Cross Another World
Ni no Kuni: Cross Worlds is a role-playing video game developed by Netmarble and published by Level-5 for Android and iOS, with a PC version entering Beta testing in mid-2022.
Cross World's story follows a beta tester for a fictional virtual reality game called Soul Diver, which transports them to the world of Ni no Kuni. Within Soul Diver, they meet an AI character named Rania before the a glitch crashes the game. The character awakens in a burning city where they save the Queen, who is revealed to be the parallel version of Rania.
The world is based on the one from Ni no Kuni. The game features five character classes: Destroyer, Engineer, Rogue, Swordsman, and Witch. Originally, it was announced that the game would have two gameplay modes: Kingdom Mode being a cooperative multiplayer mode wherein players can explore the world with their Imajinn (Familiars) and Team Arena being a competitive multiplayer mode where six players compete in two teams to collect the most Higgledies.
In actuality, however, the game features a system where you explore the world of Ni no Kuni, set thousands of years after the original game. As you explore, you learn more of the series lore and gain the opportunity to join a Kingdom with other players. Field Bosses, battled by multiple players, are available at various points during the day, and there are various other daily events. Each day, you can also participate in a number of monster-killing / fetch quests to build up your character. There is also a twice-weekly event called Lava Valley, which is a three against three PVP mode. More than 40 types of Imajinn (Familiars) are featured in the game and these battle against your character, either attacking, or providing buffs/healing. These too can be battled using the "Familiar Arena," in which you send five of your familiars up against the pre-selected team of the opponent you choose. Familiars can also be used to gather various resources in "Familiar Adventure."
This game contains examples of:
- Allegedly Free Game: As per expected of any MMO or mobile games. The game is free to play, but if you're going to want to get anywhere, you better either have the patience of a saint or be willing to pay up a lot of money for enhancements that are otherwise hard to get in the game without paying a cent. On the flipside, though, paid content is generally limited to things like purchasing advantages or costumes. Actual story and event content is available to all players, regardless of paid status.
- Anti-Frustration Features: The game comes with a number of these and more have been added as the game has progressed.
- You can fast-travel to pretty much any location you've already visited, albeit for a small fee.
- If you're in a party, you can travel directly to the party leader. This is essential since you only get the benefit for the party if you're in the same area and is highly useful during Field and Chaos Boss battles.
- You can sell most items in batch, preventing the hassle of having to sell one by one.
- An update made it so that if you obtain soulstones/specialties, skill books, or clothing, and already have the respective ones maxed out, an emblem depicts that.
- Have a particular item and want to know where to get more of it? Just tap it and then choose the handy "Source" button and it'll show you anywhere that you can get the item.
- The cooking event adds the Farm Friends who will harvest and water the crops in your Familiar's Forest for a small fee of Sprout Points, saving you the time-consuming task of doing it yourself.
- You can have three different weapons equipped at any one time and switch between them. The game will display a helpful indicator of the one of which element you should be using against your current opponent or opponents.
- The October 19 global update added even more. You can now use multiple buff items such as food in one go; previously you had to use one, then wait three seconds to use another. When selling items, you can choose to have it default to selling off all of a particular item instead of having to choose that manually each time. You can also request support in the recruit channel for dungeons such as Dimensional Border bosses. Additionally, when claiming things such as Daily rewards or rewards from things such as Field Boss passes, if you have more than one, the game now claims them all at once instead of making you claim them one by one.
- Previously players could not ride their mounts in Dimensional Border quests, ticketed events in which you travel along a path fighting a series of monsters and then a boss at the end. As of the January 26, 2023 update, they now can.
- Late January 2024 saw the addition of the ghost assistant, who can do things like collect the freebies from the in-game shop, take and complete Swift Solutions and Conquest tasks, and even go to Tumba to forge weapons for you. The ability to take and complete Swift Solutions and Conquest tasks for you is especially helpful as you're now saved the trouble from returning to Evermore to cash in certificates for more tasks.
- Anti-Grinding: The game throws up a number of roadblocks to prevent you from progressing through the story or leveling up too quickly. If you battle enemies whose levels are too much lower than your own, it results in simply gaining very little or no experience. Completing story quests gives large amounts of EXP, but sometimes to progress the story you have to complete "reputation" quests first, some of which are only available once daily. Some of these also involve battling a powerful monster which may be too strong for your character at that point, thus forcing you to stop for the time being. Usually when you reach this point, you have to find other ways to strengthen your character, such as grinding against the strongest available enemies, gathering monster soulstones and specialties, strengthening equipment, etc.
- Big Ball of Violence: Field Bosses and World Bosses are high-level bosses with massive amounts of HP that are intended to be battled in large groups of players at specific times of day. As such, most fights with these tend to end up as this because there are a massive number of players present, each unloading all of the attacks they have available in rapid succession. You can, however, set an option to display only your own party members, which greatly improves performance.
- Catch-22 Dilemma: Your player character needs to get into the citadel of Evermore in order to report important news. The soldier won't let you in because you're outsiders, but says that one of the ways you can get in is by obtaining a mercenary badge from Swift Solutions. In order to get said badge from Swift Solutions, you have to complete missions, but the Swift Solutions guy, Bert, doesn't want to give you missions... because you're outsiders. Fortunately, Bert does explain at least that he will eventually give you the time of day if you do enough to enhance your reputation by helping people around town.
- Death Is Cheap: If your character dies, you can just revive in a nearby area. You don't get back any health potions you may have used, but these are cheap anyway.
- Easter Egg: The jukebox found in various areas has among its tunes the Japanese version of "Pieces a Broken Heart" from the original game.
- Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: All enemies have an element, and using the opposing element will deal much greater damage. It's fairly standard configuration of Fire beats Earth, Earth beats Water and Water beats Fire. There is also Light and Dark, which are, of course, directly opposed.
- Fourth-Wall Observer: Every time any character drops a term that doesn't fit the pseudo-medieval setting of Ni No Kuni, the player character realises they're players of the same game they were supposed to be playing.
- Gacha Games: Particularly for those who aren't paying to win, much of the game is essentially this. The game is filled with gacha mechanics, from the hatching and summoning of familiars, to equipment, to various types of prize draws. Of course, most of what you draw will be junk and rates for things like 4 star familiars or equipment, especially the rare ones, are something like .01%.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation: Early on in the game, you're told that the Guardian Stone is what allows your character/party to fast travel from place to place. When you reach Moneyma'am City, it is stolen from you and sold to a pawn shop, and you have to try to raise money to get it back. However, you can still use the fast travel function at will through that story arc.
- G-Rated Drug: The Treynia and Hydropolis update has a huge chunk of the people of Treynia addicted to Caramel Powder courtesy of the Black Circle. Side effects include becoming spaced out, speaking slightly incoherently and having a voracious appetite. Does This Remind You of Anything? indeed.note
- Healing Boss: Most bosses, including all Field Bosses and Chaos Bosses, generate a continuous healing field on themselves. If you aren't strong enough to overwhelm this, they simply can't be defeated. Or, in the case of Field / Chaos Bosses, the boss won't go down until enough players of sufficient strength have gathered to take it on.
- Idle Game: By no means purely an idle game, but if you're a serious / top-tier player, by far the majority of your time is going to be spent running the game auto-battling to farm for resources including gold (or Shop Fodder), territe for upgrades, equipment and EXP. Some players even run accounts only for the purpose of farming territe, as "unbound territe" can be used as part of the game's NFT system. The game even provides "AI mode time," by default 4 hours per day, which you can use to auto-battle without having to have your device active. Active events generally run only at specific times of the day for a limited period and there is only a limited amount of story content.
- Massive Multiplayer Crossover: The Ni No Kuni X Sanrio event, which runs from the first week of January in 2024 through the end of Febuary, which sees the appearance of My Melody and her rival Kuromi, alongside the pink notes and black notes. Mari Land was also mentioned in the introduction cutscene. What sets this apart from a regular level crossover however is the appearance of Cinnamoroll, Hello Kitty, Pompompurin and many of Sanrio's other franchises in the sports festival minigame and in the DJ Kuromi dungeon.
- Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game: A spinoff of the Ni No Kuni single-player JRPGs.
- Medium Awareness: Being an Outsider means they're players of Soul Diver, so are just as aware of the game interface as you are.
- Name Amnesia: Tariq and Varum are both players and while they're sure those are their names in the world of Ni no Kuni, they have a strong feeling those weren't their names on Earth, but they have no idea what those were.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: During the Episode Eve event of A Nightmare in Evermore, your player character meets a young girl who wants their help handing out candy to the little kids of Evermore. Come the actual event, you find out that the young girl was the "Dream Witch" and the "candy" was actually dream seeds which have sent the kids into dreams that will never end if you don't enter the dreams and wake them.
- No Inner Fourth Wall: Several characters outright refer to your character as a player, as well as some of the in-universe characters saying you have "two souls" and the 'outsiders' all talk and act like online game players, using terms specific to gamers, something your character picks up on.
- Pay To Win: The game will often provide timed opportunities to purchase a selection of power-up materials, weapons/armor, gold or other items after completing certain things. For example, after clearing Goldbeard's Pirate Ship for the first time, the player is offered the chance to purchase the "Goldbeard's Pirate Ship Clear Bundle 1" for $3.99, featuring 100,000 gold and 200 diamonds (both in-game currency), as well as an Addicting Custard item and a Gem Treasure Chest. There are also always available options to purchase various items and advantages.
- Want some of the better mounts or one of the exclusive pets or familiars? Prepare to shell out for bitcoins then exchange them with asterite if you’re not good at 3-on-3 PvP or if your familiars aren’t somehow strong enough to take on rivals above a certain rank. You only get free asterite if you’re quite high up on the Lava Valley tournament or if your Familiars are strong enough to make past a certain rank in the Familiar Arena.
- Player Elimination: In Lava Valley team arena you get three lives and if you lose them all, you get switched to spectator mode unless you're the last eliminated. Not the case for other types of PvP, including Temple team arena, Relic Wars and Fight for the Throne, in which if you're killed you get infinite revives, though the wait period gets longer each time unless you spend Diamonds to instantly revive.
