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

[Timrod]

Update 16: Boy Sampson Strikes Again

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

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

: “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.

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

: “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.

: “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.

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

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

: “Is this how Goldpaw treats its guests?”

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

: “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.

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

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

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

: “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.

: “Huh?!”

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

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

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

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

: “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.”

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

: “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.

: “Have you found anything, 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!”

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

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

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

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

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

: “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.

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

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

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

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

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

: “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.”

: “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.

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

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

: “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.

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

: “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.

: “Are you sure this will work?”

: “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.

[Timrod]

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.

: “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.”

: “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…

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

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

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

: “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.

: “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?”

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

: “…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.

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

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

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

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

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

: “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.

: “Do you accept my terms?”

: “We do!”

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

[Timrod]

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.

: “Because this is a court of law.”

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

: “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.”

: “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!”

: “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.

: “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.

: “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.”

: “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!”

: “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.

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

: “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!

: “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.

: “It’s their Kingmaker - Longfang!”

: “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.

: “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.

: “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.

[Timrod]

Update 19: The Kingdom of Dipshittia

With Ifrit banished to the void, it’s time for us to pray return to the Waking Sands and/or Rising Stones get moving toward what is absolutely the worst mechanic in Ni no Kuni 2.

: “Phew! We’re back!”

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

: “Guess we’d better tie up some loose ends, eh?”

Pugnacius somehow revives, despite the fact that he had his soul ripped out not even minutes ago.

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

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

: “He came to me some months ago. He promised secret knowledge - knowledge of ways in which our nation might be made yet greater - and in return, he sought high office.”

Remember kids, don’t deal with evil viziers.

: “It was he who suggested that the dice be manipulated. Who gave me the means by which that might be done.”

So, this is one of the things I absolutely cannot fucking STAND about this plot is how no one in the magical isekai realm has any concept of personal responsibility. It’s somehow never their fault for any of the shit they do, even though they weren’t being mind controlled.

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

: “We managed to calm your Kingmaker down. But… without your Kingsbond… will you, uh, will things here be okay?”

Kingmakers are also like Primals in that they can’t be killed… except FF14 goes ahead and kills a Primal off anyway. What I’m saying is that Roland should probably just stick his gun in Pugnacius’s mouth and be done with it.

Evan then introduces himself to Pugnacius (which I’m going to skip), but more importantly…

We’ve gotten Niall his forest back. Time to go back to the forest and subsequently clear-cut it for kingdom materials.

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

: “Wait. Niall - Pugnacius had his kingsbond stolen by a creepy snake-headed weirdo. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

Tani begins showing her racism against green people.

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

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

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

: “Yes! A sort of… purple aura?”

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

: “The Horned One?”

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

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

: “Ye’ll have a job daein’ that, I’m afraid. Allegoria hasnae existed for… oh… two thousand years or more now. It disappeared along with the land on which it stood.”

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

: “Is he a ghost or something?”

: “Whatever he is, I’d say he’s lookin’ tae pinch people’s Kingsbonds in order tae try and bring the Horned One back somehow. And if he does that, the whole world’ll be filled with purple fug before ye can say ‘We’re Doomed!’”

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

: “We sure can’t. But if we’re going to stop him, we’re going to need the strength of an entire kingdom - a kingdom we haven’t even started building yet.”

What we are about to enter is what is without a doubt the worst part of the game.

: “Where did all these people come from?”

: “I see greenlings, sky pirates… even a few people from Ding Dong Dell.”

This line is actually a lie - as far as I remember from my end-game save, we never actually recruit a single greenling apart from Niall himself.

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

: “That they must, right enough, but how did the swabs even know to come a-knockin?”

Man, a kingdom ruled by a ten year old boy with a tiny green gambling addict for a finance minister. What could POSSIBLY go wrong?

And naturally Evan, being a total dipshit, immediately goes for it.

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

: “The swab in charge o’ fightin’, ye mean? I like the sound of that a good deal!”

I wasn’t aware getting nuked counted as valuable country-running experience, but okay.

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

: “Well, that’s very kind of you, Evan… I just… I don’t know if I’ll be…”

Roland ALMOST feels like he’s trying to take responsibility for getting New York destroyed, but then gets over it immediately.

: “It’s a king’s job to appoint his ministers, correct? Then I hereby name you Chief Consul.”

You might ask if Evan ever finds out about the whole getting nuked thing, and I’ll tell you right now that the answer is no.

I’m going to skip a couple of pointless dialog lines since I think we’ve both seen enough of this bullshit. I started Disgaea 5 recently, and the writing in this game is maybe a half-step above any given Disgaea game. All it’d need is Roland complaining about not being the main character and Evan constantly screaming about how much he loves curry.

I vote for “Dipshittia”, after the fact that not only is this country being founded on a totally unachievable political goal, it’s also run by a dipshit.

Yep, Dipshittia it is.

Evan then gives a speech that I’m going to skip about half of, because it’s just the sky pirates getting into line.

They’re really trying hard here to have him channel JFK, and it just doesn’t work.

By the end of the decade, we will put a man on the moon! By man, I mean anime, and by anime I mean we’re banning all anime, anime is over.

Another question you might be asking at this point: does the whole idea of a kingdom being founded on a completely unachievable idea run by a ten year old being a really bad idea ever get brought up as a plot point?

I’m not going to answer, but you’ve seen enough of this game to know what the answer is.

There’s another cutscene with Bluehair McPlotruiner that I’m going to skip.

Welcome to the worst part of Ni No Kuni 2: the kingdom management minigame. The kingdom management game is to NNK2 what, say, Item World or Chara World are to Disgaea… except instead of having a direct effect on gameplay, kingdom management only really affects itself.

Oh, and we’re in Chapter 4 now.

Roland starts off by giving an extended tutorial on how this works, but I’ll just handle that for you. Kingdom management is basically one of those clicker games.

We start off with the castle, and a large barren wasteland with nothing in it. Unlike the main game, kingdom management has its own currency called Kingsguilders (KG). KG is gained at a set rate per hour based on your influence (top-right).

You’ll notice that we have a limit as to how much KG the kingdom can hold. We’re not actually limited to how much we can have, but the kingdom can only store 3000 before it will stop generating more. This means we have to come back every hour to claim our KG… or lose it.

At the start, you’re forced to build four basic buildings: the Spellworks, the Armory, the Blacksmith, and the Higglery. The spellworks researches spells - this is how we upgrade things like Evan’s fireball spell to do more damage. It’s that building in the back, with the gold dome on top of it. If you’ll remember, back in Cloudcoil Canyon we found a locked blue chest. The spellworks is how you research the unlocking spell that unlocks said blue chests.

The armory and blacksmith are used to craft stuff - the armory is the helmet-shaped building to the right of the spellworks. Crafting in this game is pointless.

The building in front of the spellworks is one of the few useful buildings in this mode: it’s the general store, which allows us to (eventually) stock up on high-level healing items we can’t find anywhere else.

Over here, we have the blacksmith (left), the higglery (back), and the barracks (green roof).

The higglery is where we can upgrade our higgledies and make new ones. It’s almost totally useless apart from a few end-game upgrades that require way more KG than we have right now. The barracks is for upgrading stuff for skirmish mode.

All of the other buildings are resource gathering points, which will gather resources as long as they are staffed. Right now, we don’t have the people to do that.

Each building allows you to staff it with characters we’ve recruited - all of our major party members are recruits, as are a bunc h of NPCs from the sky pirate base, Niall, and Floyd.

Each character has four aptitudes: combat, crafting, higgledies, and magic. The explorer’s guild here does have one useful upgrade that increases the speed at which we move on the world map… but we can’t research it yet. That’s because each character has a unique skill that unlocks things depending on where they’re placed.

Some characters, like Floyd here, can only be placed in one particular building. In Floyd’s case, that’s the restaurant. You’ll also see Gerel, the store owner from the pirate base, standing in front of the general store: that’s her specialty. No one else can run the store.

Anyway, that about does it for this update. Next time, we’ll start on the godawful sidequests we’ll need to do in order to level up the kingdom.

[Timrod]

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.

: “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!

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

: “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!”

: “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.

: “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.

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

: “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.

[Timrod]

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.

[Timrod]

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.

: “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.

: “A…banner?”

: “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.

: “Hmm…”

: “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.

: “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.

: “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.

: “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.

: “But how do we get up there?”

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

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

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

: “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.

[Timrod]

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.

: “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.

[Timrod]

Update 24: Reading Comprehension

We have to go back to Boddly… regrettably. Her dialog is almost word-for-word the same as last time we spoke to her, but we have to do this in order to trigger the event flag for the skirmish battle.

The skirmish pops up just south of Goldpaw.

Skirmish Mode now has a new option: Bolster Forces, which allows us to waste our precious KG from kingdom management mode to either get a boost or re-do skirmishes on hard mode. If you’re going to go for the all-skirmishes achievement, you might as well wait until you’re at kingdom level 3 and earning 400,000 KG an hour so you can just buy all the boosts at once.

