YMMV / Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom

• Anti-Climax Boss: For somebody that Nella states that she could not even beat, the Black Knight was easily taken down by Roland's gunshot causing him to fall down to his death.
• Angst? What Angst?: Roland is nearly killed in a nuclear attack that doomed any chance his world had at peace, was magically transported to a new world with no explanation and is separated from his young, sickly son who has possibly died in his absence. Despite all this, Roland is notably cool and collected throughout most of the game and quickly accepts and adapts to his situation with stride.
• Applicability: People who believe that the European Union has a purpose beyond being a bureaucratically managed trading bloc may see parallels with Evan's desire to form a peaceful union of former enemies.
• Ass Pull: The reveal that the "curious boy" is not only Evan's future son, but King Ferdinand who inspired Evan to unite the world in the first place. While it's obvious that the curious boy is from the future and knows Evan as an adult as early as the end of Chapter 5 if not earlier, the exact circumstances come out of left field.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The Black Knight transforming into a gigantic mouse centaur creature lines up with what extreme exposure to Darkness could do in the first game. Here, however, it's a single isolated incident given no explanation and is never seen happening again.
• Best Boss Ever: One criticism of this game is that the bosses don't fit this trope as much as the previous game, with most being simple Tank-And-Spank or Elite Mooks. However, there are some exceptions:
  • The Kingmakers - Due to having a unique gimmick for each fight (that comes back), being very frantic, and for rewarding the players who manage to smack their weak spots.
  • The Imp Queen in the Ding Dong Dell arc. Like most bosses, she is a trash mob on steroids. But unlike most of the minibosses, she summons adds that can heal her, and floods the stage with all sorts of powerful attacks to keep players on their toes, forcing them to play defensively and avoid them. It's a change from the previous bosses, who could be beaten by playing aggressively and flanking.
  • Mausinger from the same chapter. While nowhere near as insane as the Imp Queen, he still tests the players dodging abilities. It's also a very emotional fight from a story standpoint, with Mausinger being a rare sympathetic example of You Killed My Father.
    • It's also worth noting that the battle with Oakenheart follows immediately afterwards, and not only is it one of the easier kingmaker battles, Mausinger becomes a Guest-Star Party Member for the fight.
• Broken Base: Was dropping the Mon elements for a more Action RPG approach a good thing? Detractors dislike it because the previous game was one of the few mon games that managed to do something unique with the genre and as such managed to break some of the stigmas around other mon games only ever being a poor man's Pokémon. Supporters of the new system like it because it offers more strategy and keeps you on your toes more, with many pointing out how most late game 'strategy' in the first game boiled down to "get a Dinoceros, teach it Earsplitter and proceed to watch everything die", while also pointing out how the game still has mon elements in the form of Higgledies.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Even if you aren't savvy to a certain twist from the previous game, it doesn't take much to note that 'Doloran' can be anagrammed to 'Roland' with an extra O — or perhaps 'Orlando', the Italian form of Roland.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Hammer the quick melee button to build up MP, spend the MP on your favorite skill attacks and leave the AI characters to their own devices. With a bit of grinding you can beat the final boss this way.
• Crossover Ship: Nia from Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and Lofty, as both are people with welsh accents thicker than their thighs.
• Difficulty Spike: The DLCs are really fond of this, apparently the guys at Level 5 decided to get sadistic after multiple complaints of Disappointing Last Levels. Case in point: the Lost Lord DLC requires you to abuse the Ding Dong Discipline battle method on the final boss, which is quite tough to pull off on certain input devices as-is. Then comes the bosses in the Timeless Tome final battle, in which there is a puzzle element involved, with the additional complication of the boss spawning mooks that are at least 10 levels higher than you if you had jumped directly in. The mooks and minibosses leading up to the final battles are pushovers by comparison.
