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To be a little more direct: As of now meme curators dominate Steam. So consider following me for reviews that actually cost me some time (and effort) to create. I do not know, if this will change much, but the majority of my readers are not followers. I am still going to pump my heart into these reviews.
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/31884377-If-It-Is-Insane/

• Story

  ◼️ Writing On the paper, it’s a journey of self-discovery and hard political choices, in reality, it’s rather a mishmash of substories, badly developed characters with superficial and predictable outcomes. Everything feels like something “seen” before, seems to me that'd leave you with nothing in the end. It’s a simple, childish story with a very bad developing, though there are enough fun situations and goofy premises to keep things entertaining. You don’t understand if the story is a prequel, a sequel or made up in an alternative timeline from the first one. The plot contains huge and heavy contradiction with the first game. The most interesting story of all is the one not told, why the world changed so much? What happened? Let’s say that this “brand” wants to follow the Final Fantasy path, different games, different worlds, different stories. ◼️ Characters and Dialogues The protagonist and the party heroes feel uninspired, dialogues are boring and empty of content. Think that the citizens you’ll recruit during the playtime have better substories than your party members, the game world is full of interesting side characters and hidden substories to discover.

• Gameplay

◼️ How it plays The combat system got a total makeover. No longer will you have to try to sort through menus or manage a party full of AIs who love blowing all of their magic at the worst possible moment. Battles here are set in real-time and they stay snappy and fun throughout the whole game. In dungeons the transition into battle is seamless, you simply attack the enemies you come across meanwhile when crossing larger distances on the field map, you can still choose to try and avoid or engage enemies. During fights, you get the help from Higgledies, small elemental helpers that join you in battle and can serve as additional damage dealers, healers and more (you can equip up to four at a time). You can use points earned in battle to tweak your tactics, allowing you to do things like choosing to be stronger against certain elemental enemy types or less susceptible to specific debuffs. ◼️ Particular game characteristics The most interesting thing is the Kingdom building management. The quest to build and grow your kingdom is quite compelling. It’s your rendezvous between quests, a base of operations you can return to that’s always evolving as you add new facilities and expand its scope. The most interesting quests are made up to increase your followers by recruiting new citizens. The characters can then be assigned specific roles and help research new capabilities and improvements for your party skills. Meanwhile from the other side of the coin, something avoidable are the skirmish challenges, which sees you take four units of troops into battle. There’s a rock, paper, scissors element to these encounters as you rotate your units around Evan to try and counter the enemy unit types. Skirmishes are little clunky, annoying and unrewarding. ◼️ Overall difficulty The game is far too easy. I played the game at the maximum difficulty and I couldn’t die even by trying.

• Graphic

◼️ Art Design The first Ni no Kuni world had a beautiful world well worth saving, the new one is rubbish. I can’t explain why the total change in direction but this sequel world is a huge downgrade in art design and graphic quality. The colour palette inside the cities is colourful and beautiful to see, during world exploration it’s horrible, blank and sad. The characters are represented in a nightmarish bubblehead version, areas and environment are full of recycled content. What happened? The studio Ghibli wasn’t directly involved with the sequel, you don’t have animated cutscenes, you don’t have character design made by them, everything is “inspired” on the Ghibli art style and approved by them.

• Soundtrack and Audio

◼️ Music Probably the best thing of all the soundtrack is again composed by Studio Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi and performed by the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra. ◼️ Voice Acting There is a sparsity of both voice acting and fully realised cutscenes. Overall the acting is really good and made by the official Studio Ghibli localization studio voice actors.

• Extra

◼️ DLC Some free content that adds a lot of subquests, items and building evolutions. Two bigger DLC: The Tale of the Timeless Tome and The Lair of the Lost Lord. I got them with the season pass and got bored to death, one is a two hours side quest that wants to make happy the longterm fans with easter eggs from the first game, the second one it’s a marathon of fights after fights in an endless randomly generated dungeon. ◼️ Replayability Not so high, mostly because the story doesn’t connect at all with the first one. ◼️ Game length Around 70 hours, with the DLCs add 15 more. ◼️ Achievements 63 more than half achievable in a normal run. ◼️ Steam Cards and Points Shop Items 7 steam cards but no items in the point shop.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2291202131

◼️ Fully-voiced and directed cutscenes are restricted to short snippets. Even static, voiced dialogue scenes are few and far between. The majority of the time you’re reading text on screen, either with no voice work or short expressions to illustrate overall intent. It all leaves Revenant Kingdom feeling very flat, and the writing and characters simply aren’t good enough to bridge the presentation gap.
◼️ The most hated thing is the randomly generated dungeons you’ll find, a hundred-floor maze where the exits are casual and random. Sometimes you are lucky and you’ll find the door soon, sometimes you get around the same corner ten times, sometimes the dungeon has a problem in generating the exit so you have to start everything from the beginning. Image arriving at the 77 floor after 3 hours and find out that you are stuck in a room without exit.
◼️ They cut a lot of content, there are some areas, activities and characters that feels misplaced and half made. Recycled content is common, here is too common. There is a single “model” of cave, a single model of temple, a single model forest. Every single dungeon is built upon the same three types of assets.

◼️ Bugs & Issues
Other than the dungeon bug sometimes the audio crashes, normally during the Skirmish Battles, I had to restart my pc to fix that.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2298926754

Legacy can be a burden. Ni no Kuni II is a relaxing and delightful journey, one full of interesting mechanics and fun battles.
Is it a good sequel? Not at all. Is it a good RPG? Not as well.
The game is charming, fun and delightful to play, but nothing more and nothing less. If you loved the first game you will end up hating this one. If you love J-RPGs you’ll gonna leave unfulfilled.

There is no voice acting for all the lines