I went off-screen two updates ago and did some grinding on that higher-level skirmish to get our two existing units to level 6 - they’d be level 3 otherwise. As you can see, the other side has two spear units to start… and gain a few more once we defeat the initial wave. Spear units are strong against swords but weak against hammers, meaning we really should just sit everyone who isn’t Bai Gon out.

As soon as we start the skirmish, Min Ti reminds us that her unit’s “shock tactic” is splitting from the main force to attack independently. This is absolutely a horrible goddamn idea because the split ability is on a timer, meaning that she’ll either get destroyed by melee on the way to her destination or get stuck on a wall trying to rejoin the main force. This also costs 50 military might, just to add insult to injury.

I’m not going to go over every detail of this skirmish battle, apart from a couple of highlights. Chingis gets destroyed in about ten seconds when the spears swarm the rear flank, and the guns and bows (being highly weak to melee) lose most of their units in seconds.

The only other new thing here is the addition of Command Posts. Command Posts are a structure more useful to the AI than they are to you - they crank out a crap unit every twenty seconds or so once you get within a certain radius of them.

You can rebuild them for 100 military might, which converts them to your side. This is almost completely pointless, because all they do is give you 20 military might every… ten seconds or so.

The final boss is a wand unit and a couple of monsters - monsters are special in that they’re basically a standard army unit that doesn’t lose attack strength as they lose HP. These ones are both sword-based, and thus strong against our hammers… but we have our rage bar up all the way.

All we have to do is go super saiyan and they die within seconds.

When we warp back to Goldpaw… aw hell, another sidequest. This one takes a couple of minutes… so I did it anyway to see if I could get some silver ore to drop for that other sidequest we can’t do.

This dumbass had all his shit stolen… and he wants to join us as an army commander. Makes perfect sense.

Right at the entrance to Cloudcoil Canyon is this guy, who is here solely to give us a plot flag at Crookneck Cavern, which is located a small distance outside of Cloudcoil Canyon on the way to the pirate base. We actually stopped there briefly before.

Inside is a dick-ass merchant who is selling Tabbias’s stolen shit.

Once we buy it, Batu confronts him and he sends his bandit buddies at us.

Even on Extreme, it does not end well for him.

One trip door trip later (actually two, one to find out that the game is being a dick and won’t drop that silver ore) and it’s done.

We give the stone to Boddly, who is about to commit a crime against god.

Yes, we gave her all that shit so she could make lipstick.

More importantly, we get a library card. What follows is going to be a short sequence where Roland runs in a circle to five hotspots in order to read some textboxes, so I’ll just post the textboxes.

First up is the book on Goldpaw. These books are a bit different in that they’re the only place in the entire game where any kind of war is ever mentioned. This first screen is all shit we already know.

Capstan-upon-Hull is way to the south of Evermore, and the Eider Downs are the area between Evermore and it. There are no settlements there that are ever shown in the actual game. Note, however, that they don’t say how long ago that war was.

Next up is Hydropolis, the merfolk kingdom. The book is located right next to the book about Goldpaw. I wonder where we could possibly be headed next and what our next major boss fight could be?

You know, I preferred the way Mario Odyssey handled this kind of thing, where it was a footnote on a pause menu that didn’t get in the way of gameplay. Again, we have a war… but this one is another civil war, not an international one.

The long-lost continent of Nausicaa, which is a good film, unlike this trash.

Second to last is Ding Dong Dell. We already know most of this information, but…

So again, this is a civil war, not an international one. If you ask me, I think this entire portion of the game was only put in because the writers had no fucking clue what they were doing. I feel like they had three teams of writers that they kept in separate buildings with no knowledge of each other’s existence and had each one type out a plot and then just slapped them all together.

Roland at one point says that all of these books are actually stone slabs, and that it’s impressive they’d have written about the coup that happened maybe a week ago.

So yeah, what I feel like is that the writers changed up the plot several times before they released the game, and still hadn’t really gotten a single cohesive plot together by the time it shipped. From Roland’s character entry, it’s pretty clear that at one point they were probably going for a direct sequel to the first game (hence why Ding Dong Dell exists) but then decided for some reason not to do that (hence why none of the other locations from Ni no Kuni 1 exist and why the world map is totally different).

Broadleaf are the ones who made the Facebook ripoff, ruled by their beneveolent CEO, Zark Muckerberg. We’ll be heading there after Hydropolis, and it is easily the best-designed yet somehow also the worst and least fitting location for this kind of setting.

This part we will never hear anything about outside of this room, much like the other mentions of any kind of war that ever went on in the isekai realm. Like I said, they never at any point show any kind of actual war in Ni no Kuni 2. I think someone realized this just before it shipped, and that’s why they added this room to the game. They had to go with the “oh, all these wars happened several hundred years ago” bit because they already had assets in place and didn’t have the time or money to go back and fix stuff so there were obvious signs of battle damage or add cutscenes to show an actual war (or the threat of one).

Honestly, it was more than I ever needed to know in the first place. The best part is that this segment is only part of the problem I have with this game’s plot. To really understand why it sucks, I’d have to show you the ending.

: “This place sure has seen its fair share of wars… though I guess that’s true of my world, too.”

This is the first time he ever brings up the fact that he’s from a different world to anyone but Evan, and no one seems to give a shit.

Roland demonstrates his amazing reading comprehension. Let’s total the amount of wars mentioned in those books, shall we?

Goldpaw: 1 annexation war that happened an indeterminate amount of time ago
Hydropolis: 1 human/merfolk civil war, also long since over
Ding Dong Dell: 1 mouse/cat civil war, has been over “for centuries”.
Broadleaf: A handful of human/monster conflicts, but monsters don’t count as people apparently since we’re killing so many of them.

So that’s… two civil wars and a monster culling to one thing that could maybe be called an actual international war. By that standard, Roland should be more worried about the furries turning against the all-human government or having Boy Sampson and/or a nuclear missile explode the continent, since at this point in my first playthrough my theory was that Doloran was travelling between worlds and was responsible for the nuclear strike ala The Gunslinger.

: “Arr… t’ain’t precisely the jolliest o’ conclusions, but it sounds about right to me.”

Now, get ready for this shit.

: “Roland, I’ve been thinking… what if we could unite the world?”

Nice try! Now, let’s see who you really are!

Oda Nobunaga! I knew it the whole time! All that talk about peace when you’re probably planning on lighting the furries on fire until they bow to your every whim!

No seriously, this is fucking textbook Nobunaga.

: “Sure, unite the world and there’d be no one left to fight. That would certainly put an end to war…”

: “But look at these books. Read what they’re saying. Nobody in history has ever come close to doing what you’re proposing.”

No one asked you!

Meet Ferdinand, ruiner of what little semblance of a plot remains in this game.

There are only five countries in the entire isekai realm, and that’s counting Evermore.

: “Amazing! So someone has done it before!”

: “But I just read every history book in here and none of them so much as mentioned his name.”

Read: Ferdinand is a walking fucking plot hole (likely added in at the last minute) who ruins the entire game just by existing. It’s top-secret because not even the writers thought he was a good idea. Anime was a mistake.

Next update, we’ll finally start heading to Hydropolis.

[CommanderKeene]

Hydropolis sounds like the name for a Sonic the Hedgehog level. Although, we’re in magical isekai furry realm, so Sonic being here wouldn’t even be that weird.

Gotta stop all these civil wars by making the world all one country! …What do you mean that doesn’t make any sense?!

[Timrod]

Update 25: Collective Brain Damage

Oh trust me, you haven’t seen anything yet. By the way, I want to mention that Ni no Kuni 2 is still incredibly unstable on PC. I hadn’t really run into the instability until just now, but it tends to crash a lot and also will crash if it ever goes into windowed mode. Supposedly they fixed this months ago, but it’s still bad.

Once we get back to Evermore, Roland not-so-subtly reminds us to go check kingdom management mode, because the game kind of assumes we haven’t touched it since we unlocked it - this would be a mistake. The reason I’m grinding it so hard off-screen is because I don’t want to end up in a situation where we’re locked out of progress because we haven’t reached Kingdom Level 3 yet.

As you can see, we’re far ahead of the curve. I have to pick up the KG every 40 minutes or so to not waste any.

In fact, we had enough to upgrade this building to level 3, which lets us unlock a new level of healing items in Gerel’s store. Upgrading the Hubble-Bubblery is important, and this was not something I realized on my first playthrough (mostly because the lower-level upgrades are trash).

Oh man, you mean we’re going to get together and give this game an actual plot? I vote for doing the entire thing over only this time it’s a battle royale game.

Step 1. Acquire a nuclear deterrent.
Step 2. Go to Costa Rica and find a scientist specializing in the development of bipedal nuke-launching tanks.

: “First and foremost, we’ll need to sign a treaty with the other major nations of the world, effectively forming a single united realm. We propose to call this treaty the Declaration of Interdependence.”

You can’t see it because the scroll is blank, but further up there’s a picture of Roland riding a nuclear bomb like in Dr. Strangelove.

Evan, please stop looking at me like your plan to end race-based civil wars by creating a single nation ruled entirely by one race makes any kind of sense.

