.

EVAN! NO!

Martha: “It’ll get even the filthiest pot sparkling clean with just a swish and a swash.”

Martha: “And my little higgledy-darlings outright refuse to be born into anything but the cleanest of cauldrons! So, you see, I can’t be doing without it!”

Evan: “But who do you think could have stolen it, Auntie Martha?”

If I had to guess, I’d say dementia. I have fifty bucks that says the higgledies are like those things in My Neighbor Totoro where only the young (and impressionable) and old (and very senile) can see them. Roland has just been playing along this whole time while he finds a home to put her in.

Evan: “Well then… we’ll get it back for you!”

Yep, nothing to see here but an old, racist, senile grandma.

Welcome to the sidequest screen. I won’t be showing this off much in the LP, but this is a screen you will be seeing a lot if you play this game yourself. The reward is… actually kind of tempting for this point in the game. This sidequest is mandatory, but three-leafed soreaways are NNK2’s equivalent of a hi-potion, and are pretty much the best healing item you can get outside of kingdom management mode.

The Grotty Grotto is just a bit east of Auntie Martha’s house. There are a lot of caves in this game, but Grotty Grotto is actually special for one reason.

This quest is dead simple: the grotto is laid out such that it’s a straight shot to the only group of enemies in the entire area, who are carrying the dildo.

Even on Extreme mode, these guys are done within seconds.

Before we can leave, though…

We get introduced to a character who will become one of the final recruits for Evermore, much later in the game. I finished her sidequest shortly before I went after the final boss on my first run.

Her name is Mileniyah, and apart from being extremely annoying, she adds almost nothing in kingdom management mode if you ever bother recruiting her.

Evan: “Um… is there something we can help you with?”

Evan: “But you said you had a special mission for-”

Mileniyah then gives us the Dreamer’s Key. There’s a whole conversation that explains what it is, but I’ll spare you and just tell you myself.

There are nine caves in the magical isekai kingdom that have a door, like this one. You could theoretically have run across this one before getting this quest, so the key is just to stop you going in before then.

Coming across it will remind you to save before going in. This is absolutely something you want to do, because the Dreamer’s Maze is essentially Item World from Disgaea, except without the ability to leave until it’s completed. Unlike Item World, there are a limited number of mazes (nine) and each one has a fixed number of levels and a fixed enemy level range.

Inside the maze, your goal is to find the door on each level that leads to the next level. The levels are procedurally generated as far as I know.

You’ll notice up in the top-right that there’s a “danger meter”. The dungeon starts at danger level 1, and the circular meter increases every couple of frames. Each danger level (there’s four, I think) increases the level of all enemies within the maze.

Just underneath that meter is our orb count. Enemies in the mazes drop orbs, as do random breakable objects. You can use kingdom management to increase the number of orbs you get, as well as lower the rate at which the danger level rises… and eventually just make it so the game will point you to where the door is.

There’s not much of a difference as far as I know between danger level 1 and danger level max.

There are also blue chests we can waste orbs on, but orbs have a far more important use.

Each floor has an idol hidden in it that will take your orbs and allow you to reset the danger level to 1. This is important not so much for the sidequest mazes as for the big one at the end of the game, which is 100 floors long and requires you to clear all of the other mazes to enter.

The door leading to the final level of a maze will always give you this notification. Thankfully, the danger meter stops once we reach the final floor (and also pauses in menus), and there’s no difference between 1% and 99% on the bar, so long as the actual level doesn’t increase. Grotty Grotto is only three floors.

The final floor of each maze is a boss. Keep in mind that we’re still on Extreme at this point, so let’s just see…

NOPE!

Even on Normal, this thing is a damage sponge.

It took me… I want to say around four minutes to kill this thing, which has significantly more HP than the one we fought in the forest.

This gets us one of the nine chaos emeralds, which we need to combine to access that final maze at the end of the game… if we want to. It’s optional.

