imagine having to input a WEP key to pair it
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So according to this game’s character descriptions, Mr Prez not only chose to leave his home nation in ruins to tag along with his new liege, but also left behind his own seriously ill child
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I am around 20 hours in, and the more I play the more it feels like they ran out of time, or had some major production issues, probably due to how they tried to cram ten billion different systems into the game.
For one thing, there seems to be no more than about 15 different enemy types, just endlessly palette swapped. Even once you get on the boat and head into the ocean, you still end up fighting the same hamsters, wolves and slimes that you see everywhere else, only now they are blue.
There’s a surprising lack of voice acting, which makes me think they had to cut out a chunk of story at some point during development in order to get the game finished by the deadline. It’s used inconsistently to the point where a cutscene will start off as just text, then halfway through switch to voice acting.
There’s tonnes of fetch quests inserted into the main story for padding. The library card thing Booji described above is literally an entire chapter devoted to fetch quests.
Joe Hisaishi’s music is fine, but feels a bit phoned in, and there is not really enough variety. Hydropolis has a nice theme tune though.
Battles are super cluttered with stuff everywhere and systems getting in the way of each other. It feels like they could have merged some of the systems together, for example they could have merged the weapon and higgledy systems, so you equip three higgledies with different attributes who fight alongside the player, unleash their special skill when the meter fills up and then swap to the next one. But this is Level 5 and apparently Too Much Shit Happening is their whole design philosophy.
Having said all that, I am still enjoying it. I think it works well enough as an off-brand Dragon Quest to pass the time until the real deal comes later in the year.
Soooo if I give some time to Ni No Kuni, should it be 1 or this?
Everything I gather here makes it seems a lot more varied and interesting.
1 is a lot more developed, but much less All Over the Place than 2. So it depends on how much you value consistency and things actually being thought through.
The first one definitely had a lot more care put into it.
It’s been a long time since I played the first one, but I think I like the combat in 2 better, despite how messy it is.
the first one also has a bit more of a problem of unnecessary padding to get the playthrough length up. In 2, it feels more like the generic fetch quest stuff is replacing actual plot that got cut out because they ran out of time.
The other thing to consider is that you can probably get the first one considerably cheaper now.
Most of the stuff in this thread sounds silly, and I got bored of the first one; but also was enthralled by the way it looked and these Part 2 graphix are wow compelling
Folks, I make some bad decisions in life. I have spent too long in failing relationships. I went to grad school for two years and got a decent chunk of debt but no degree. And, most importantly for this thread, I keep playing this fucking videogame. Lest you think I have moved on, like any person who values his life would do, I keep fucking playing this videogame.
When last I updated, we knew we had to go to WATER CITY, but we didn’t have a boat. Well, thankfully your #1 gambling dog Pugnacious happens to have a city under his rule that makes boats. I know, total shocker there. So off we went to Capston-upon-Hull. Sure, OK, that is a name for a place in this game that will totally build us a boat. Except when we get there, aside from the captain of the town, all the men are gone, fighting some monster and according ot the women of the town, losing. So of course we go find them, and who do we find there:
On one hand, probably the most Dark Souls looking enemy in this happy as fuck game, but on the other hand, WTF EVEN IS THIS?
Oh sure, that clears it up. So once we beat the Jelly Queen, we free all the soldiers who had been tied tot he wall with what looked like spider web silk, but apparently was jelly from a certain queen. Whatever man, I don’t know, just build me a damn boat already. Except this is Level 5 so of course you gotta go get some wood to get the boat built, right? But before you do that, you gotta go help a hippie tourist in Fake Chinatown.
See, he got convinced by a fake fortune teller that he would have good luck if he just…sat one out right in front of the main gate to the town. And he did that, for some reason. Anyhow, we busted the fake fortune teller, and I think he now lives in our city, or the real one does. I don’t remember and it doesn’t matter, as your dude Dwayne Johnson would say (a person who has far better things to od with his life than play Level 5 games).
So anyhow, back to gettin’ wood (heh). In order to be able to get the wood, from Niall’s forest naturally, which is again apparently the only fucking place in this world that has anything related to wood or wood products, we went to talk to Niall, who hooked us up with a spray just to knock down some thorny shits that were in our way. Even your main dogg Ex Prez comments on how weird it is that someone would make something just to do this, but then goes with it any way. Prez Roland has these moments of self-awareness, but then the game ignores him because far be it from Level 5 to let anything like good taste or self-criticism get in their way. So you go use that.