: “We think that’s highly likely, yes. But we can’t worry about that right now. All we can do is visit each nation and try to convince them to sign up.”

Again, Batu is the only one with any kind of sense. Someone on Twitter a few months back said that this scene was like everyone in the room realizes it’s a bad idea but they’re doing it anyway to not make Evan cry. I think everyone has severe brain damage.

: “Sure, this plan o’yers is a noble one, and a fine banner for an up-and-comin’ kingdom to unite under… but ye’re about as likely to get all the nations o’ the world to sign yer little pact as I am to grow a third leg!”

: “Don’t say that. We can do this.”

I’d say he knows more than you, Roland, given that you got New York nuked.

: “Stop it!”

: “I…I don’t know if we can do this. But it doesn’t matter. I want to do it anyway.”

: “I’ve realized something. Now that we’ve been to all these places and met all these people-”

What the shit? You went to one kingdom! One! The one that’s right next to yours!

That’s right, we’re doing it for an NPC we knew for all of ten minutes! This is like how all of the NPCs in Final Fantasy 14 talk about Louisoix all the time, despite the fact that he was in one cutscene where he immediately dies from being fantasy nuked by Bahamut.

: “And I don’t care if we might not succeed! That’s no reason to give up!”

: “That’s right.”

: “Of course, it won’t be easy getting all of the countries of the world to sign our agreement. But if there’s even a chance of success, I have to try. And I’ll need all of your help to do it.”

And he’ll cry if he doesn’t get it, and then Roland will be very upset because the isekai realm version of his son who doesn’t exist in the final version of the plot didn’t get to live his non-canon son’s dream of taking over the world!

And with that, we’re off to Hydropolis! And by that, I mean Goldpaw again because Ni no Kuni 2 will be damned if it’s going to let you walk off without going through a bunch of padding!

: “Indeed it has. It is good to see you well. Since you so kindly shared Doloran’s identity and the details of his wicked scheme, my men have been working tirelessly to apprehend him… without success, I am sorry to say.”

Well no shit, the guy can teleport. How are you going to keep a teleporting man locked up?

: “Even now I cannot believe that he stole - that I allowed him to steal my Kingsbond. Whether I was manipulated or not, what happened was unforgivable.”

If you ask me why this cutscene exists, my best guess is that it was added near the end of development, probably around the same time that the final scene in the library was, because the writers realized that Pugnacius was kind of an asshole and got off scot-free.

: “I read somewhere that the majority of the taxes generated by Lady Luck are intended to help the poor. Is this true?”

I’d like to point you to the update directly above this one, where Roland reads about Goldpaw. I did not skip any of the text boxes for that segment. Nowhere does it mention this.

: “It is. And in my weakness, I allowed her noble purpose to be corrupted… but enough about my woes. How may I assist you?”

: “We came to ask you to join your kingdom with ours in the name of peace.”

: “All of the great nations agreeing on something? And something as momentous as this? The chances of such a plan succeeding are remote…”

: “But Goldpaw will stand beside you in your endeavor. After all, there would be no Goldpaw if not for you.”

: “That’s wonderful!”

: “Indeed. We must hope that Lady Luck agrees.”

Yep, he’s going there.

: “Are you kidding me?!”

: “I am not. In Goldpaw, all decisions are entrusted to fate, as you well know.”

So yeah, we’re going through this cutscene for… what is this, the sixth time now?

Lady Luck is the smartest person in the entire room.

: “The world is in danger. We stand together or fall apart. Goldpaw must join you.”

So yeah, the dice thing was a ruse the entire time. Why do they even have it then? Who the fuck knows.

Now it’s time for a cutscene we’re going to see three times in this game.

There’s one part of this cutscene I wasn’t able to capture, where it shows a mysterious green dragon next to Goldpaw’s kingmaker. You can sort of see part of it in the corner.

So yeah, we’ve got another step to go before we reach Hydropolis.

Fuck off!

: “Yes, I have Roland to thank for that. And Boddly.”

No, Pugnacius signed it because he had his heart torn out by a guy in a stupid-ass snake costume.

Dude, he’s like ten years old! Plus he’s a catboy, and there is no such thing as a straight catboy. Not even Rule 34 has come up with a straight catboy. They just don’t exist.

Yep, he’s gay.

Anyway, that guy has fucked off. Now what?

Hey, this is just a Legacy of Kain ripoff! Those are the pillars of Nosgoth!

You know, it’s real disappointing they didn’t get Tony Jay to voice Doloran.

Well, shit. Next time, we’re off to Capstan-upon-Hull. We also fight another superboss and basically triple Batu’s attack power.

[Timrod]

Update 26: Broken Gear Progression

Capstan is a good distance south of Goldpaw, so we’re going to have to walk.

The mountain pass separating Goldpaw and Capstan is pretty nondescript, and also full of enemies that are about our level. We don’t give a single fuck about them, but since they aggro I had to fight off a couple.

We also run into a new enemy type: fire incarnates. These have a truckload of HP compared to the wind ones in Cloudcoil Canyon, and also are virtually impossible to kill without using Evan’s water spell. If they’re not killed after a few minutes, they teleport away.

There’s an entire area off to the side of Capstan, which is going to be our destination soon enough. That dragon is level 50 and is pretty difficult even for an end-game party to handle.

Capstan itself is in an area surrounded by high plateaus that we can’t reach on foot. I wonder why that could be? Anyway, near the town is a tainted monster that we absolutely want to kill right now.

Yvan is a wyvern who acts pretty much like every other wyvern except-

Whoops, I forgot to turn the difficulty down and got oneshotted.

Anyway, Yvan is a wyvern who behaves like every other wyvern we’ve fought, except that he does about ten times the damage they do. A single hit from him on normal does about 350 damage to Roland.

Most of the time, he’s going to be on the ground swinging his axes around like a dumb asshole.

And just like the others, he’ll start flying, which means we need jump attacks or ranged to knock him to the ground. Fortunately, Yvan’s defense is really low.

He also has a divebomb that does a load of damage.

While the fight itself wasn’t terribly difficult, I did have to revive Tani and Batu once each - this is because the AI tends to stand around and try to shoot it, which leads to them taking some pretty major hits. Everyone gets a free levelup, and…

We get ourselves a bitchin’ hammer. How bitchin’, you ask?

It has over twice the attack rating the second-best hammer we have has. That’s how good it is. We won’t find a replacement for this hammer for a long, long time.

We could go into Capstan, but there’s a couple more superbosses I want to take down first. Tani has been hurting for a good weapon for some time now, and I think it’s time we got her one.

Near the exit from Cloudcoil Canyon is this area, which has a cave across a gap. I actually wound up doing this much too late in the game when I played the first time for the reward to be useful, but now’s the perfect time to do it.

To get there, you have to stand right here and mash the action button until you cast Bridge. There’s no prompt for it.

This makes a bridge so we can get across and kick this thing’s ass with Batu’s hammer.

Normally I’d advise against fighting any lightning-based flying monsters with a hammer, but a hammer’s what we’ve got.

This is Stormigan. Compared to Yvan, he’s a total pushover.

Stormigan spends the entire fight flying around, which allows Batu to jump and hit him for massive fucking damage.

His only attack is a charged projectile, which can be completely dodged by just standing behind him.

Evan and Batu level up, but more importantly…

We get a spear for Tani that doubles her attack power. Tani now has a higher attack rating than Roland does. Don’t worry - we’ll get Roland a good weapon soon… but we need a boat first.

I also went back and murdered Googah because fuck that piece of shit. It is completely identical to the other slime superboss we fought, only without the fire element. Batu’s hammer made short work of it, and everyone got another level-up.

Oh, and one more.

Right near Niall’s forest is this area, hidden to the side at the start of the bridges that lead to Niall’s tree. It’s basically a procedurally-generated maze that isn’t actually procedurally generated.

At the end is this fucker. We’re actually higher level than it is, so it’s clobbering time.

I couldn’t tell you what the actual strategy is here, because I had Batu charge up a hammer spin and knocked it unconcious, then beat it to a pulp in about ten seconds. We got about 3/4 of a level off it.

Welcome to Capstan-upon-Hull. It’s a largely unused area, with only a handful of later-game sidequests that revolve around crafting.

There are only a few NPCs here, including an item shop and an inn.

This is Wright, the shipbuilder.

: “Really? Has something happened?”

Sounds like free EXP! Let’s go kick that thing’s ass!

Making sure to grab the trip door on the way out, we can go destroy not only the story boss, but also another tainted monster.

Right near the shrine is another fairy-type tainted monster. With our party levelled and geared the way they are, we’ve essentially broken the game.

Lily is one of the easiest tainted monsters in the game. She sits perfectly still and shoots water balls directly in front of herself, so Batu just gets behind and shoves his foot straight up her ass.

Follow up with a charged hammer spin, and Lily is out of commission for quite some time, allowing Batu and Tani to beat the crap out of it.