• Disappointing Last Level: The game's middle stages (Hydropolis, Broadleaf) are self-contained arcs that can be finished within the span of only two hours each since every dungeon is pretty short, with Broadleaf only being one dungeon. The minibosses were seen as rather forgettable as well. However, Ding Dong Dell manages to make people remember the first game's early dungeon, and gives quite a frantic boss fight in the form of Mausinger, followed by another Kingmaker with arguably one of the best themes ever.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Gravity elemental attacks, a sub-element of the darkness element, verge very close on being a flat-out Infinity +1 Element. The number of things gravity is strong against is way higher than the other elements. To wit; flying, 'goo' and large enemies such as Manticores and Dragons. This might not sound like much but these enemies make up a large amount of beastiary; with large enemies making up a large number of bosses.
  • As a byproduct, Higgledies with gravity attacks can quickly shred through enemies HP. One of the earliest ones you can get can end up doing damage in the 1000s before your characters are doing triple digits. Fully-leveled ones can deal damage in the high-thousands. Combine them with fully-leveled higgledies with the Me too, Me too! ability and watch the attack stack two to three times depending on how many Me too! higgledies you have on the field, dealing a major blow to the enemies' health, and an instant win if you're lucky.
  • On the topic of Higgledies, try having two fully-leveled higgledies with the Higgledy Sirrah ability and two fully-leveled higgledies with the Me too, Me too! ability. Essentially, you have two higgledies that could summon a very powerful knight that will fight on your behalf for up to a minute and two who're practically mimes. Summon one knight by activating the Higgledy Sirrah ability. Watch the Me too! higgledies summon up to two more knights. If you get lucky you can have up to four knights on the battlefield. Watch the knights take a good chunk off the boss' health from a safe distance. Can be tweaked to have only one Higgledy Sirrah Higgledy and three Me too! higgledies.
  • There's basically no reason to increase money drop rate in the tactic tweaker menu; increasing weapon and armor droprate not only negates this by giving you a large number of weapons and armor to sell, it can quickly snowball as you end up getting great armor that further increases weapon drop rates. All this together results in gaining some extremely damaging weapons way ahead of what you can usually craft/buy and mountains of money to spend on whatever else you need.
  • Evan, the main character deserves mention. While he starts out as a Squishy Wizard, even with a little investment into him to buff out his problematic stats, Evan can become a Magic Knight Master of All who can solo a large amount of the enemies in the game. A wide variety of elemental spells that covers all the basics; simple, quick and powerful sword combos that complement his ever evolving Kings Slash line, an AoE multi-hit attack that completely melts the HP of any enemy caught in its radius, usually letting him take out four to five enemies at once. The only downside is, because of all this, his MP tends to drain extremely quickly; a problem that can be easily remedied with multiple MP restoring items and equipment that slowly regens MP as the battle goes on.
  • Two words, Roland. Crane, easily surpassing many other party members in terms of practicality. A Lightning Bruiser, President Action, with a variety of Simple, yet Awesome skill set. What give credence to his Lightning Bruiser status is his second highest HP value that come close to the main tank of the group, fast attack speed comparable to Evan, the main character and having physical stats comparable to said tank. Then his skills that while aren't as flashy or as gimmicky as other characters and not as varied, works for their intended purpose with little to no wind-up or lag-time in-between strikes that most character's stronger skills have and some of his main skills can either buff himself or debuff the enemy's defense and physical strength. Not to mention, since they are all skills, not spells, one does not need to invest to upgrade Roland's skills. Plus, Roland's less varied skill set works in his favor compared to many other characters incredibly varied skills and spells, thus limited only because the game allows four active skills/spells to be set which Roland doesn't have said problem because of his limited, but practical skill set. All in all, there's no reason not to use Roland the moment the open world section starts. Though, there are some enemies that Roland deals with poorly, they are far and few in-between.
  • If you have the time and patience you can just sit and wait on Evermore while it automatically collects Kingsguilders. You will have to occasionally claim and invest in upgrades, and it’s best to do this after getting a good number of subjects, but soon enough you can farm thousands upon thousands of coins in the span of an afternoon.
• Good Bad Bugs: As mentioned above, it's possible for Dreamer's Maze NPCs to spawn half-inside of walls in the cave maps.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Hey, remember when Oliver beat the King of the Mice in the first game?