Next time, we’ll go back to Goldpaw and start grinding sidequests.

Update 21: Sidequest Grinding 1

Once we get Martha’s scrubber back, all we have to do is teleport over to her cottage and quest complete.

We’ll do just that, and start doing higgledy research. There’s no particular reason for it, we just had the KG lying around and the early higgledy research has a pretty good cost-influence ratio.

I also went and built the kitchen for Floyd - this is again because the kitchen (at least its first level) has a good cost-influence ratio compared to some of our other options right now. The kitchen is one of the big influence-point generators, though not as cost-effective as some other ones we’ll see later.

Before we go to the cutscene, I’d like to just point something out about how broken gear progression is in Ni no Kuni 2. We’re going to kill ourselves a superboss.

Just north of Evermore is this asshole - a giant level 23 whamster. We’re level 19 right now, so it’s a little above us… but this guy’s a pushover unless you’re dumb enough to fight him on extreme. By the way, the superboss drops are fixed so you don’t get anything better for killing them on extreme.

On normal, this boss is extremely easy - he has a shield, but his attacks only hit a small area in front of him and thus we can just run around behind him and hit him repeatedly.

We can even knock him down with charged special attacks and just lay down the damage. Clangston spent probably 80% of this fight eating dirt.

His only real attack when he’s not busy being prone is charging in a straight line, which has a very visible wind-up and is super easy to avoid. The one hit I took here, believe it or not, was because Windows decided to steal focus due to fucking stickykeys since I just built this PC a few months ago and forgot to turn that off.

He dies, and everyone immediately levels up. This is why you want to do most superbosses as soon as you possibly can.

The other reason is this thing.

The bone mail this thing dropped is an armor we won’t see regular drops of until near the end of the game. You can see that it’s nearly twice as strong at physical defense as the previous best armor we had, and over twice as good at magic defense.

I also tried the slime again, but the slime is practically impossible to do without Evan and I didn’t feel like going back to kill it.

Actually, you know what? Fuck it. No plot this update, it’s sidequest time.

Each one of those speech bubbles on the minimap is a sidequest. There’s one we can do right in front of us.

This is Persha, who we met in the basement of the castle at Ding Dong Dell.

Unfortunately, she wants to make a quilt for the inn before she leaves forever, so she needs four lumps of greenglade cotton. We had eight, and it’s almost always worth it to get a citizen, so this is pretty much a no-brainer.

Next up is this guy, Nu Bi, who is a weaponsmith… and would be our primary person in the weapon shop if we ever bothered to craft. But we won’t, because the superboss drops are that good.

Magmanimus, however, is an asshole and we absolutely, positively need Evan to kill it.

Goos, you see, have very poorly defined hitboxes and an attack that hits in a 360-degree arc that comes with absolutely no warning. This means it is very hard to hit them to gain MP back.

The reason we can’t do this with Roland is that Magmanimus spends half of its time in a state where it only takes damage from spells. Evan’s water attack is pretty much the only thing we have that can do any kind of damage to it.

When it gets under half HP, it splits. It splits again at 25% HP. Depending on how dickish the RNG feels like being, this can be not too bad, or they can all sit right on top of each other and become virtually impossible to damage due to the constant 360-degree arc attack.

I’m not going to lie, I died twice on this fight. Both Evan and Roland levelled up (Tani and Batu levelled up from trash mobs on the way to the boss) again.

Its drop is… a really shit accessory.

The REAL superboss drop is the quest reward, which is easily the best sword obtainable at this point in the game.

Would’ve been real useful against that magma asshole… but it’ll be even more useful on our NEXT sidequest that requires us to kill a superboss.

Hoi Den has an EXTREMELY useful skill for this point in the game: she’s how we get the Explorer’s Guild to produce a passive ability that boosts our movement speed on the world map. She wants us to kill Mortimer, who lives in a cave near Evermore. Man, Roland really picked a great location.

