Between its beautiful art style, entertaining battle system and various side content, Ni no Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom instantly resonated with players when it arrived earlier this year. In fact, the only consistent complaint players had at large was the lack of challenge (unless you intentionally gimped yourself), and even that is poised to become a thing of the past now that Bandai Namco and Level-5 has added the one update the game really needed: new difficulty modes.
With update 1.03, when selecting “New Game” or traversing the options menu mid-game, players can now play Ni no Kuni 2 in two new difficulties: Hard and Expert, while the mode everyone has been playing on thus far is now referred to as “Normal.”
As one might expect, enemies are more powerful on the higher difficulties, but this added challenge is offset by access to better loot (like Tales). Specifically, not only will playing on Hard or above increase the maximum quality level of equipment drops, but the chances of rare item drops increases as well.
On top of that, players can look forward to rare equipment boasting an additional skill slot and a set of entirely new skills to play with.
There were also other bug fixes that came with the update:
- A bug that allowed the airship to land in places where it should not be able to land has been fixed.
- Steam version only: A bug that made the player unable to control the camera at specific screen resolutions has been fixed.
All in all, these are all welcome changes (again, the lack of challenge was a consistent complaint among the playerbase), but one has to question whether Bandai Namco and Level-5 were too late in rolling them out. Ni no Kuni 2 arrived in March, and it would be safe to assume that most players are done by now. This isn’t the type of game that encourages players to go through twice (no new game plus, re-recruiting citizens for Evermore, etc.), and there has been no new content to further incentivize additional playthroughs or even revisit a completed one.
For those willing to put up with the inconveniences of playing through the game a second time (or simply haven’t beaten it yet), Hard and Expert modes will likely offer the challenging experience they were hoping for back when Ni no Kuni 2 first arrived. For everyone else, however, this update might be too little, too late.
Check out the announcement video below:
