2018 Game of the Year Contenders
Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom by Level-5
In a typical year, Ni No Kuni II might have the JRPG spotlight all to itself, but with last year’s NieR and Persona 5, the genre has been seeing a revival. This year doesn’t get any easier, but even still, NNKII has what it takes to rise above everyone else, and even grab some GOTY awards.
Features editor Alex Gibson was hooked-in hard by all of the improvements Revenant Kingdom made over the original. Notably, the kingdom building gave more purpose and life to activities that would have been reserved as filler content in most other JRPGs. Even small quests aid you in your goal of creating a kingdom that is able to defend and fend-off attackers.
Normal battles were switched up to be action-based, and Revenant Kingdom made strides to improve on that style of play too through ideas such as Tactical Tweaks and Higgledies, instead of just copying what has worked with other games.
There’s also a surprising number of new mechanics, and dramatic changes for a series that was quite well received in its first outing. Level-5 could have just given us another cutesy, anime romp with the same traditional JRPG mechanics and everyone would have probably be perfectly OK with that. Instead, they rolled the dice, cutting things people did like, to make room for features that they believed would drive the series forward, and they succeeded big time. It’s definitely among 2018’s game of the year contenders.
