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.
: “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.
: “Ah yes, building materials.”
: “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!
: “You can’t just go chopping down trees willy-nilly! What do you think Niall will have to say about that?”
: “I’m guessing he’s the owner of this forest?”
: “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!
: “Then we must go and speak with him. I’m sure he’ll give us his blessing if we explain the situation.”
: “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.
: “That writing - those are the weird squiggles they use in Goldpaw, right?”
: “Goldpaw?”
: “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.