How to enter to win

If there is one thing Xbox know how to do, it is to build hype for any one of their exclusive games and let us be honest here and they have to because there are simply have so few of them. When word came out that iconic British developers RARE were working on  brand new game, their fans and those on Xbox stood up and paid attention before cheering when it was revealed that they were working on what they promised was the ultimate Pirate experience before entering into a very lengthy period of beta testing. I was really hyped up for this title and along with my friends was eager to crew our ship and go searching for buried treasure, but immediately Sea of Thieves had issues, and not just with its own servers.

I am not going to beat around the bush here because Sea of Thieves has a whole ship full of issues and problems right now that have left me really disappointed with this game. What I had hoped for and expected from it after being a part of the betas for months before release quickly vanished the moment I fired the game up and in the few weeks since launch at the time of writing, this is a game experience that can be at times amazing but at others left me scratching my head and asking where is the rest of this game is. It is just so frustrating to see the usual Xbox marketing machine swallow up one of their exclusives, to sell merchandise such as expensive custom controllers but then only to deliver an actual game that has more problems than it should.

Sea of Thieves is essentially a shared world experience game that provides certain tools for players to live out the dream of becoming a pirate and living a pirate’s life. The first thing to notice is that this game does not have a tutorial system of any kind; it neither explains how to play nor suggests anything to do. It merely provides a world to exist in with things to do once you piece together how to make it all work which for anyone who did not take part in the beta period before release, may feel completely lost in working out what to do unless shown by other players. You are not told how to pick up voyages which are the objective quests or how the shop system works and you are certainly not taught how to sail a ship. It is an interesting mechanic of being thrown in the deep end so to speak to trust that players will show each other how to play in order to negate the need for a tutorial.

One of the aspects I was really looking forward to doing was to create my own pirate and my personal love for The Secret of Monkey Island series growing up meant I was hoping to recreate Guybrush Threepwood, the mighty pirate, for my game. However just before release came the update that players would have to pick a randomly generated pirate instead of making their own one. How does this work in the game, well when you start for the first time you are giving a choice of 8 options and then like a slot machine, by pressing X you can then lock in a choice before spinning the wheel again to see if you are giving anything more pleasing. It took me twenty minutes to find one that I felt was half decent and if honest I was never really happy with any of the options provided and basically went with the least terrible one which I am now stuck with and annoyingly so.

So how does it all work? So when you start the game and log on to the servers you are giving the choice between two ships; the impressive and large Galleon or the small but agile Sloop. You then get to choose the size of the crew you want which with the sloop is a maximum of two crew and the Galleon can have a maximum of four crew but minimum of three. You can go out solo in the sloop as a crew of one, but as I will come to later, this is not advisable. The game can match you with random people much like the beta but the real aim and only way this game can ever be fun, is with your friends which can be invited to your crew and then you are ready to set sail. You will start off on a random outpost with your ship already docked waiting for you. There are very few things to actually do in this game surprisingly; the first is to collect ‘voyages’ from the three guilds such as the search for buried treasure from the Gold Hoarders or looking for cargo for the Merchant Alliance or completing bounties for the Order of Souls. You will be given a parchment with the location or list of items required which you will then take to the ship, place on the captains table and the crew must then vote for which voyage to undertake.

Now on the surface these seem perfectly fine as quests, but the truth is this is really just a basic fetch quest system which never changes and simply has crews going to different islands, repeating the same tasks over and over again for very little reward other than of earning reputation with the guild that gave the voyage. By leveling up you can then unlock new levels of voyage but again, it is just the same ‘go here, get/kill/collect this and bring back to me’ type quests. The higher your reputation the more difficult the voyage will be with some giving you multiple treasure chests to find or multiple skeleton captains to hunt down. Skeletons do increase in difficulty though depending on the level of the bounty with the normal white variety or the green ones that will heal if they get to water or if it rains or shadowy ones that can only be damaged in the light and gold ones that must be soaked with water in order to weaken them. Other than that, there is very little to do but these voyages are basically….it.

I am not a fan of the grind either as the gold rewards when you start are really rather pitiful when you compare them to the cost of the cosmetic items the game others to start making your pirate and the ship look even half way decent. The cost of cosmetic items simply mean one thing, the introduction down the line of real money micro-transactions and it is a blatant one. The cost of say a simple belt or coat/dress for your pirate means hours of grind with the low level voyages, it took three hours to earn enough gold just to buy some shoes for my pirate after handing in eight treasure chests and three skull bounties. It is even worse if you want to make your ship look a little fancier with everything from hull paint to sails costing 70,000 gold coins which is an unfathomable session of grinding to attain. It just makes it all the more frustrating instead of fun when hours of gameplay only result in enough to buy a basic cosmetic item. In the three weeks that I have been playing since launch I have only just managed to get my pirate looking like a pirate to the point where I can now start to build up towards working on my ship but crikey that means a whole lot of fetching and carrying.