I sacrified Batu to show off the only other attack Lily has: a charge forward that will probably instakill whoever it touches. Again, just sticking to her back will stop her from doing any kind of damage.

Not only does everyone in the active party get another level-up, we also get a pair of sandals that are almost as good as that armor Roland got earlier.

Combined with some drops from the common enemies in this area, we’ve gotten a pretty substantial power boost. If there were any other tainted monsters we could reach right now, you bet I’d be murdering them too.

At the end of the beach area is the shrine.

Gee, that sure looks like a boss arena. Good thing I never took the game off normal mode after doing the tainted monsters. Get ready for the dumbest possible logical conclusion ever.

Oh man, I remember this from Nioh. It’s one of those Joru-Gumo things, the half-woman, half-spider youkai. Turns out all you have to do is spam katana slashes on its spider bits and…

: “Umm… some kind of coccoon or egg or something?”

Where’s Bushido Bill when you need him?

: “W-what was that?”

: “Oh my gosh, there’s someone inside it!”

Yeah uh, bad news, that dude is probably liquefying by now.

: “Ye mean to say there’s people in ‘em? Every one o’ the blessed things?”

So… it’s a giant spider or a joru-gumo, right?

Nope! It’s a fucking squid! This makes about as much sense as uniting an entire country by force to end civil wars.

The Jelly Queen is a boss that’s more of an annoyance than an actual challenge, especially with our tainted monster equips.

Batu opens up with his new ranged skill, which launches an explosive arrow that knocks off about 500 damage.

The boss doesn’t move apart from jumping and turning…

And occasionally stopping to fire a fucking laser at people. These lasers do maybe 10 damage to Roland, but they do knock him over.

So yes, clearly this laser squid spun all those webs. Makes perfect sense… unlike Devious Vacuum, who is always funny and charming and capable of saying things that make sense. She’s pretty much the opposite of this trash game. Just trust me, the guy who is LPing a trash anime JRPG.

It also has a spinning multi-laser attack that can be avoided either by being far enough away from it or from being right up against it the way Roland is here.

Finally, it has a charge attack, which is super goddamn easy to avoid. The AI rushes in anyway.

The resulting explosion does minor damage, but also hits Tani and Batu with confusion.

Confusion lasts all of… I don’t know, two seconds? It mostly just makes the AI useless for a couple of seconds and that’s about it.

A few seconds later and the jelly queen dies.

For our efforts, we get a second bone mail that is just slightly worse than the one Roland has.

: “Is everybody safe? Mr. Wright was awfully worried about you all.”

Right. Capstan. Actually, it’s been over an hour, so I should probably go grab our stuff in kingdom management mode.

Back at Evermore, we find our third silver nugget for Fai Do, as well as enough KG to start researching the next tier of medicines for the general store (which we’ll want so we can continue our tainted monster hunts). Let’s just head back to Goldpaw quick and…

Holy shit is it ever sidequest grinding time. We want to do these ASAP because we’re currently making way more KG than we can hold and almost all of our buildings are currently locked behind kingdom level 2.

First, we hand in the silver to Fai Do. The armor he gives us is trash, just like he is.

Next up is this quest, to find Evan’s old tutor from Ding Dong Dell. Clearly she’s an idiot given how dumb Evan is, but we absolutely need her for kingdom level 3. Why, you ask?

Look at her ability. The Institute of Innovation is a building we can’t have until kingdom level 2, but it reduces the cost of all buildings across the board and also reduces the time it takes to do research.

Hetty is in Niall’s forest about to be eaten by wolves.

One Flatliner from Roland later and they’re all dead. Quest complete.

There’s a couple of other sidequests (including one that was clearly one of the initial sidequests that the writers came up with that they later removed when they decided Roland’s son wasn’t going to be a plot point) that I did to hit Kingdom Level 2, but I’ll show those off in the next update. For now…

Back in Evermore, Nu Bi and Fai Do now have sidequests available that award a decent amount of KG. There’s an entire chain for each of them - Nu Bi will want to see weapons of a certain quality (you can upgrade your existing weapons in the armory once you reach a high enough level but it’s never worth it) and Fai Do will do the same but for armor.

Nu Bi’s quest here is either a total pain in the ass that requires a ton of crafting materials or a breeze based on RNG. Thankfully, we found a rarity 5 hybrid bow on the way to the spider-squid, so that one gets completed. Fai Do’s quest can actually be completed… with the armor he gave us for recruiting him.

This brought the treasury to a whopping 15,000 KG… but we’re still short a bunch of people. So, what do we do?

After visiting Capstan for the first time, this guy shows up in all of the major cities. This guy is “Swift Solutions”, which is essentially an MMO-style turn in system. He has randomly-generated quests that usually ask for crafting items or specific weapons and award “tokens of gratitude” in return.

You can then spend the tokens to buy perfectly willing and not at all coerced by what is clearly a system of human traffickers citizens for Evermore carte blanche.

I got all of these except Fitch, who doesn’t really matter. There are two recruits we ABSOLUTELY WANT here: Yung Mein and Chi Pi.

Yung Mein has the first available spear unit for skirmish mode, and thus is invaluable for a couple of skirmishes we’ll need to do coming up (apart from one I had foolishly already done before this).

Chi Pi also has a military unit, but more importantly boosts Institute of Innovation.

Spiffing Smithing is an important skill, but there’s a ton of recruits with it.

Finally, it’s time.

Hell yeah, motherfucker. We absolutely, positively want to build the Institute of Innovation first. There’s only… one small problem.

To get it, we need Aranella Square.

Aranella Square is 25,000KG. We have 11,000 left over after upgrading to level 2. At this stage, since we’re now making close to 8,000KG an hour, the best thing to do is just leave the game running in the background until we can afford it.

I also upgraded the General Store, which is an absolute must for tainted monster hunting.

Doing this gives us a 10% discount on all items, and also makes Gerel the first place we can buy Three-Leafed Soreaway. Since we can only carry a limited amount of each healing item type into battle, this gives us a significantly more powerful healing option.

Next time, after I’ve burned myself out on Smash, we’ll grind grind grind grind grind until we’ve got that goddamn institute.

[Timrod]

Update 28: Sexual Innuendo

I’m going to skip the majority of the remaining open sidequests, mostly because they’re the kind of thing where your brain goes on autopilot after a few of them. This one, however, is different. Unlike the other ones, this is a sidequest that gives us nothing but an alternate outfit for Roland.

The “vicious monster” is a down-statted version of the level 50 dragons we saw near the shrine last update. In fact, we’re so overpowered right now that this thing went down before I even had a chance to take screenshots.

Seriously, this was one attack from Batu. Not even a crit, just a regular physical attack.

: “Hm? Is something wrong?”

: “Oh no, it’s just… I was thinking about when they told us what happened… you got ever so angry, Roland. I’ve never seen you like that before. You’re usually so calm and collected. What happened?”

What happened was that Roland realized the isekai kingdom had better guns than he did.

And then he became president and had them murdered by the CIA.

: “What?! You were bullied, Roland?”

: “Sure. I was a pretty small kid, so there was no way I could fight them off. Whatever they did to me, I had to take it.”

: “I was coming home from school crying every day, and my mom got worried. That was the worst part - I didn’t mind the bullying, but I hated seeing her like that.”

I have a feeling that this sidequest was originally part of the main story, back when the writers were still going with the “Evan is Roland’s isekai son” thing. The developers probably had already done it before the writers decided to go with the mess we actually got, and didn’t want to throw perfectly good code out so they just stuck it in as a sidequest.

: “So when I heard that lady say what she did… I guess it got to me pretty bad. Sorry. I shouldn’t have gotten carried away like that.”

So there you have it, the only time Roland will ever mention his son.

Our reward… is a really dumb looking samurai outfit for Roland. I equipped it immediately.

The other sidequests in Goldpaw, in case you were wondering, were purely for non-recruiting purposes. One rewards a cookbook for the kitchen (useless) and the other allows you to take on a tainted monster for some trash loot.

There was one quest I picked up in Evermore to go fight the Goldpaw army in a skirmish for 4200KG. I took this one mostly because it features Evan talking to himself.

All that aside, our skirmish army is now around level 12-13. There are only a handful of skirmish sidequests that actually recruit people, so we’re probably good for a while.

I also took the liberty of upgrading the coffers in kingdom management. We’re making over 10,000 an hour now and will probably have both Aranella Square and the Institute by the time I’m done with this update.

Anyway, back in Capstan, we get sent to yet another filler quest.

: “Hard-wearing wood, hmm? We’d better go speak to Niall.”

: “I think I know what ye might be after. Reckon ye could do a lot worse than an Ironbough tree or ten. They grow over in the Hard Woods.”

: “Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s go and get some!”

: “Aye, that ye could laddie, that ye could. But you’ll not be wantin’ to go strollin’ in there unprepared, believe me.”

Yeah, the “hard woods” sounds like it needs some lube.

: “And there’s no other way of getting to these ironbough trees other than going through this thing?”

Niall then gives us a bottle of plant killer. Geez, what is this guy into?

Right across from Niall’s tree is… a giant pair of balls.

