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!”
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.