- Play Every Day: There are a number of quests and activities that refresh every day, as well as daily rewards. Some of the quests will roll over the next day a certain number of times if you're not able to login on a particular day, but others you just miss out.
- Random Drop Booster: Energy Drinks boost drops of EXP, gold and items by 700%, while Sweet Drinks accomplish the same thing minus the EXP. Aroma of Focus boosts the drop rate of monster Specialties/Soulstones by 700%. There have also been a number of other items offered on a limited time basis through events which increase drop rates by a lesser amount, generally only 200%.
- Rare Candy: The Yakk Amber is used to a summon or evolve a Yakk mount. Simply having any of the game's mounts increases a character's starts and you can further increase them by training the mount. The Yakk Amber is only available from the Fuse Pot in Evermore. It is a Rank 1 out of 5 reward, meaning that only 7 are available at any given time when it appears, whereas there are 1,000 available of the rank 5 reward. As such, typically the second one of these appears, people will start drawing like crazy, emptying the fuse pot in about a minute or two, just to try to get one of these.
- Recycled Soundtrack: Uses music from the original game, including the main theme and the battle music. Credit is given to Joe Hisaishi on the opening screen. That said, there are some original themes in the game, apparently composed by Hisaishi.
- Ridiculously Small Wings: One of the premium mounts your character can ride is a bumblebee called Buzzbee with these kind of wings. The game's description for the mount even lampshades this, reading "How is Buzzbee able to fly with those tiny wings? That's a secret!"
- Save Both Worlds: After progressing far enough into the story, you learn that Levant's corruption is powerful enough that if not put in check it will eventually seep into the Earth as well. Thus by continuing to fight you are saving not only the world of Ni no Kuni, but also the Earth that you came from.
- Scunthorpe Problem: The in-game chat censors certain words. Most annoyingly, it doesn't distinguish spaces between words. Therefore, if somebody says something like "That was excellent," it ends up getting censored because the filter sees the word "sex."
- Shop Fodder: Although monsters do directly drop gold and there are a number of other ways to obtain it directly, one of the most popular ways is by fighting enemies which regularly drop coins or statues of varying gold values which have no use other than to be sold. Dark Magic Crystals, which are used for providing enhancements to weapons, also sell for 10,000 gold each, making them very appealing for selling for gold if you build up a stock of them, since you probably won't be using them all for enhancement due to the other requirements.
- Shout-Out:
- One of the Reputation Quests for the Goldbeard segment involves finding someone named Jerry on a deserted island. When you get there, you find a castaway, who tells you that he doesn't want to go back to Evermore but he does want you rescue Jerry, his only friend for him. Jerry turns out to be a soccer ball.
- Rojo, the leader of the red pirates, look and talks too similarly to a certain pirate played by Johnny Depp, that he is given the appropriate nickname by Asian players.
"Go ask Captain Jack Sparrow" - actual reply given by an Asian player when asked about completing a quest. - So Much for Stealth: In the Proto Mark 13 Dimensional Border, after defeating the initial group of Black Circle guards, Zera tells you to move forward, but quietly. The security door opens, you run through, only to run smack into a set of eight more. "Darn, busted!" notes Cluu.
- Tagline: "An epic tale of two intertwined worlds starts now."
- Timed Mission:
- Many of the boss fights are timed and will count as an automatic loss if the time runs out, regardless of how much damage you had done or how much health you had left.
- Familiar Arena battles have a one minute and thirty second time limit, applied against whichever player initiates the battle. If the timer runs out, it's an automatic loss for them, even if they were ahead. Since Familiar Adventure battles operate on the exact same system, the same thing applies. This most commonly comes up in battles where both players are using one or more healing familiars.
- To Be Continued: As of launch and going into December 2022, at least for the global version, the complete story is not available. Players who reach the last available story quest, at around level 80-90, receive a message stating that "The next story is coming soon!" with no specified date. A major update was finally released in late December 2022, adding two expansive new areas and story content to go with them.
- Trapped in Another World: You were only supposed to be testing a game but a glitch has you trapped. Bonus points for Ni No Kuni translation to Another World.
- 20 Bear Asses: A number of the Swift Solutions quests are of this type, with the game requiring you to repeatedly battle monsters of a certain type until you've collected enough of a particular item.
- Vanity License Plate: The license plate on the Platypaws car mount reads NK20210610 which is the original release date of the game - June 10, 2021.
- Voice Grunting: Of the "voice clips" type, though a bit more fleshed out than most examples. While the game has voice acting, you tend to hear rather less out loud than what's displayed on-screen. For example, the text box that appears may read "Hmm... We do issue badges to those who complete enough errands, but I'm apprehensive about giving work to outsiders...", but all that will be voiced out loud is "I'm apprehensive about giving work to outsiders." Extremely important story scenes tend to have full voice-acting, while some of the most minor quests will often have more typical grunting, with only a single word said, or just a vocalization of surprise, etc.