The balls are inert.

What follows is an area that is almost identical to (but a bit shorter than) the one we went through to get to the dice factory. The only real difference is that we have our first dark-element enemies, which are just a recolor of the fairy enemies we’ve been fighting since Cloudcoil Canyon. I honestly couldn’t get a single screenshot of their attacks, because between Batu’s overpowered hammer and Tani’s new spear, they were dying in seconds even on Extreme.

There’s also a few of these mushroom spots that we’ve seen before.

At the top is a spot that I can only really describe as a bootleg copy of the Elder’s Recess from Monster Hunter World. There’s also a trip door and a save point, though we have absolutely no reason to ever come back here.

Uh-oh. Sounds like someone ordered a stupid repeat bossfight!

Zagg is somehow an easier, lightning-element version of Thogg, the boss we fought solo as Evan several chapters ago. Unlike Thogg, he has… no real attacks to speak of early on. He’ll sort of stumble around trying to punch people, but that’s about it.

Once he’s lost about a fifth of his health, Zagg will run up to the tree stumps and uh… do absolutely nothing. Seriously, you’d expect that he’d throw things or call down lightning or something, but instead he just sits there and occasionally jumps between stumps.

He’ll do this for a good… probably twenty seconds before deciding to charge up and bellyflop back into the arena. This not only is extremely easy to avoid, but also provides a huge opening to damage him.

Eventually, he performs a further ripoff of Monster Hunter by copying Kirin’s three-pronged lightning strike attack, only with way more time in between when the indicators show up and when the attack actually hits.

To make things even easier, the lightning doesn’t hit all at once - it starts at the spots closest to Zagg and works its way out.

One spinning hammer special from Batu later, and Zagg is dead.

Now, we could go warp right back to Capstan… but what’s this?

Back over by Niall’s tree, one of his underlings has a sidequest for us.

Muriel is pretty useless, and we’re still a pretty long way from kingdom level 3, so we’re going to backburner this for just a bit.

The reason for that is that we can get a load of KG right now by doing a skirmish battle. This skirmish is particularly noteworthy because it’s level 20 and located right next to Evermore. In fact, this was the one I used to grind my army up from level 6 or so when I played this the first time.

No surprise, it’s that guy who we tried to murder in order to steal his land.

I won’t bother showing this one off mostly because the site is being extremely temperamental about accepting my screenshots of skirmish mode, but it’s good to know about if you want to get ahead in kingdom management. 4200KG is almost a third of what we make an hour.

With the money from that quest, we’re able to immediately build Aranella Square. This is the key to getting your influence points up, and more importantly getting that institute so we can lower the costs on future upgrades. For comparison, upgrading Aranella Square to level 2 is 120,000 KG.

Even with a single capacity upgrade, we’re still making more than we can hold an hour. Aranella Square accounts for roughly 40% of our income right now.

While we wait for more money to build that goddamn institute, let’s head to the Jumblewoods and save Muriel. The Jumblewoods is actually a special location of sorts.

Muriel won’t come with us until we save her dipshit animal.

Now, Batu can clearly see that there are two forks in the road, and the quest arrow is pointing to the one on the right. However, if we go the other way…

We run into… oh god. Evan, close your eyes.

So yes, this is uh… “Mr. Higglesworth”, who is not at all a flasher and did not by any means arrive in the Jumblewoods in a windowless van.

I mean, he says he’s a higgledy. Checks out.

Mr. Higglesworth will uh… offer us candy for ten pebbles. Pebbles are an incredibly common drop both from gathering points on the map as well as from the mining camps in Evermore. Batu, you should uh, probably take Tani and leave.

His candies give minor boosts to certain stats, and are generally worth it if you have a ton of pebbles to offload. Eventually, we’ll have tons of useless citizens to send to the gulags, so we’ll have a bunch.

Muriel’s llapaca is on the other side of the map, surrounded by enemies that are too low-level to want to fight us.

In the time it took me to to do that, we made enough KG to get the institute. Not only is it worth a fair chunk of change per hour (1200 or so) but it also gets us the single best research item in the game.

1200 KG for a 20% discount on all buildings and upgrades. Considering that Aranella Square costs 120,000 to level up, this saves us more on that alone than it costs to do the research. This is why you ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY want to make sure you have Chi Pi and Henny if you don’t already.

So yeah, we’re now raking in almost 19,000 KG an hour. The most efficient thing to do is save that income until the institute finishes its research. By the way, good luck figuring any of this out without having played the game before. Our next step will be to grind influence until we can afford to upgrade the institute, which at level 2 or 3 (I forget which) offers us a second cheap research item that reduces the time and cost of all research.

By the way, while working on this update, the first paid DLC for this game launched. It’s $10 for a single procedurally generated dungeon. The boss at the end is a copy-paste of the Black Knight from the beginning of the game. It also has “voiced cutscenes that delve into each character’s past” as if we’d want to know more about these dipshits.

Enough about that shit though, let’s get on with this trainwreck of a game.

You know, I figured there was enough innuendo in this chapter already, but I guess not.

I like that Boy Sampson is actively trying to make Batu’s life harder, and that Roland can’t even be bothered to help at all.

We then get our new boat… after a cutscene that warps us to Evermore. There’s more to it than this, but I’m skipping a lot of it because it’s not really important.

Also, Ketch joins us. Ketch is borderline useless. His only skill is operating the boat workshop, which gets superseded immediately after we leave Hydropolis.

: “It’s a nation built on the ocean, where merfolk and humans live side by side. And it’s ruled over by a queen named Nerea.”

You know, they had that in Monster Girl Quest. It was one of the least body-horror centric parts of the game, though it had a lot of copy-pasted art assets. Strangely, it also had no plot holes, which Hydropolis has a FUCKLOAD of. I wish I could be LPing Monster Girl Quest right now.

: “As for the food, I hear the fish is very good this time of year.”

Roland reveals his secret vore fetish.

We now have our first vehicle: the boat. The trick to the boat (which the game never mentions in the tutorial for it) is that you can hold down shift to make it go faster.

Instead of going right to Hydropolis though, we’re going to head upriver. Just north of Evermore is a waterway that eventually dumps you out here, at the Dugout.

Going straight down the middle path leads us to another tainted monster.

At this point, all I had to do was have Batu charge up his hammer spin and just let loose.

Whammity is a bog-standard whamster with a club. Easily knocked down, low defense.

Everyone but Tani gets a levelup… and Roland gets a sword that is only slightly better than a random drop I got somewhere and forgot about. The nice part though is that it has confusion on it, and a very high chance of inflicting it. Confusion works better on enemies than it does on the party, so we’ll definitely get some use out of it.

Next time, we’ll head to Hydropolis.

[CommanderKeene]

Wow, an RPG where confusion isn’t useless in the player’s hands? I guess this game had to get something right.

[Timrod]

Update 29: A Blatant Draken-NieR Ripoff

Before we leave Evermore, I dicked around for a couple of minutes to build up some KG. Why, you ask? So I could upgrade the Institute to level 2 and start its second research project… which reduces research costs by 20%.

Basically, from here on out, if there’s ever a question as to what we’re upgrading in kingdom management mode, the answer is probably the institute.

Wow, an RPG where confusion isn’t useless in the player’s hands? I guess this game had to get something right.

You’re damn right it’s not useless. Confusion isn’t really what you’d think - it’s really a stun effect. Allow me to demonstrate how good it is by fighting a particularly annoying tainted monster with it.

Right near Capstan, on an island that blocks us from reaching the other side of the world by boat, is this fucker. Notice how it is surrounded by level 50+ dragons. We want to avoid those.

Quilla is a giant hedgehound whose primary means of attack is being fucking annoying.

It spends most of its time either dashing or jumping, and moves quickly enough that Batu has trouble keeping up with it.

However, with Roland’s new sword, Quilla gets stunned on practically every other hit. This allows Batu to use some charged specials that he otherwise wouldn’t be able to hit with.

Batu makes it eat dirt, and then as soon as it gets up…

That’s right, Roland stunlocks its ass to death, giving everyone about half a level-up.

As a reward, we get a gun for Roland that has freeze on it. While we have a pistol that does slightly more damage, this one will turn Roland into a stunlock machine when combined with his sword.

That tainted monster is the last one we can reach before the Hydropolis area, so let’s press onward. On the sea, every monster shows up as a blob. There’s nothing new here per se - the enemies are all recolors of ones we’ve already fought.

There’s a water-element skeleplasm, a water-element goo, and a water-element fairy enemy… and that’s about it. By the way, I should mention that Roland’s newfound ability to stunlock shit also applies to his special attacks - that means we can open with a Flatliner and potentially confuse several enemies (you can see one of the enemies in the front has it here).

As we near the middle of the ocean, this giant coral area that is blatantly not a Nausicaa ripoff appears.

We can’t land on any of the corals, so we’re forced to go to a nearby beach.

There’s a trip door right there that we can grab, which is good because by this point the coffers in kingdom management mode were almost full and I had to go empty them.

First, we need to go up these corals. There’s a few tainted monsters here - neither of them offer anything great - and a Dreamer’s Maze.

