ROLE PLAYGROUND | Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom
Somehow this game feels both traditional and totally new, and I'm loving it.
It's very easy for a JRPG to become repetitious - it can fall back into the same old tropes and get lost in its faux-grand storyline.
It's not the games aren't trying their best to be original - usually they are, but when you boil everything down it's always the same: Some evil group or person is threatening the kingdom, so a group of ragtag rebels seek to take them down all the while - something eviler lurks beneath the surface.
It's a simple formula, but it's effective. Hell, Final Fantasy has made an entire franchise out recycling that plot over and over and over and over again. But Final Fantasy makes the right changes - they fix up the game play or add a few more elements that previous games have never had before. They attempt to improve.
Level 5's Ni No Kuni II doesn't just attempt to improve - it succeeds. It takes it's simple plot, and packs it with so much fun things to do that you don't even realize that you've definitely played something like it before. Whether your mustering up your troop or building up your town Dark Cloud-style - you'll never stop having fun.
THE GAME
In Ni No Kuni II, you are introduced to the President of a pseudo-United States, just as one of his major cities is bombed. He is caught in the blast, but before he perishes, he is teleported to the land of Ding Dong Dell. Not only that, he appears in the room of a young would-be king Evan, just as his Kingdom is about to be taken out from under him. Throughout the rest of the game, you travel with young Evan to save the world and build a new kingdom.