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: A common complaint about the game is how often the game throws EXP at you, rewarding you with EXP for completing sidequests, throwing multiple enemies in a single battle that can be taken down easily for a lot of EXP and even building the kingdom itself can give some EXP. All this means it's very easy to become over-leveled even if you don't do any grinding, which in turn makes the main story a breeze. On June 22, 2018, this was remedied with the release of the patch to version 1.03, which gives the options of playing on either Hard or Expert difficulty levels.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: A sentiment felt by some who laser-ran through the game while ignoring all the battles and the sidequests.
• Memetic Mutation: Comparing Lofty to Lisa Simpson is popular, thanks to them both having a similar 'hair style'.
• Most Wonderful Sound: Lofty shouting "All Youers!" in battle, as it indicates that he created a ball of energy that, when touched, totally heals you and gives you unlimited magic for a short time.
• Narm:
  • Doloran's reveal as Roland's Soulmate is somewhat ruined by him just looking like a goofy, green-skinned version of Roland with the same big anime eyes and nice smile you've been seeing all game. It's kind of hard to take him seriously as the Big Bad until he puts the snake head back on.
  • The reveal that Ferdinand is Evan's son not only comes completely out of left field but is accompanied by an hilariously clumsy Exposition Dump and very awkward lip flaps.
• Narm Charm: "A kingdom where everyone can live happily ever after!" sounds like a very childish, sappy goal, but the game makes it work.
• Polished Port: While the game does tend to randomly crash on extremely rare occasions, and the odd graphical glitch tends not present in the PS4 version does pop up, the Steam port is considered pretty solid overall.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Jumping is a little wonky in this game. Fortunately you can't fall off of ledges to your death, however on the rare occasions in which you must jump across ledges you can easily miss since you have no real way to control your momentum.
  • The war sections can get rather monotonous and boring as the game goes on. A lot of the 'strategy' comes down to rotating whatever unit is most effective against the enemy units in front of yourself and more often than not a lot of it boils down to brute force and using all military power to replenish units rather than anything resembling actual strategy.
• Side Tracked By The Golden Saucer: It's very easy to get sidetracked by building the Evermore Kingdom; not only does it give some hefty rewards, the sheer amount of sidequests the game offers, most of which reward you with newcomers to your kingdom, makes it very easy to farm the kingdom currency you need to upgrade/build everything.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: Two of the main draws of the game, kingdom-building and citizen recruitment, aren't introduced until Chapter 4 (of 9). Due to this, there are no optional sidequests at all until this point, leaving the game with a downplayed case of No Sidepaths, No Exploration, No Freedom until then. (The only real optional content being Tainted Monsters and the odd forest) Even the main story suffers from this trope; besides the Ding Dong Dell coup d'etat, nothing particularly major happens until Chapter 3, and it's not until then that we're introduced to the Big Bad and the central goal of solving the nation rulers' problems.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • With a young protagonist leading a small army, having the option to recruit NPCs, building a prosperous town and having army battles expressed through miniatures, the game certainly has that Suikoden vibe down pat.
  • Despite being a direct sequel to the first Ni no Kuni, the battle system is more closely related to that of Level-5's very early RPG Rogue Galaxy, being an action RPG where each character specializes in both a melee and ranged weapon, the mild platforming elements, and the fact that enemies in dungeons are fought in the dungeon itself, rather than in a specialized arena.
• That One Achievement: A few of these qualify.
  • "No Stone Unturned" requires you to activate every Higgledy Stone. Along with needing to scour the entire world for them, some of them require hard-to-find items (Vorpal the Volcanic in particular, who requires an item that's only obtainable from a max-level Evermore or the ultimate Bonus Dungeon) or have powerful Tainted Monsters blocking them if you beat the first 50 Tainted Monsters first.