The first tainted monster is in a clearing just after starting the climb. It’s a whamster.

Grimpopo is level 37, which puts him significantly above our level 33-34 party. Fortunately, he’s extremely vulnerable to confusion and gets knocked down with ANY special attack even if it’s not charged. Strategy here is to go for a flatliner, hit him a few times, and then flatliner as he gets back up.

You’ll want to do this as his only real attack is charging an explosive arrow with an insane AOE that does a truckload of damage.

As our reward, everyone levels up and Batu gets his own means of stunlocking shit to death. I should mention that I used some of the money in kingdom management to build the training ground, which is another thing you’ll probably want to build sooner rather than later.

You can probably guess why.

A bit further up and we find the third dreamer’s maze inside this shrine, which also houses a tainted monster. On the way, we also encounter a new enemy.

Meet the Stellar Jelly. It’s the regular enemy version of the spider-squid we fought near Capstan. It attacks in more or less the same ways the boss did, but its jump has a shockwave and it has a flying headbutt.

The maze is to the south, while the tainted monster is to the east.

Yeah, it’s another one of these fucks. Thankfully, the water-element slimes don’t seem to harden as often as the other types. Other than that, it’s exactly the same as the ones we’ve fought before.

The reward isn’t even good - it turns all of Roland’s attacks to water element. Using this in a land of monsters that are immune to water makes about as much sense as this game’s plot.

Even further up is this cave, which is used for I think a sidequest later on, but there’s one thing inside I do want to show off, because I didn’t figure this shit out until I looked it up near the end of my first run.

See that green thing in the back? That’s a “lost spirit”. They’re supposed to be a source of lore, but most of them don’t have anything important to say. In fact, they won’t talk to us AT ALL right now.

To speak to them, we first need to upgrade the spellworks to level 2. 4000 KG is pocket change at this point (we’re making almost 30k an hour). We also need Hau Ling, who is a citizen I picked up in Goldpaw during that last sidequest run. Hau Ling’s quest is extremely straightforward: you run around talking to people in town and find out he has a guy impersonating him, then he joins you.

The spell itself costs another 5400, and that’s with our 20% discount. That’s a much steeper price to pay, but I’ll do it for two reasons: one, we need it for a single sidequest after we finish Hydropolis. Two, I never bothered talking to any of the spirits in my first run.

I also built the Kingmaker’s Cathedral, which is largely useless except for its notable cost - influence ratio and the fact that you need it to unlock one of the major influence generators later on. The ONLY reason I’m showing this off…

Innuendo!

One other thing in this quick kingdom management roundup: once we reached kingdom level 2, we unlocked the ability to build better versions of each resource-gathering building. The reason we want to do this is because some buildings later require us to level up our citizens, and the higher-level resource buildings give more EXP.

Hydropolis is just north-east of Makronos, the island we were just on. We didn’t actually need to go through Makronos, but it’s good that we did.

Welcome to Plotholia, where the risen corpse of Ni no Kuni 2’s plot goes to die, so that other fledgling game plots might feast on its remains and flourish. Pay no attention to the giant Eye of Sauron in the background.

: “It’s ever so pretty, and the weather is so lovely and warm and… ah!”

: “L-Lovely me, I’ve never been so seasick in all me days…”

I wonder what that could be about?

: “A pretty gift from back home an’ a few sweet words’ll do the job nicely enough, I’d wager.”

Meanwhile, in a blatant ripoff of Drakengard 3…

So, remember Four and Decadus? Yeah, that’s pretty much exactly who these two are, albeit more family-friendly.

: “Without you, our nation would be nothing, Your Majesty. I above all others know this.”

There’s something I want you to think about with this conversation, and it’s this: think about how fucking weird it is for two characters to be explaining something they both already know to each other. What’s worse is that we’ll totally get this explained to us a second time IMMEDIATELY AFTER THIS CUTSCENE.

: “If they did, then… what, exactly?”

: “Then your life would be in danger. Malign forces would plot your downfall. This is the way of power.”

: “So I put myself forward. If the people see me… deal with me… they can only become discontented with me. Can only wish to harm me.”

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Pugnacius had the whole purple corruption aura when we first saw him, and clearly Nerea is going to have the same thing. Wrong. Even then, it wasn’t like Doloran was possessing him.

: “Not without reason, your majesty. But if it would prolong your life for a single second, that would be reason enough. Such a death would bring honor on me. Upon my entire line.”

What really bothers me about Nerea is not only that she’s a blatant Intoner ripoff, but also that she doesn’t have a fucking nose. She’s supposed to be human, by the way. Evan is the only furry-human hybrid in the entire world.

: “You are too kind, your majesty.”

: “Well? You wished to see me?”

: “Yes, your majesty. A ship has arrived from a foreign land. It is a vessel unknown to us, but most likely it brings travelers… or perhaps traders.”

: “Is that so? Well, whoever they are, they must obey the word of the law. There will be no exceptions. Is that understood?”

We get about maybe three steps into the city before another cutscene.

Now we know what the Eye of Sauron is for.

: “We’ve traveled here from Evermore, a new country in the Heartlands. We’d like to request an audience with Queen Nerea.”

I mean, we can’t have Zero killing her off before we get there.

: “Something tells me news of our illustrious kingdom hasn’t spread too far yet.”

: “Well, it will have soon! They’ll be singin’ our praises from the rooftops next time we’re here!”

This next part will be… pretty familiar to you if you’ve played NieR or read The Dark Id’s excellent LP of it.

Well damn, illegal to blast this fucker in the face to make him shut up.

…what? There’s no actual indication of how high we can go, but we can go everywhere in Hydropolis (as far as I know) without any issues so it has no real gameplay impact.

I, uh… you know… it seems like you’d probably have thrown half your population into the dungeons at that point.

If you had any hope of the people in Hydropolis being any less stupid than the people in Goldpaw, yeah no.

: “Wait, wait, what, what did you say? That’s crazy!”

Even Roland, the president who probably had the CIA take his childhood bullies to a blacksite and execute them, thinks this is nuts.

Next time, we’ll explore Hydropolis, do a mandatory “sidequest”, and probably start heading toward the second dungeon.

By the end of this update (I left the game running so I could get that spirit spell done) we have a pretty significant chunk of income. Because I’ve grinded kingdom management so hard, we’re well beyond where I was at this point in my first playthrough. I also took the liberty of upgrading the Institute (again) and getting a thing that makes research faster.

I also went back to that spirit (ignore the active quest) and talked to it.

Riveting stuff that is absolutely worth the 5400KG.

[Timrod]

Update 30: The Priests of the Temples of Syrinx

As soon as that cutscene ends, we’re given a new mission - go to each corner of the city and talk to people. If you’ve played Final Fantasy 14, you’ll recognize this as the quest each major city has to find all of the warp points in it.

Gee, I wonder if that has anything to do with the giant fucking eyeball that is visible from anywhere in the city.

Wait a second. Ocean kingdom, has a unique marriage-related item… we’re in what Super Mario Odyssey might’ve been had it been a shitty anime JRPG.

I kind of wonder if at one point this area was intended to be a homage to the Japanese folktale of Momotaro, which involves an underwater palace full of dragons.

: “No, but we sure heard a lot about this Leander character.”

: “Ye’re thinkin’ the swab might be our way in?”

: “Interesting. Yeah, if we can get to him, we might be able to use him to get one step closer to the queen.”

: “But how would we get to him?”

: “…Ooh, I know! Me, me, ask me! Actually… I’ll fill you in on the details in a bit. Let’s get us one of those thingumybobs first, shall we?”

: “What?”

: “Yeah, exactly! Let’s try somewhere that sells accessories and all that. Reckon they might have one by there…”

Now we get a mandatory delivery sidequest. That soreaway sweet is something we’re going to want for later tainted monster fights - it’s NNK2’s equivalent of an X-Potion. We can buy them from Gerel’s store much later on… after we reach kingdom level 3.

The three deliveries are located in almost exactly the same spots as the people we talked to before.

This guy tells us the origin of the “no high places” rule, which actually does prohibit us from going into one particular area.

With that done, we get ourselves a wedding ring… and a cutscene that seems like something that’d be in Lupin III if Lupin was ten years old and a complete idiot.

In case you’re curious, this shot is ripped straight from Lupin III Part 2 - specifically the end credits.

Evan is now in a disco outfit for some reason.

Also Boy Sampson is now a film director despite there being no mention of film existing in the isekai realm.

I wish I had recorded this because he walks like a robot and it’s kinda hilarious.

I feel like this should be an early 2000s-era Youtube Poop.

Man, it’d fucking rock if instead of going the way everyone thinks it is, Evan just fucking decks her off the bridge. That’s what you get for trying to ruin Princess Mononoke.

: “Oh, get on with it, will you? It’s just make-believe!”

: “Y-Yes! O-Of course. I um… ahem… I…”

Man, he REALLY has to shit.