Mortimer is a giant asshole of a boss, mostly because he’s very hard to hit without also being hit. Tani dies in the first 30 seconds and I don’t bother reviving her.

His main attack involves chasing after someone, then hitting them with his sword with no real warning to speak of. This does about 350 damage… on normal.

We have one way to kill this asshole, and that is with Roland’s new sword. His sword has the freeze attribute, which causes enemies to freeze solid upon being hit with one of his special attacks. One flatliner and Mortimer is unable to do anything for a good five to six seconds.

His reward is trash, but we don’t care.

The first thing we do upon getting back is shoving Hoi Den into the Explorer’s Guild and getting that movement increase.

We also pick up this sidequest, which requires an item we won’t see as a regular drop until Kingdom Level 3. There’s another sidequest we have to do first, which happens to reward a grass-green thread. Unfortunately, we won’t see that one until after we advance the plot some more.

There is one more sidequest we can do back at the sky pirate base for a rather useless citizen whose only real talent is vegetable farming.

You talk to him and he runs away.

The map will outright tell you where he is, but you have to do this three more times before he’ll join you.

Munokhoi brings our total citizen count to 11, still less than halfway to Kingdom Level 2.

Update 22: The Plot Goes to Shit

Before I start this update, I’d like to say that this update, right here? This is where the entire plot (which is already full of holes and sinking rapidly into a pool of its own waste) completely fucking tanks. This is the point where I realized on my first playthrough that Ni no Kuni 2 is not a good game.

Back in that cutscene I skipped over in the last update, we’re going to find our next objective.

Roland: “But we’re still missing something vital. You have people gathered here from all over the world. If you’re going to unite them, you need a banner to do it under.”

By “all over the world”, he means Goldpaw and the area immediately surrounding the kingdom, plus some pirates. There are in fact two races we don’t have anyone representing right now.

Evan: “A…banner?”

Roland: “What exactly do we stand for? What are our goals? Our values? That’s what I mean by a banner - a shared purpose. Something everyone can work toward. Without that, we can’t call ourselves a nation.”

Ooh! Ooh! I vote that we become Florida and make our purpose to see how many times we can top ourselves in generating stories about strange crimes that occur in the state! Seriously, if I ever get Connecticut Yankee’d to an isekai realm and have to found my own kingdom, the first thing I’m doing is making it Florida. No one would dare fuck with it because they’d get run over by a guy who is simultaneously naked, drunk, and high on meth driving a stolen pizza delivery truck.

Evan: “Hmm…”

Roland: “You’re the King, what kind of kingdom were you hoping for?”

And you just know that because Evan is a dipshit ten year old he’s going to be like “I want a kingdom where every day is Christmas! And the buildings are made of ice cream!”

Yep, it’s dipshit o’clock here in Evermore.

Roland: “Sure, we know that part. But we need something more concrete than that.”

Now, I’d like to pause for a moment and restate something I’m sure I’ve said before, which is this. At no point is it ever shown that any of the four major kingdoms in the isekai realm are or have ever been at war, nor are they in any actual danger of doing so. Like, even Pugnacius probably would’ve just caused his kingdom of morons to die of their own stupidity.

Batu: “And who doesn’t want that lad, hm? Ye think we liked bein’ at it tooth and nail with the wyverns the whole time? Or they with us?”

Further, I’d like to say that at no point in this game is there ever the sort of Undertale moment with the monsters, even though Batu sort of insinuates here that they’re not just mindless killing machines with absolutely zero chance of redemption the way they are in Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy.

And the thing is, this is EXACTLY the kind of game where that kind of thing could’ve been done! The writers for this game had a fucking perfect opportunity to do the Undertale thing, and they fucking didn’t! It could’ve been a character growth moment for Evan and maybe an opportunity to show that he’s not just a Mary Sue!

He totally is a marysue, by the way.