  • "God of War" requires you to complete 50 unique skirmishes (read: play all the skirmishes at least once as of patch 1.03). Two incredibly hard skirmishes aside (Criminal Capture: Bandit Gang and Survey Party Protection, both known to cause the onflow of cluster F-Bombs from players), it's also incredibly tedious as if you've been diligent during the main story, you'll have completed maybe 20 by the end of the game. Skirmishes also aren't very fun (see Scrappy Mechanic) and it's hard to grind for the higher-level ones. Also, the main problem isn't so much doing the skirmishes as it is finding the skirmishes. The main story ones and ones associated with quests are easy enough. However, the remainder just show up on the map and have no relation to the rest of the plot. The flags for these spawn at random and up until a recent update there's no way to track which ones you've already done other than these flags. It is possible to know how many you've done by checking the number of skirmishes completed in the game's encyclopedia, but only if you've had the foresight to never re-do any, and the game encourages you to do just that by providing a "Hard Mode" option. Even after the update, you can tell which skirmishes you already did from the color of the glow surrounding the flag, but it still doesn't help much as the flags still appears and disappears at random. In order to respawn the flags, you have to enter and exit areas several times and possibly do some flying around searching for the ones you want. It can take many, many tries before you finally spawn the one(s) you want.
  • Let's not even get started with the last achievement on each of the DLCs, which requires one to defeat the dungeon at Hard difficulty level or higher. Did we mention that the final bosses in the DLCs are extremely cheap and can one-hit KO you, even on normal difficulty?
• That One Attack:
  • The slashing frenzy used by the stronger skeleton enemies. It's very difficult to escape the Cycle of Hurting if you get caught in it, and its multiple hits (the last one being a powerful finisher) can One-Hit Kill most party members. And the Tainted Monster skeletons are even worse...
  • The second The Summoned One Boss in Mook Clothing while fighting the bonus dungeon boss Blackhart from the Adventure DLC. Bad enough the game forces you to traverse the floors on hard (with the last 9 floors bereft of any goddess statues) and will not let you fight said boss otherwise. He summons two mooks throughout the battle that are OP versions of existing tainted beasts. The second beast has this one wide-reaching AOE attack that can potentially wipe out your entire party in one hit, especially if your danger level is 3 or higher at that point. Many players agree that one reason that Blackhart is a pain to take on is because of this one attack by this mook-boss alone.
• That One Boss: Many find Bastion to be this. On top of being very large for the relatively small arena you fight him in, he has quite a fair bit of AOE attacks that makes attacking him in the first place rather difficult. There's also the second phase, where a sudden Unexpected Gameplay Change where Evan must platform his way onto his head causes numerous players grief, if not for game's jumping physics not being suited for platforming, then because Bastion is constantly spamming lightning bolts that are guaranteed to knock Evan off and back to square one if he's hit by them. Luckily, when you later get the ability to refight the Kingsmakers, you don't have to do the platforming section and only have to do damage to him, making him one of the easiest to refight.
  • For tainted monsters, many players have cussed Cluster F-bombs in rapid succession when fighting Horraura. While not that hard on her own (she's only number 55 of 60!), her tendency to summon numerous mooks to the battlefield as well as her wide array of moves (some of which can even devastate level 99 fighters in one or two blows) makes her battle tough-as-nails. Although she's also a good boss to fight to grind up to level 99, but when she outlives her usefulness, taking her out is more of a chore than a good time.
  • The above-mentioned second The Summoned One Boss in Mook Clothing. With a wide-reaching AOE that could potentially decimate the entire party in one blow especially on higher danger levels, yeah. Let the Cluster F-Bombs fly.
  • Zeta, also in The Adventure Pack DLC, is mostly just a powerful fairy boss. The AOE blast from her light attacks are hard to dodge, which is annoying enough as-is. However she has the unique ability to summon several rings of light that spread across the arena and tear through the party's health without some very good dodging of its own. She starts summoning these rings at about half health, and she does not stop for the rest of the fight. Good luck getting anymore hits on her.
  • The Lost Lord himself, Lord Remus, from the DLC of the same name. One hit KO even on normal difficulty, and the only way to defeat him is using the Ding Dong Discipline counter method, which requires dodging during the small window where he is about to hit you. Depending on your keyboard or gamepad build quality, and how much display lag you face, dodging is always a hit or miss affair. If you use a normal monitor and cheapo keyboard with no ability to press multiple keys at one time, or if you use a cheapo controller, good luck, you're gonna need it- most of the time, Evan would just back away slowly blocking instead of dodging and triggering the method.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Quest 55, "A Secret Sweet Tooth," is this. It's given off early in Chapter 6, about a dog who wants Rosehip Tart. The problem arises when the only way to get the recipe to cook it is during Dekhah's quest to recruit him, and that only pops up after you've finished the final boss!