Now, there’s something I want you to keep in mind about this scene for later. Neither Evan nor Tani are from Hydropolis, and there’s no clear reason they’d want to settle down in Hydropolis. This will become part of a bigger plot hole when we find out why it is that they have the law against love.

Oh shit, it’s the anime police! Hide the h-manga!

Yeah, why won’t the police crack down on anime crimes? This used to be a nice neighborhood!

Thankfully, these horrible criminals are promptly taken to anime jail.

: “Jail indeed, my boy! Which means my plan went off without a hitch!”

: “Hmm… if that be so, where’s this Leander swab then?”

: “What business do you have with the Archon?”

: “Are… are you Leander?”

Well, that’s what his dialog box title says.

: “I am.”

: “Yay! We finally got to meet him!”

: “My apologies. We were forced to use a little… artifice to gain your attention.”

: “…is that so? And why would you go to such lengths? Who are you?”

: “I am Evan Pettiwhisker Tildrum, King of Evermore. And I’ve come to ask you to sign a treaty.”

: “If you speak of a union, I am afraid I must refuse. If it were up to me, yes, but Her Majesty has ordered that you be brought before her.”

So here we are, in the royal palace of Queen Dipshit of Plotholia.

: “We cannot, Your Majesty. To enter into a union would be… I must advise against it.”

I like how in his previous line, he says he’d do it, and now he’s saying he wouldn’t. I don’t know if this is just a bad translation or if Leander is just an idiot.

: “Silence, Leander. I have but one condition…”

: “Really?”

: “Yes. Leander will join you.”

: “So… where exactly is this labyrinth?”

: “It lies in the sea south-east of Hydropolis.”

With that, Leander joins the party as a “temporary” member (hint: there are no actual temporary party members in this game).

Like Tani, Leander uses spears as his primary weapon. His ranged weapon type is magic wands, which would eliminate the overlap of ranged weapons between Tani and Batu if we were to get rid of Tani.

Tani’s stats, for comparison.

I couldn’t get a screen of Leander’s skills due to a glitch introduced with the new DLC that causes the game to not let you change equipment or view skills, but he’s more magic-based than Tani. He has a few elemental ranged attacks like Evan does, which would make him invaluable against goo-type enemies.

At this point, I’ll be taking votes on a potential party reshuffle while I wait for Level 5 to make the game playable again. Post your vote in the thread.

[CommanderKeene]

Well, Evan needs to be the one to kill the monster, and Leander needs to bear witness. That’s how this works, right? As for the last party member, I dunno, let’s not split Roland and his isekai not-son up.

[Timrod]

Update 31: EcoQuest II - The Search for Cetus

I’m probably only getting one vote, so we’re going with Evan, Roland, and Leander. This won’t change too much apart from the fact that since Evan and Roland have weapon overlaps, we’ll have to stick with one or the other. As it turns out, the way around the menu bug is simply pressing G, which is never mentioned anywhere in the game. Great job on that, Level 5.

Here’s a rundown of Leander’s skills. He’s pretty much useless skill-wise right now because his only magic attack is water-based. I’ll probably replace him with Batu (or our final party member) once we finish the upcoming dungeon. His second skill boosts his magic damage, while his first and third skill are physical attacks with his spear.

Before we head out to fight Cetus, I went ahead and did some kingdom management stuff - most notably increasing the coffer size to 30,000 so I don’t have to collect as often. We’re still well over the limit we can hold per hour though.

I also finished off everything we can currently build in Aranella Square, which includes a bar for Batu. He’ll actually ask you for it if you talk to him on the kingdom map.

He even makes a Leafbook post about how much he loves beer. You just know that Evan is going to pass a law that lowers the drinking age to 10, and Roland will realize how bad of an idea letting a kid run a kingdom is.

One thing I didn’t show is the big whirlpool right outside of Hydropolis. This will become relevant… shortly.

Cetus is on an island that is so far away from Hydropolis that you can’t even see the city from it. This island is only ever used for this one segment, and a couple of sidequests later on. We’ve explored about 3/5 of the map at this point.

So, are we in for a boss fight? A dungeon? NOPE! It’s skirmish time!

I don’t know if the site will let me post the skirmish mode screenshots since I’ve had a bit of an issue doing that recently. As you can see, I grinded the army up a fair bit doing that one sidequest for KG earlier. We want to take two hammers to counter their spears, a sword to counter their hammers, and a spear because swords are weak to spears and we don’t want two units of swords.

This fight is against units of ghostly mer-people who decided to build palisades and shit for no reason. Because our hammers are so high-level and because hammers are strong against spears, we destroy them without even taking a hit.

The real threat comes from their monster units, which are a class of enemy called “fangfish”. We won’t actually fight these in regular battle format for a while, and they only appear in a handful of optional skirmishes.

Fangfish have the annoying ability to burrow underground, where they stay for a few seconds before popping up and instakilling any units caught in their radius. This can be quite annoying if they’re the last enemy you need to kill to progress, or if your military might is low because even if you give the order to sprint away as soon as you see it dive down, your units won’t likely be fast enough to run away in time.

Just beyond the end of the skirmish is this area, which looks like a boss arena (because it is).

: “Fearsome though he may be, Cetus is no threat to Hydropolis. So why risk all our lives on this errand?”

: “There must have been an important reason for the queen to have sent you, Leander.”

Meet Cetus. He’s a reskinned version of the fangfish. I didn’t fight too many fangfish in my first playthrough so I don’t remember if their moveset is the same.

Just like in skirmish mode, Cetus likes to burrow underground.

He’ll then come out at an angle and try to bite people. On normal, this does piddling damage.

When he goes below half health, Cetus will start tossing around kelp pods when he burrows. This is a total joke of an attack - the green ones do no damage and drop craft items when broken, and the red ones take forever to explode for maybe 150 damage. You’d basically have to be trying to get hit by this.

Batu and Evan both level up, and we’re more or less done with this area.

: “Which means we can get Hydropolis to sign the declaration now, right?”

: “Assuming the queen is as good as her word, yes.”

It looks like Evan’s head has come detached from his neck in that pose. It’s definitely one of the ways in which the anime-shading really doesn’t work well.

: “The Ocean’s Aether… so this is what her majesty meant for us to retrieve. Could she really intend to…”

: “Is everything alright, Leander?”

: “…Yes. Very much so. Let us return to the palace.”

I’ve got twenty bucks this is going to be one of those “You will NEVER… believe… what happened” situations. I want to make a JRPG someday where the main character leaves his idyllic fantasy town for a day and comes back to some guy shouting that, only instead of the village being on fire and everyone being dead somebody had a baby or something.

So remember when I said that we had explored about 3/4 of the map? Right now, we’re on that purple island in the bottom-right corner. Thankfully, we can just trip door back to Hydropolis and actually land right on the trigger for the next cutscene.

Who ever could have seen this coming?

: “The Abyss? But…”

: “The vortex in front of the entrance was placed by the queen herself, and only she could have removed it.”

: “So she’s gone into the abyss for some reason?”

Probably to escape this godawful plot.

: “It would seem so. But for what? What reason could she possibly have for making the perilous journey to the king’s cradle?”

: “I don’t like the sound of this. Could this be Doloran’s doing?”

Evan is slowly devolving into Kazuhira Miller. Next thing you know he’ll be waving his fist and blaming Cipher for everything.

Anyway, we can now venture out where that giant whirlpool used to be.

Welcome to the Abyss. This dungeon is godawful, but it’s not nearly as bad as the third one - mostly because we only have to go through it once.

The first thing about this dungeon that is really fucking weird is that Leander points out that we can destroy the red corals. There are, as far as I know, only two of these and they happen to be right here. You can just walk around them.

But the real reason this dungeon sucks is because of these things. These are “puffer whelks”.

Leander then gives us a spell that we’ll only ever use in this one dungeon. What does it do, you ask?

It makes the water into a grind rail. Strangely enough, it’s possible to grind upward to get back to the exit… though since trip doors exist, there’s no reason to do it.

Now I know what you might be asking: did I take screenshots of Roland and Leander grinding? The answer is yes, yes I did.

Anyway, this dungeon is basically a clusterfuck, because once you start activating the whelks there’s no easy way to see which one leads where. Fortunately, the game gives a quest marker at the ones you’ll need to activate to progress.

Leander looks like he has a promising career in early 90s rap ahead of him.

The rest of this dungeon is basically “go to quest marker, fight a single group of enemies, activate whelk, repeat” for about 15 minutes or so.

We do get a few armor upgrades and sword for Evan that has better stats than Roland’s, but without the confusion. By the way, I did get hit with confusion from one of the Stellar Jellies on purpose and it inverts your movement controls.

The weird part of this is that there are whamsters in here somehow, despite the fact that until about ten minutes ago this dungeon was sealed with an impassable whirlpool. The goo enemies and squids I can understand, but how the fuck did the hamsters get in?

Eventually, we reach the bottom. There’s a trip door and a save point in case you need to return to Evermore (I did to spend KG) and then…

A grind into the void. Next time, we’ll fight Leviathan of Final Fantasy 14 fame.