The other major problem I have with this scene is that Batu is the voice of reason here. Batu, the guy who was ready and willing to execute a child. You would think that Roland would be the one chiming in here saying that it simply isn’t possible, but no that would be good writing.

I honestly think that this is kind of the point where the people at Level 5 decided to just turn this game into a cash grab.

But no, no one is going to correct Evan or try to set him on the right path. Instead, he’s going to just plow ahead with his plan to eliminate war from a world in which war doesn’t even exist.

Sure, there was the coup, but that’s not really a war - and as we’ll see going forward, Evan very much means the traditional international idea of war.

Roland: “If that’s your decision, we’ll need to gather intel on our rival kingdoms. I for one don’t feel like I know enough about this world yet.”

There’s one other thing I’d like to point out here, which is that Evan’s council is composed entirely of humans, despite the fact that there are at least three different furry species (cats, dogs, and a third one we haven’t seen yet) with no representation.

By the way, even though we never see Roland tell anyone else about the whole isekai thing, everyone just sorta knows about it. In fact, I’m pretty sure every NPC in the isekai kingdom knows more about Roland than we do at this point.

Now it’s time for us to meet the worst fucking character in any JRPG I have ever played. Remember Poshul in Chrono Cross? Dial that up to about five hundred and you have Boddly.

The library in Goldpaw is right across from the inn. You can’t miss it.

Remember the evil old lady from Spirited Away? She’s back, because Fred couldn’t find any other Ghibli IPs to rip off.

Also she talks like this and I fucking hate her so no, I’m not going any further with this conversation. Basically, she wants us to do three dumb sidequests for her because the game figures you either didn’t notice or didn’t give a shit about the markers on the map.

Anime was a fucking mistake.

Anyway, our first quest is to get her a “red, red rose”. Unfortunately, we need a world map spell that is only ever used for this one particular mission to do so, because said flower is located up a cliff north of Goldpaw.

There’s an NPC in town who can teach us the spell if we recruit her, which means we need to grind more sidequests.

Li Li is on a bridge directly across from the library.

Just when it sounds like she’s going to join us…

Yeah no, we need to bring her three boar asses first. I swear, this feels like one of the developers almost became self-aware and was trying to do some meta commentary but then gave up.

Thankfully, all we actually need to do is walk straight out of Goldpaw and fight a single group of skeleplasms anywhere in the blue circle.

Unfortunately, there’s an extra step we have to take - namely putting Li Li to work in kingdom management mode.

First, I spent about half our KG to upgrade the “hubble-bubblery”, which is basically a healing item research facility. There’s a good reason for this that I don’t know if I showed off, but we can only carry a limited number of each type of healing item into battle… and when you’re dealing with superbosses, you’re going to need the stronger stuff.

Bridge is actually not a bad deal, 160KG for 5500 influence (which I believe is about 80KG/hr).

In the meantime, I started some other cheap research to boost our income to just over 4000KG an hour. Given that the cap is 5000, we’re doing pretty well for this stage of the game. I also had to “finish” the research into that faster world map movement skill.

For some reason, the game doesn’t automatically complete research - you have to click the button. This means our actual influence is a few thousand higher than that last screenshot, bringing us to around 4200KG/hr.

Meanwhile, Bridge finishes.

Man, this spell sucks. Guess you get what you pay for.

The spot where we need to use Bridge is actually more east of Goldpaw than it is north, but whatever. Some asshole went through the trouble of making this twenty-foot span of cliff invisible.

You know, I remember when Okami did this, only it was better because Okami was a good game.

The skirmish battle there is level 16, and is probably impossible with the units we have now. The good news is, however, that we COULD use this to grind up our existing units if we so chose… though we shouldn’t because we don’t have a full army and skirmish mode is pointless.

There’s also a chest here that has a sword with stats identical to those of the freezing longsword we got from that quest last update, but lacks the freeze-on-hit attribute.