Yeah, thornaway spray! It’s an item in this game! You will never use it again! But it exists!
Of course, in order to get wood, we have to fight a boss. He’s like a low rent Blagonga for all you monhun SisBros out there. His name is Zagg, the Doughty Defender of the Toughest of Timbers, and he isn’t hard except sometimes he jumps up on trees and you can’t hit him, but that isn’t hard as much as annoying. Whatever. We crushed his dreams of wood protection, and then take the new wood back to Capcom-up-in-Hall.
C’mon, game.
So we got the shipwrights, and got the wood, to get the boat, to go to WATER CITY. Sail away, Ex Prez and the Evermore Party Posse.
Eventually, we get to Hyropolis and like, I know things in this game have been weird, but they are about to get a whole lot weirder. Or maybe not weirder. Different. Sure. Because Hydropolis has some rules. The first three rules are that kind of arbitrary shit that you expect in tiny remote kingdoms. Shit like ‘no climbing high stuff’ or whatever. Wait, nobody expects that, but there it is anyway. But man, rule #4 of their Four Pillars [of Law and Order] is SOME SHIT.
Yo, Merman, what the hell is this shit? That isn’t even like a real law. I mean, unless your whole country is all about the baby-don’t-hurt-me-no-more, you should know you can’t prevent that shit. So what gives? And how will they know that I am in love with someone? Whose gonna find me out?
Oh, the game has that answered:
OK, this is some panopticon bullshit. This giant eye looks over the whole city. In one of the more impressive little details of the game, it just moves around on its own. It blinks. It’s always there. It is fucking freaky as hell and I do not like it. However, despite us talking to everyone in Waterton, Not Jersey, nobody can get us in to see the queen, because nobody gets to see the queen. The most they get to see is Leander, her #1 bro and best bud, who runs all her business. Half the town doesn’t even think she is real, so of course she is totally real.
How do we scheme to get to see her? BREAK THEM RULES. Specifically, we break them rules by acting out a marriag eproposal between Evan and the Pirate Princess, where Evan wears a tux and our tiny bad drawing of Lisa Simpson is the director of the scene. He’s into it.
Like…too into it. Either way, it gets our crew arrested, and we get to meet Leander, who looks like he saw Anime Dad President and was like “dude, you need more anime”:
Anyhow, he gets us in to see the Queen, who basically tells us that to get her to sign the Declaration of Interdependence, she needs us to go beat up some mythical monster at the bottom of a labyrinth. Whatever, we go fight him, but we have to play some Not Cannon Fodder to get there, which meant a little NCF grind to get levelled up, but then we marched all over it, only to fight this doofus:
Which gets us some magical doodad. Oh, also Leander joined the party, so now Anime Dad Prez can always be battling with Super Anime Wizard Not Dad for most anime honors. When we try to take that to the queen, she of course isn’t there, so we end up going to a place called the Abyss, which used to be inaccessible, but only she could open, so apparently she opened so now we can go there. It is a big long dungeon underwater with nothing super great about it except:
MOTHERFUCKIN’ RAIL SLIDES on some streams of water. Anyhow, prior to jumping into this, Evan and Prez were all both “yeah, Serpentor is here” and total shocker of course he is, and he is controlling the queen.
So we have to fight the queen’s kingmaker like we had to with Pugnacious, and it’s a pretty OK fight except it has a poor man’s version of the shooty fighting from Nier, minus the need to dodge anything or really do much aside from SHOOT THE GLOWY BITS. But it is really out of place, like this whole game. Only instead of like a floating book that talks shit or a cute robot or whatever, it’s like a little steampunk UFO thing and is boring.
nce we rescue the queen, we find out that HYRDOTOWN is actually like 300 years old, and had started to fall apart, but then the queen cast a magic spell to keep it alive, but that made the eyeball appear, but she had to stay awake all the time to maintain its power, but she couldn’t do it if any more people showed up or died, so hence the weird rules to keep people from hurting themselves, and also the NO LOVE because nobody can make babies or whatever. We also found out that her and Leander grew up together, and he said he would marry her and become king, and she is all about this now, even though it might mean people could love each other and maybe the town will fall part and die or some such. Really, the game just glosses over the potential negative consequences here because LOVE LOVE LOVE. But then she also tells Leander to jsut go with your posse to save the world, because that is important too. Like everything else in this game, this story is really brief and nobody thinks too much ever, because nobody in this game thinks.