  • Recruiting Furnest is annoying, as Swift Solutions will give out his quest randomly after completing 80 errands and making it to Chapter 9^note Most people forget the Chapter 9 part and thus fail because they're trying too early. (Fortunately, once it shows up all you have to do is talk to him. But getting it to show up can take a while).
  • Making the ultimate weapons and armor is quite the process. To start off, it revolves around a sequence of sidequests that span the entire game, often requiring you to get a sword/armor over a specific rarity. This isn't so bad because you can usually craft them at the weaponry/armory... However, some of the weapons require a specific tier of research to unlock, which is usually locked behind requiring a certain citizen with the ability needed to research. If you can't find said citizen or have trouble completing their request, you're already in trouble. Then when you finally complete the quest chain, the materials can only be found in the ultimate Bonus Dungeon, requiring you to make several repeated trips through the (randomly generated) levels that that you can't save in so if the power goes out or the game crashes, all that effort is for not. Then there are the enemies, which quickly scale up to the 90s and, if you're slow in dealing with the danger gauge, can actively exceed the level cap and quickly stack on the damage. Needless to say, most players usually only make one of each ultimate weapon for their three end-game party members, despite being able to wield multiples at once.
  • "The Sweet Stink of Success" can either be really easy or really hard. First, you must recruit Morgan, which is quite a lengthy quest of its own (find her, buy her music sheet, find a flower in the mountains of Rolling Hills). Then her second quest at Evermore involves you giving her any kind of smelly/stinky boots, which are a low-tier equipment title. This late in the game, you might have invested in getting better quality, and may have either never gotten such boots to begin with, or have sold the earlier shoes off due to Wrong Genre Savvy (many other RPGs impose an inventory limit. This is one of the handful of RPGs that don't) or to gain money to buy healing items. It's possible to find a pair a number of ways, such as going through the Dream Mazes, but that alone requires luck with the RNG and a lot of grinding.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Roland's son is mentioned only three or four times throughout the entire game and there is only one scene where Roland displays any pain and sorrow over being separated from him. This was remedied in second DLC, which has a chapter dedicated to him.
  • Also, Doloran after his Heel–Face Turn. There's potentially a lot that can be done to flesh him out and many potential additional quests he can bring. Sadly Level 5 decided that the game was not worth any additional effort after the second DLC failed to sell well.
  • Roland himself is shockingly underused in the main story despite the shocking opening. He never brings up his past life beyond whatever skills are needed to help Evan until right before the final boss.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The game's world has six major species inhabiting it^note Humans, Grimalkin, Mousekind, Greenlings, Dogfolk and Merfolk., robots, and many species of monsters. However, all the playable characters are human or humanoid in Evan's case. The game could have allowed other species to be playable to add more variation and to tie into the game's theme of peace and unity.
  • One of the game's hidden missions has Evan helping a group of Grimchillas gets rid of a porc that has invaded their den. The game could have had several side quests featuring Evan assisting various monsters and befriending them, possibly even inviting them to live in Evermore.
  • Evermore holds a lot of potential for new adventures. However, not much is done with it, and Level 5 no longer developing DLC for the game has left it underused.
  • Again, Doloran's Heel–Face Turn holds a lot of potential for new side quests and even a whole new adventure had he been made a playable character. Sadly nothing came out of it due to Level 5 giving up on the game.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • Throughout the game, you'll learn almost a dozen noncombat spells, some of which are given to you throughout the main quest while most require research at Evermore's Spellworks. However, the spells are very situational and are barely used throughout most of the game. Some spells, such as those to speak with animals and spirits, are only used once or twice for side quests.
  • The Tactics Tweaker allows you to deal more damage against various monster types, and take less damage from attacks and status effects. However, monsters usually appear in mixed groups, and Actually Four Mooks on the overworld means that you won't know what you're up against. It's easy enough to tell which group a boss is in, but you won't know what type of attacks it uses until you fight it, and the game is easy enough on Standard difficulty that it usually doesn't matter.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: The main character Evan, with his shoulder-length blond hair and feminine features, is often mistaken for a girl. The fact that his voice actor is female doesn't help.

---