The little red sparkle on the ground is the rose, which we bring back to the Spirited Away reference to get our second mission.

Her saying horny-worny makes me want to delete this game.

She also gives us this: a bottle of skin cream.

So, if you’ll remember back to when we were in Cloudcoil Canyon, there was that one area off to the side near the beginning hidden behind a prop clover, which I said contained higher-level enemies that would absolutely murder the shit out of the party. That’s where we’re headed.

We’re not going to do this, because while we do have the facility and the money to upgrade Evan’s spells, we’re missing a key ingredient.

Comely Corals can be obtained through one of the buildings in kingdom management mode, which we actually do have… but it’s a rare drop unless the building is upgraded and the upgrade is not efficient in terms of influence.

I stuck Persha in there anyway while I was working on the LP itself to see if I could get one to drop, but I didn’t get one and took her out. Why, you ask? Well, let me explain that since I never really did (and fucked if the game is going to).

You see how Tani here has a gold star next to her portrait, but Persha doesn’t? That’s because every character has a place they’re particularly suited to work: Tani’s happens to be the mining camp. They also have an experience bar. There are a bunch of upgrades later on that will require us to have levelled up our personnel - and the only real way to do that (short of one facility we’ll get much later in the game) is to put them in buildings where they have that star.

Back in Cloudcoil Canyon, our objective is pretty clear.

I already got the clover the first time we came through here, so we can just go up and fight.

What was once an insurmountable wall dies in about ten seconds.

Roland: “But how do we get up there?”

Batu: “Time was, I would’ve shimmied up there quick as ye could tie yer shoes. But ah… that was a while back.”

Roland: “What about using one of your flying contraptions?”

Batu: “Be my guest, Roland lad. But ye’ll think better of it when ye’re tumblin’ from the sky, yer wings ablaze about ye.”

Tani: “Yeah, dead prop-leafed clover. And didn’t Niall say something about Quicken Growth not working on dead plants?”

You know what we’re about to do?

Put skin lotion on a plant, that’s what.

Three clovers later, and… oh look, it’s a miniature Kulve Taroth. No, that’s literally what this thing is, a miniature Kulve Taroth.

Meet the Incineraptor, possibly the easiest mini-boss in the game. I did this on Extreme without ever really taking more than incidental contact damage.

The Incineraptor, much like Kulve Taroth, will spend an inordinate amount of time spewing flames in a small area. This leaves its legs wide open for attacks. You can pretty much just sit here and build up MP without it being able to damage you.

The boss will fly up and try to reposition itself, which is completely pointless because it’ll just go back to spewing flames.

Just like Kulve Taroth, it also has a dashing attack that usually won’t hit anything. Thankfully, it does not have Kulve’s broken-ass hitboxes to go with it.

Unlike some bosses, the incineraptor can be stunned by a charged (or zing-powered) attack. Flatliner wouldn’t do it, but Circle Cut sure as hell did. The head takes slightly more damage than the body does, and you can pretty much build up your MP to full by the time it gets up again.

Eventually, the boss will roar and take flight for yet another Kulve Taroth ripoff attack.

Here, it’ll fly up and nuke the area directly underneath it, as well as two smaller areas to the sides of the initial blast… just like Kulve, though Kulve can’t fly.

At some point, Boy Sampson gave me an awakening orb, so I turned Roland super saiyan and had him murder the shit out of the incineraptor with repeated knockdown stuns.

Everyone levels up, and we also get a piece of armor that’s an upgrade for Batu.

That and the horn… and one other thing. Directly under the Incineraptor’s nest is a chest.

Inside the chest is a songbook we won’t be able to use until Kingdom Level 2. and probably not until Level 3 when we have actual KG to blow, because the building that uses these costs a fuckload.

Next time, we’ll finish Boggly’s last quest and probably grind more sidequests.