Next time on Tales of Level 5: You might have heard that white men can’t jump, but guess what? Boats sure as shit can! I know, right?
9 Likes
Ni No Kuni looked nice, but I watched a good few hours and it came off a little too tame and tedious for me to go back to.
Meanwhile this looks and sounds way too bonkers to pass up, even if rushed and less than coherent. If it’s really ~30 hours for a playthrough, I’m in before long.
Yeah this one is definitely a lot more brisk in it’s pace than the first one was. I am 20 hours in, at the same point as booji, but I have been meandering about doing side stuff. Even so, I think I am about 60% of the way through.
One thing I didn’t mention above in regards to feeling unfinished is there are numerous occasions where a dungeon turns out to be just a single room with a boss
3 Likes
Has Level-5 been contracted to do a Popolocrois game yet?
really into LEESA SAMPSON in here
I just finished this last night, and boy golly does it get even sillier later on.
Spoilering all this in case Booji is still playing and wants to have his mind blown on his own terms.
After Water Town comes the Steampunk Facebook HQ Kingdom, whose Steve Jobs style president, Zip Vector, rides a zeppelin (called the Zippelin) which has a giant gold sculpture of his face on the front.
During the big boss fight, a cutscene comes out of nowhere where Evan suddenly realises the True Meaning of being a king, and so Leesa Sampson turns into a massive dragon and helps defeat the boss through a platforming sequence.
Then the next chapter consists almost entirely of cutscenes where President Roland turns out to be a dirty rotten traitor and defects to Mausinger’s side. Except of course he didn’t really, its all just a part of his plan to get the amulet thing that hadn’t been mentioned at all until this point.
Before the reveal of Roland’s plan, we see a scene of him shooting one of Batu’s pirate lackeys at point blank range to prove his loyalty to the rats. But don’t worry, they are just magic bullets that only make you seem dead. Later on Roland frees the lackey and they both escape by turning into frogs.
In the next chapter Evan solves racism by showing Mausinger his dead father’s diary that proves that he always valued him as a true friend. Mausinger’s tears summon the spirit of the king who assures Mausinger that he’s all fine with being betrayed and they are both best buds forever. And thus the world is united and all live in peace and harmony.
At this point the developers realised that there are two entire continents that haven’t been featured in the story, so a reason is concocted in order to send the player off on a generic fetch quest to visit these regions. The ice region in particular has this massive ruined spacecraft just sitting there, with no relevance to the plot.
Except of course that for the finale, the evil snake dude summons an off-brand Dragon Quest final boss, and Evan has to get all the kingdoms to work together to defeat it. Roland’s son who has not been mentioned at all up to this point, suddenly shows before the fight with Snake Dude up in a vision where Roland is in the smouldering ruins of Not New York, and sees his son crumble into ash.
Turns out Snake Dude is actually Roland’s fantasy world counterpart and thus they can’t kill him or else Roland will die too. This is a concept that the first game introduced, but is not brought up at all in this game until the last minute.
But never mind, Snake Dude is not actually evil, he is just trying to resurrect his old kingdom, as well as his Kingmaker who he fell in love with, which is forbidden because reasons. The kingmaker is apparently sealed inside the evil Demon final boss and by summoning it, he expects to be able to free her. Except she isn’t and she is actually dead and everything Snake Dude did was for nought. But then the ghost of the Kingmaker appears and says don’t worry about it, because by summoning it they were able to kill it, and so it was all a net good.
So in the end, Snake Dude decides to start a new kingdom from scratch, Roland goes back to the real world cos his work here is done, and everyone lives happily ever after.
The final scene reveals that Curious Boy, who Evan talks to in his dreams is actually Ferdinand, the legendary king who united the world and, in his own words his ‘mind can sort of travel through time’, which is how they are able to speak to each other.
Except he is not actually from the past, he is from the future and he is actually Evan’s Son! And while Evan managed to unite the five main kingdoms, Ferdinand took it a step further and united everyone including all the kingdoms that Evan must have forgotten or something.
Post credits, we get a repeat of the opening scene with old man President Roland and his entourage driving through Not New York. Only instead of a cruise missile it is fireworks, because he is actually about to attend a meeting of all the world’s leaders to sign their very own Declaration of Interdependance.
Yes indeed, this is a game released in 2018 that ends with the President of the United States of America bringing about an era of world peace and harmony on this here planet Earth.
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That last bit reminds me of how many times this game got delayed.
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Sorry I took a break from this game to read and prepare for Yakuza 6. More updates will happen.