When comparing Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom vs NieR: Automata, the Slant community recommends NieR: Automata for most people. In the question“What are the best RPG games on Steam?” NieR: Automata is ranked 3rd while Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom is ranked 50th. The most important reason people chose NieR: Automata is:
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Specs
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Pros
Pro The kingdom building is satifsying and strangely addicting
One of the cool features is the ability to plan and build your own living, breathing kingdom. You can build and upgrade a variety of different buildings. These buildings provide bonuses such as being able to craft better weapons and armor, providing special rare items, and generating income. By traversing the world and completing quests for characters, you can recruit them to your cause. They'll join your kingdom as a citizen, and you can assign them to work on any building that suits their skillset.
You can also return to your kingdom anytime you want, making it a nice little home base type area to relax between battles. All in all, it's a fun little sidegame. It's strangely addicting to watch your kingdom grow over time as your newly recruited citizens generate you money and special items.
Pro The combat is simple but entertaining
The combat is as simple as swinging your weapon and dodging attacks. It's quick to jump in without a steep learning curve. You may feel a bit overpowered at times, but that just adds to the action as you're dispatching enemies with ease. You won't be fighting alone though. Your pets add a little bit of depth to the combat. They can heal you, and zap your foes with various elemental attacks. You also have the ability to swap them out at will, so it will keep things fresh for quite a while. Some of the bosses have puzzle type encounters where you'll have to use specific pets, but for the most part the choice is up to you.
Pro Great starter RPG experience for younger players
With it's cartoonish graphics, anime-based characters, and simple to understand combat, this is a great game for the younger generation of gamer to get into RPGs. Nothing feels overly challenging throughout the duration of the game. The story moves along at a nice pace to prevent boredom and hold your attention. Just when you think you don't know what to do or where to go next, a helpful dialogue box will appear that teaches you a new game mechanic or guides you on the next step. All in all, it's a great game to get your kids or more casual gaming friends into the RPG genre.
Pro There's a fun pet collecting and leveling system
There's cute little creatures you can collect during your travels called Higgledies. Not only are they adorable, but they are quite fierce little fighters. They will heal and fight alongside you, adding to the fun of combat. If you have a particular one you enjoy, you can level it up to help it gain stronger powers. You can swap them in and out during combat, and some bosses even have weaknesses to specific ones.
Pro Fast-paced, action-packed combat
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Pro Unique storytelling with a real emotional impact
NieR: Automata's outlook on storytelling is incredibly special. To get the full experience, you have to run multiple playthroughs of the game, each of which offers a new experience and perspective. Your world view of the story events and characters expands drastically as you complete each playthrough, playing on your expectations to help you develop a deeper emotional bond with the protagonists and become invested in their plight.
Things take a real turn on your third playthrough, putting you on an emotional roller coaster all the way to the true ending. The plot twists and knocks on the fourth wall elevate the story to a truly unique place. Getting all the way to the very end can be a religious experience from how much heart and meaning you discover in the symbolism.
Pro It's got a hauntingly beautiful environment
NieR: Automata is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape after Earth has been overrun by hostile machines, and the artists really nailed what that would feel like. Abandoned and overgrown cities litter the landscape along with old refineries, graveyards, and eerie forests. When you add the beautiful soundtrack to the experience, it fills you with a bittersweet mix of loneliness and hope.
Pro Varied genre-spanning gameplay elements
NieR: Automata has different types of gameplay to keep things interesting. From the very start, you're on an on-rails bullet hell section, and then you switch over to the more traditional action RPG style of fast-paced combat. Things change up again not long after with some side-scrolling platforming from a 2D view. Later on in the story, there's a hacking mini-game where you navigate a tiny ship through a short puzzle, with the music changing to a charming retro sound to fit the theme and mood. This is a game that doesn't stay boxed in a single genre.
Pro An incredible amount of content
Outside of the main story, there's plenty of optional content to dive into. The side quests are the best way to get to know the characters and lore of the world, with some of them giving clever and subtle foreshadowing of the game's most critical events. There are also weapons to collect and upgrade, each of which offer nice little tidbits of lore after you get them to max level. And after reaching a certain point in the story, you get access to Chapter Select that lets you go back and replay whatever you want. You can easily spend 60+ hours exploring the world and still have much more to do.
Pro Gorgeous, ethereal soundtrack with amazing vocals
NieR: Automata's music is out of this world. It's so stunning and elegant in a way that nothing else can really live up to. The soundtrack manages to emotionalize the game through music, from the action-packed tracks with hard-hitting wind instruments and percussion, to the softer, somber songs that encapsulate the hauntingly beautiful environments and story moments you encounter. Vocals in the lore's indescribable language makes the music even more memorable, adding to the ethereal quality of the sound. This soundtrack is definitely one that you can go back to again and again without getting sick of it.
Cons
Con Skirmish mode feels like something you have to trudge through, rather than enjoy
The Skirmish mode allows you take your armies out in a watered down RTS style mode in which you move your units around and watch them fight in a rock paper scissors type battle system. However, some quests require this mode far too often to the point of it becoming grindy and repetitive. It's novelty wears off quickly due it's simplistic nature. Essentially, it ends up feeling like you're doing the same battle over and over.
Con Main character walks way too slow
Until you unlock fast travel waypoints and pick up some speed boosts to your walking later in the game, the extremely slow pace at which you move can be downright annoying. Walking through the sprawling dungeons or between towns just doesn't feel like it matches the brisk pace of the story itself, and tends to make certain parts of the game drag on where they shouldn't.
Con Some weird inconsistencies in the voice acting presentation
From time to time the voice acting will suddenly stop mid conversation and only display the written dialogue. It's almost as if they forgot to record some lines. It tends to happen randomly and can be a bit distracting and immersion breaking when it occurs, such as listening to half a conversation and then having to read the rest.
Con Limited open world
Even though NieR: Automata is technically an open world game, it doesn't always feel like it. It's more that there's a big open space in the center of the ruined city you explore, with branches that lead off to vastly different environments, like a desert, a village, and a few other places. These locations aren't that spacious, either, and it's a bit of a stretch to even imagine all of these places being so close together in the first place. It's not too much of an issue as long as you find the story and combat engaging enough.
Con Second playthrough can get repetitive
Once you get to Route B, your second playthrough, you may find that too much is the same. There are some big differences, such as the new way you get to see things play out, but a lot of it rehashes Route A, your first playthrough. There's a ton of hacking you have to do as well, which gets pretty boring after repeating it over and over again. But if you stick with it, Route C and onward are absolutely worth the time spent getting to that point.
Con Some boring fetch quests
The pacing gets messed up when you're forced to run certain fetch quests near the start of the game. This is somewhat forgivable after the fun and action-packed introductory level, but the quests themselves are still a drag to play through. Some of the side quests can also boil down to the same thing. Even though these quests give a lot of useful information about the world, they're not all that fulfilling, and you may dread having to repeat them when playing through the game again.
Con Buggy on PC
Some players complain about the game crashing, freezing, their save files mysteriously disappearing, and more. As of June 2018, over a year after the game's initial release, there is still no patch to fix these problems. Not everyone on PC will have these bugs, but it's still quite prevalent. If you continually run into issues, your best bet is to find a mod or play the console versions instead of waiting on an official patch that may never happen.