[Timrod]

Update 32: Squall Is Dead

At the bottom of the grind void is, of course, a grassy field with a giant shell on it. Makes total sense, with all that sunlight at the bottom of the ocean.

I think a question a lot of you probably have is “Was Nerea possessed the entire time?” and actually, as far as I understand it the answer is no - Doloran possessed her only after we left to kill Cetus.

Wait a second… haven’t I seen this somewhere before?

Somehow, it’s less threatening when you’re using bubbles instead of giant ice spears. Honestly, what is that even going to do, other than maybe get people wet?

Leander, never one for a water balloon fight, immediately puts up a Cutscene Barrier to block the completely non-threatening projectiles. This is not an ability he learns in actual combat at any point.

Top ten anime betrayals. Also holy SHIT is she smug.

No shit, dumbass! She knows and that’s why she launched a bunch of water your way!

: “Please, you must come to your senses!”

She calls him daddy now.

: “Your queen is gone. Henceforth, she shall be my puppet. Nothing more.”

Gotta love Roland with the “Don’t talk to me or my isekai realm not-son ever again” pose.

: “Hm! Tell me - why do you even care? Her people think little of her. She is powerless. Weak. Unloved.”

: “Hydropolis would be nothing without its queen.”

: “And why is that?”

: “Even if I were inclined to tell you, you would not understand.”

We’ll learn the reason right after this bossfight. It’s extremely simple, and also extremely stupid.

Doloran is loving this shit.

: “I surrender to none but her majesty!”

I actually did this update once before, then the site lost it. I’m too lazy to look it up again, so go youtube the Leviathan theme from FF14 (the female vocals one is the best version) and play it here because it is infinitely better than the generic orchestral shit NNK2 gives us.

Oh look, it’s Discount Leviathan! Did someone order up a stupid MMO bossfight, because I think someone ordered up a stupid MMO bossfight.

Discount Leviathan is a boss that is slightly more complex than Longfang was, but still manages to be more tedious than anything.

He starts off the fight in air, which of course makes perfect sense for a creature with no visible means of flight.

As you can see, he has three weak spots: two on his middle set of fins and one on his chest. We have no way of hitting these while he’s flying: even Roland’s gun isn’t accurate enough.

Thankfully, when he lands, Discount Leviathan’s weak spots shift to his upper set of arms for no good reason whatsoever.

Discount Leviathan then takes a page straight out of Vaal Hazak’s playbook and starts firing a laser in a 45-degree or so arc in front of him. Since you’re naturally going to go for the glowing weak spots, the chances of ever being hit by this are slim to none.

After a few hits, the weak spot on this side breaks, and Discount Leviathan takes off again. This is the one spot that’s actually difficult on Extreme: he has a MASSIVE hitbox when taking off that does enough contact damage to oneshot the entire party - something that’s more likely to happen than not given how the AI behaves.

The cycle then repeats on the other side: he fires his laser, you run to the side and slice the weakpoint in half, and then…

A weak point on his head opens up. I didn’t show it off (mostly because it’s very hard to see when you’re hitting something with it) but Evan learned a new skill that is essentially a multi-hit combo done in a large area in front of him without him moving much.

Said skill also has a power rating of 120, which is about triple what Roland’s Flatliner or Circle Cut have.

After one good hit, the boss decides he’s had enough of this shit and puts up a barrier over his health bar while at the same time filling the area with ice spears.

The spears break in a few hits each, and drop higmakers the same way the meteors in Longfang’s fight did.

You can activate the higmakers with as few as three gathered, but the more you have, the faster this fight goes. Discount Leviathan spends this time flying around and shooting very slow-moving ice projectiles that will never hit you.

Activating the higmakers gets us… a minisentry from Team Fortress 2, only flying.

The minisentry has a targeting reticule, and will constantly fire pellets at whatever you’re aiming at with no input needed. All we need to do is hit the boss, which quickly depletes his barrier.

The next part is a little harder: we then have to hit the weak spots on his fins and chest with the sentry, which requires leading your shots a bit. You might also notice that the blue liquid in the sentry is at about half. The more higmakers you collect, the longer the sentry lasts.

Busting the weak points forces the boss to land again, and allows Evan to use his new ability to hit for tons of damage again.

Repeating this for a second cycle sends Discount Leviathan back to the bargain bin from whence he came, and levels everyone up.

: “I am fine, Leander. Cease your fussing.”

: “Not one, but two Kingmakers have fallen at your hand. Impressive. But it matters little. I have what I came for.”

: “It is no more than she deserves. Without her, our nation would be nothing.”

: “So you keep saying. But what do you mean by that, exactly?”

: “…Very well. Perhaps it is time you knew the truth.”

So yeah, if you thought Evan was a dipshit for building his kingdom for dipshits in a barren land with no resources or that Goldpaw was the dumbest the isekai realm could possibly get, think again.

: “It is her gaze that protects us. Her magic, channeled through the great, watchful power of the Eye, that turns back time to save us again and again…”

: “But there is one great problem with this method of survival.”

Remember when I said Hydropolis was a giant plot hole? Now you see why.

: “So that’s what all the laws were about…”

: “One more life or one less, and it all comes tumblin’ down, eh?”

Now, what I want to know is, what was the logic behind throwing Evan in the dungeon? If they have to reset time every so often, wouldn’t there be the distinct possibility that Evan’s existence fucks everything up if they left him there?

Oh yeah, everyone in Hydropolis is also 300-plus years old and yet somehow no one there realizes what’s going on. Clearly, the time warp doesn’t erase people’s memories because Leander knows about it, but you’d think after people had celebrated 299 birthdays they’d start realizing something was up. Then again, there was that episode of Space Dandy where they got caught in a groundhog day loop for like six years and didn’t realize it.

: “You too would be short of temper. You too would vent your frustrations on those around you. But all that she has done, she has done for us. All that she has sacrificed, she sacrificed for her beloved subjects.”

: “Y-your majesty! You are unharmed, I hope!”

: “You did. You knew all along.”

: “…Yes. And so I vowed to serve you, no matter what.”

: “…I see.”

: “But the cracks are beginning to show at last. I fear that Hydropolis does not have long…”

What cracks? What fucking cracks? This is another one of those tell don’t show bits where the writers just kind of hoped people wouldn’t ask too many questions. Just like all those wars going on outside that are never shown at any point in the game or mentioned by anyone.

: “Indeed. And that is why we need the Aether.”

There’s also no explanation for why they couldn’t just, I dunno, load everyone onto boats and move somewhere that isn’t on top of an active volcano.

: “… it is?”

: “Do you remember the promise we made together as children, Leander?”

I would be amazed if he did, given that it was probably over three hundred years ago.

Oh boy, a sequence that has absolutely fuck-all to do with anything! I watched a playthrough of The Quiet Man recently and I think even that game had a narrative that was more together than this shit.

Here’s my theory about this. Someone at Level 5 had probably just replayed Final Fantasy 8 and when asked what the fuck they should do to fill the other half of the game, they just went “Uh, I dunno, FF8?”

: “How could I forget? It is my most cherished memory, and the reason I gave my life to you in service.”

My other theory is that Ifrit or Shiva or something slipped into the isekai realm and equipped themselves to everyone as a guardian force and that’s why literally everyone in Ni no Kuni 2 has brain problems.

: “But that was not what I asked of you. I asked you to become my husband. My king.”

I’d also like to point out that if Leander marries her (he will), that makes our party consist of a child-king, a president, a pirate king, and the king of all dipshits. Clearly a party of all royalty can relate to the struggles of the common man. Let them eat cake and all that.

: “But the law of Hydropolis forbids it. I could not become king. I cannot.”

: “Do not pretend, Leander. You know. You know better than any man of this realm. Whosoever possesses the Aether possesses the right to rule. It was the first king of Hydropolis who brought it back with him, and with it claimed his crown.”

: “But your majesty… I cannot.”

: “Why? For the sake of the kingdom? If we are joined in marriage, then all must end. Time cannot repeat itself. Hydropolis must fade.”

: “Yes, and I cannot allow that to happen.”

: “Let go, Leander.”

: “It should have happened long ago… but I could not let it. I had to have one last day by your side. Again, and again…”

And IF it brings your destruction? Don’t you already know that’s going to happen?

: “… Your mind is made up then?”

: “It is. So come take your place by my side. Be my husband… my king.”

: “…I will.”

And with that, we abandon any illusion that we were at any point going to get rid of Leander.

We also get to see that stupid cutscene again… next time, when we proceed to the latter half of this game. That’s right, we’re halfway done with this trash fire.

[CommanderKeene]

He starts off the fight in air, which of course makes perfect sense for a creature with no visible means of flight.

Asian dragons don’t even pay lip service to the laws of physics, unlike their Western cousins.

And with that, we abandon any illusion that we were at any point going to get rid of Leander.

The game just straight-up abandons all pretense, just like that? He doesn’t even have any real reason to keep traveling with Evan and co. Are we just supposed to believe that he’s that enamored with the whole “treaty” business? Is an explanation forthcoming? This brings up more questions than the goddamned stable time loop business!