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04/01 - Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (Normal)
05/01 - Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance - Jetstream Sam DLC (Normal)
06/01 - Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance - Blade Wolf DLC (Normal)
10/01 - Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (Hard)
14/01 - Killer Is Dead (Hard)
18/01 - Q.U.B.E: Director's Cut
20/02 - Okamiden
23/02 - Bayonetta 2 (Normal)
27/02 - Shadow of the Colossus
02/03 - Monster Hunter World
06/03 - Snake Pass
08/03 - Deus Ex: The Fall
10/03 - Bayonetta 2 (Hard)
22/03 - Ty the Tasmanian Tiger
28/04 - Warden: Melody of the Undergrowth
03/05 - Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom
Unfortunately at the end of this I was left feeling rather nonplussed. It's fine. Not bad, but not great either. On the positive end of okay. It stays away from any serious lows, but doesn't really hit any particularly memorable highs either. One serious problem it does have is one that generally puts me off JRPGs, in that it's terribly paced. It drags a whole lot in the latter portions, simply because there's just so much filler content. The kingdom building stuff gets very tiresome after a while, as it just seems kind of endless without any real point to it. You end up drowning in sidequests too, which are all just boring fetch quests. I tried for a while to just focus on the main story as I was getting bored of the side stuff, but it forces you to do a certain amount to keep up with the levelling curve. So in the latter portions of the game I had to spend a lot more time than I wanted to mashing through dialogue that wasn't worth reading, and looking at online guides for where to find a certain item for the quest.
The main story too is a bit bland. It maintains that simple, fairy-tale tone throughout, and doesn't really go in any interesting places. The closest it gets to anything like that is one arc where you come across one kingdom that is run like a giant company, where the leader is overworking people and everyone is going on strike. But like all the other major arcs, it ties up neatly in the end without really exploring any deeper issue. Characters themselves are fairly shallow too. They're not annoying or anything, and there are a couple of amusing moments with them throughout the story, but in general I never really warmed to any of them much. I was lead to believe the story would go in some interesting places towards the finale, but that didn't happen. Not that I was surprised, or even necessarily disappointed by that. I was just hoping the game would try to take things up a notch, but it was pretty clear playing it that it was meaning to carry on as it had been throughout.
On a gamplay front, again, it's basically fine. The core combat feels responsive and flashy enough, but it's basic, and doesn't really evolve as the game goes on. I've heard people say this game is too easy, and that it would be improved if it was a bit more challenging. And while it is definitely very easy, I don't think that changing the difficulty would really improve the experience much. It needed to be more varied, and introduce meaningfully different stuff as the game went on. Not in the usual JRPG way of just piling systems upon systems, but at least something that gave it some kind of quirk. Although, to be as fair as I can, late on in the game you get a new party member who can summon a drone to attack alongside them, or put down an AoE healing machine. It hardly transforms the combat in to anything that requires any kind of thought or variance in tactics, but it's something. In terms of the other gameplay features, I wasn't a fan. As I've said, the kingdom management stuff is dull and tedious. Basically just accruing more resources and watching timers. The skirmish mode was entirely forgettable. I barely did it past the early points of the game. It seems to make you go out of your way to properly engage with it, unlike the other gameplay systems. That's something I wasn't interested in doing.
Playing this game has made me think about my relationship to JRPGs though, and I realised a few things. For one, I think FF15's awkward, half-finished structure actually ended up making me appreciate it more when compared to this. Just at the point where I felt like I was getting tired of the slow pace of that game, it threw me in to those latter sections where things pick up way faster. Something you could rightly criticise as a tonal whiplash that makes the game feel rushed and incomplete, but was a boon for me in terms of keeping my attention. Definitely better than NNK2 where things gradually get so bogged down in unnecessary fluff the longer it goes on. The combat and general gameplay are another point that comes to mind. For a while, a long time ago, I was really interested in finding any JRPG that had action style combat. Such a thing was hard to find, and even harder to find one that actually did it well. These days, that is both something that I have less desire to go looking for, but is also much more common, with the likes of Nier or FF15, etc. In comparison to those, NNK2 feels kind of basic, or unimaginative. Yet I bet if this game came around a decade ago, I would have appreciated it much more in that respect.