Update 23: Sidequest Grinding II

In the time it took me to write up the last update, I left the game running and made enough KG to upgrade the explorer’s guild again. We are now making more KG per hour than the kingdom can actually hold, meaning 52KG is going to waste every hour.

Most of our buildings are locked from being upgraded until we reach level 2, so all we can really do at this point is push forward and grind it out.

Boddly’s final task is a skirmish battle. She won’t let us take it on without getting a third unit in our army, though.

This entire part of the game is something I kind of selectively forgot about.

If we hadn’t built the kitchen for Floyd already, this is where we’d be forced to do it.

Floyd works kind of like the chefs in I Am Setsuna - if we bring him enough ingredients, he can make dishes that give some negligible buffs for a period of time. Once he’s made a dish, we can then buy it rather than having to bring more ingredients to him.

The look on Floyd’s face tells me he knows damn well he’s screwing us. Thankfully, we have all the ingredients we need.

We then get Gao Jia for Evermore. His only synergy is with the barracks.

Batu: “We have swordsmen and archers ready to deploy.”

We then get two more sidequests to grind. Let’s get right to that. Bai Gon is the closest to the casino, so we’ll go seek him out first.

Great, so we’re recruiting an old hobo by giving him three boar asses. What is it with people and asking us to kill shit for them?

Min Ti, on the other hand, is far more willing to join. All we need to do is bring her a single item, which is purchaseable at the general store both in Goldpaw and in Evermore. We actually have one right now, so this quest is already done.

This also rewards us with the grass-green thread we need for that other person, so we can get two sidequests done in one go. Min Ti’s unit is a gun-based unit.

Erm… yeah, I think Evan’s a little young to own a sex dungeon.

Pi Chi’s primary purpose is being used in the armory. I took a break here to stick all the new people in the best slots I could find for them.

In particular, Pi Chi opens up a wide range of research at the armory that is extremely cost-efficient. By the time I was done here, I raised the kingdom’s income to about 5300KG an hour.

The Grimchillas that Bai Gon wanted us to kill spawn right outside of Goldpaw once you accept the quest. They’re nothing challenging, but I had to kill two groups to get the required amount.

We could go back to Boggly right now but… hey, that’s a quest marker!

This is Fai Do, who is Bai Gon’s grandson. He’s an armorer, but won’t join us unless we give him some silver… which we have none of right now. We can, however, get some potentially through kingdom management mode. I had just enough money to upgrade the mining camp to the point where it can give silver, and Tani is already working there anyway, so we’ll get it eventually.

We’ll come back for this one later.

Oh, and before I end this short update… there’s one other thing I want to talk about. I think they added this in one of the patches that came out after the game released, but there’s now a “Citizen Log” with information about all of the people we’ve recruited for Evermore. I figured I’d show a few of these off in particular, and at the same time talk about why I hate this fucking game.

This is Roland’s profile. You’ll want to note the part at the end about him having a son Evan’s age… and also the fact that this is the first place we can learn his last name (apart from a cutscene much later on). His son never becomes a plot point - but there is something I want to explain about that.

In the first game, there was a plot point about travelling between the isekai realm and the real one, and every person in the isekai realm having a real-world counterpart. In fact, the entire plot is set off by this: Oliver (the main character of Ni no Kuni 1) has his mother die and goes to the isekai realm with the express purpose of finding her isekai counterpart so he can revive her. The entire point of the first game is that death is a very permanent thing that cannot be reversed, even with the isekai realm’s magic.

I think you can see where the writers were probably going: Evan was supposed to be Roland’s son in the isekai world, hence why Roland didn’t want to leave. Why they got rid of this, I have no idea.

By the way, they never at any point bring up the whole real-world counterpart thing (they called it “soulmates” in the first game) in 2.

This is Tani’s. I mostly bring it up because I feel like they couldn’t have made her any more of a San ripoff if they tried.

Lofty’s.

Next time, we’ll finish Boggly’s quest and do a skirmish again, wishing we hadn’t.