Pre-Ramble: I've been hearing all sorts of things about this series since it's original release, and I finally decided to take the plunge. I had heard it's a bear of a game but figured, without anything else on my plate, I'd give it a shot. And what a ride it's been! I'm currently at the final boss. I'm aware that there is a handful of post-game, but I'm happy with the 55 or so hours I've spent at this point over the past two months and will likely abandon it after this point as I believe I've squeezed all the possible fun out of it for myself, personally.

Couple of points, in no particular order:

• The combat was as fun and entertaining as I could have imagined. I did a bit of light research into this game to make sure I would enjoy the combat (since that's typically what you're doing most of the time) and I can happily say that it was all it was cracked up to be. There is constantly something to do, between controlling your Higgledies, using special moves, switching characters, blocking, dodging, you name it. The boss fights were especially epic.
• I adore the game world - Level-5 has proven time and again that they can create incredible spaces that you will want to pack up and move into. Let's be honest - you need to really love a game world to want to spend dozens to hundreds of hours in it. I can hang out in Goldpaw for hours, just talking to people and taking in the sights. Hydropolis was a bit lackluster and a little boring if I'm being honest. Ding Dong Dell is absolutely gorgeous, pulled right out of a fairy tale. Broadleaf is actually kind of a pain in the ass with the f'ing elevator but I really dig the style there as well.
• The characters are nicely developed and fleshed out, and they each offer unique play-styles with regard to combat. Sure the weapons are shared so there are really only 3 types of characters, but it makes it all more manageable.
• The Tactics Tweaker is super neat. In short, it allows you to tweak tiny damage/defense boosts against certain type of enemies, as well as enhance some of your moves. I loved fiddling with this thing and seeing the results right away.
• Higgledies are a lot of fun. They're flippin' cute as heck, mon!
• The skirmishes were pretty darn fun. However, once you have essentially unlimited Kingsguilders back home in Evermore, you can max out all the unit buffs and blast everything out of the water. I found this extremely entertaining and took full advantage of it.

Some downsides here.

• Leander and Badu have so much overhead for their attacks that they leave themselves vulnerable constantly. It can take over a full second for one of their attacks to execute, which is so much lag time, leaving you open to getting one hit constantly. I couldn't keep Leander or Batu alive during any difficult battles when I mained them, instead relying on Evan and Roland (my main), with Batu as the tank. Tani was made of popsicle sticks and she was in my party for about 12 minutes before I pulled her permanently.
• I knew I was going into a fetch-quest heavy game, but boy it got overwhelming at times. I completely skipped over the quests that required going into super obscure locations to find a single item and then having to teleport back. Why can't more games end the quest once you get the item? We can say a magical bird flew the item back to the quest-giver. I ran up a million flights of stairs and took the Broadleaf elevator probably 400 times, and then an hour of gameplay later, four more quests appear. It quickly got out of control so I just gave up trying to please everyone. Nearly every time you completed a quest, you were rewarded with three more.
• I think three hours out of my total play time was spent looking at a teleport loading screen. It really started to feel ridiculous with a quest from a sailor that required me to teleport 5 times to talk to him.
• The voice acting is fine when it's there but there's so little of it, it felt a little lazy. I know translating a game with mountains of dialogue is no small feat, but at least them main cutscenes needed them. If I had to guess, I'd say about 25% of dialog that should have had voice-over, did have voice-over.
• The performance on the Switch was little lackluster. I can deal with slower load screens, but framerate drops are constant. In the overworld it runs pretty slow, but I suppose it doesn't really matter overall and doesn't affect my rating of the game at all, but I did just want to mention it.

Let's talk about the crown jewel of Ni No Kuni 2: Kingdom Builder Simulator.

Let me just mention briefly that Dark Cloud 2 is one of my favorite games of all time, specifically because of the excellent city builder angle. To this day I have no idea how they made that game. I wanted something in the same vein, so once I learned Level-5 "did it again" with a city building element, I had to play Ni No Kuni 2 as soon as possible.

Overall, this is a very different version of city building, and I really enjoy it. There are tons of incentives to prioritize teleporting to Evermore, emptying the coffers, and building/upgrading/researching and going through that loop over and over and over again. It got pretty tiresome halfway through, until I realized a few things:

• Maximizing the coffer size should be the highest priority, as well as doing the research that cuts research costs and time. Then, you need to check back and empty them periodically. By that I mean, after every half hour or so of gameplay. During the first half of the game, life is going to suck until you get Evermore pumping out new skills, item discounts, skirmish upgrades, and of course research boosts to make everything cheaper and take less time.

• Towards the second half to end of the game, I had the coffers at the 800,000kg ceiling, so I was absolutely loaded with cash. I'm ending the game with 71 people and about 10mil Kingsguilders, so I think I did OK, financially. Every single building is maxed out (for a Level 3 Kingdom, that is), I have piles of people who are basically unemployed because to be honest, I'm a little bored of the Evermore gameplay loop.

Overall, can it be better? Absolutely. I would have liked to place my buildings, and having some purpose for all the bags of flesh I keep running errands for to move into my town would have made it feel more rewarding.

It was a fantastic experience though and I recommend it to anyone that enjoys action combat, fun whimsical fantasy, and beautiful worlds to wander around in.

Thoroughly enjoying my initial time with this game. I'm glad I picked it up right away. I find the story fresh (maybe it's been done before, and I just don't know about it though), and the characters you control are likeable. There aren't a lot of similarities with the first entry in the series but that doesn't come across as a bad thing for me. It's been quite some time since I played the first game so I don't know which combat system I prefer but I remember it was a refreshing change of pace from the usual turn-based battle system and the new one is fine as well. I especially like the higgledies for some reason.

I was worried that there would be some performance issues since the game was initially released for Windows and PlayStation 4 but I did not notice any. A super minor thing that's bothering me a bit is that the gameplay time that the game is giving me also counts the time when the game is running in the background, even if I'm in the Switch homescreen and the system is in sleep mode. Thus, it's recorded that I've been playing for 62 hours now although I've only faced the game for about 5 hours. I encountered the same issue with Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth, so I'm thinking this has something to do with ports that have in-game mechanics that involve real time progression. I hope they fix this but it's not a deal breaker for me.

I'm extremely looking forward to playing more. I really hope they continue the series and that the quality doesn't deteriorate.