Everything purchasable in the game so far is cosmetic items, either clothing or vanity items or better looking equipment such as telescopes, buckets and musical instruments. Weapons do not improve in power but will look much better for the asking price and you can equip any two weapons at a time so a sword and pistol for example or maybe the sniper rifle and blunderbuss which is pretty much a shot gun. The only way to get these items is through the stores, so no finding a new sword on an island or outfit in a cave in this game. Now this does mean that all players are on an even playing field as a result, though some will be better turned out than others but it did sink my heart that at the heart of this game is nothing more then a massive grind to buy cosmetics.

The only way Sea of Thieves becomes fun is having a good set of friends to fill your crew so you can experience this game the way it was designed to be played. Believe me, this game really comes to life when you have your friends and together you take all the tools this game has and make an experience with them. Looking for treasure, fighting skeletons together is fun just as learning to sail the ship and becoming a well oiled team with everyone knowing their roles and completing each others voyages can lead to a fun session. The repetition however and lack of real reward in the early stages can make this game drag though as if after two hours and multiple voyages completed have only earned the crew the shared gold of about two to three thousand gold can be disheartening and has been for my own crew of pirates at times. It can be fun to sail around in this beautiful world and it is can be beautiful to watch a sun rise or set or to be caught in a storm and all the sounds and panic of lightning strikes whilst battling the waves can be exhilarating.

The down side however comes in the nature of the shared experience of being an online only game. The servers for this game since launch have been terrible with rubber banding and lag still very much issues now three weeks post release. When roaming an island these issues are containable but when out at sea and suddenly find yourself fighting another ship and crew, it can really be problematic if another crew cheekily boards your ship with a blunderbuss and starts one shot killing your crew and you can neither shoot or catch them because they are moving too fast or lagging, something my friends and I have noticed whenever we come up against a mixed crew of Xbox and Windows 10 players on PC. It is noticeable and it is a game killer. The PVP side can be great fun, there is nothing quite like battling another ship and winning to watch that ship slowly sink into the deep and it can be exciting when carrying treasure chest or skulls to then have to suddenly defend against an incoming ship. But it can have a more sinister side of trolling with some player ships simply seeking out other crews; especially if they happen to be in a small sloop for no other reason but to sink their ship and spawn kill the crew just to be annoying. I have literally been at an outpost and watched as a galleon has sailed past firing at my docked ship just to sink it or watching as a Sloop which has only two canons and at best manned by two players, is hunted down and just destroyed by a Galleon with full crew and six canons. Yes PVP is a factor and pirates being pirates, ship battles and dirty tricks are a part of it but there is a toxic level of this trolling behaviour which will push players away from the game.

Sea of Thieves has so much potential but right now has very little other than repetitive fetch quests to do. It does have a raid which is signaled by the Voldermort style giant Skull in the Sky giving the location of an island fort to attack. This involved fighting waves of skeletons in a horde mode style fight with increasingly difficult skeleton forces in order to draw out the Captain of the fort to take it down, retrieve his key and open the fort Vault to take the many riches inside. This is all whilst also defending against other ships all aiming to do the same thing. My first one took close to an hour to complete and the rewards of 16 thousand in gold was well worth it. You also have what I feel is my favourite aspect of the game and finding sunken ships which could be filled with treasures to take whilst fighting off sharks. Even the iconic kraken experience is a thrilling and epic gaming moment to experience as you use the ships cannons to fight off its tentacles or using your sword should you be swept up by the Kraken to try and save yourself. When you bring all the positive elements together this can be a cracking game to play but it has too many problems and far too shallow of content to justify the full game asking price.

Some of these issues are completely self inflicted as well with some strange choices having been made right before release that both helped and hindered this release, but Sea of Thieves is perhaps the biggest example of exactly what is wrong with Xbox and how it manages its own exclusives and delivers an experience that is less than what was promised. To start with, Xbox suddenly announced that Sea of Thieves and Crackdown 3 were going to be instantly part of the Xbox LIVE ‘Games Pass’ subscription which for £7.99 gives players access to a multitude of old Xbox One games. This mean that on launch, thousands of people either using the Games Pass or more likely, using the free 14 day trial that everyone with the console has, to try out the game leading to all the launch week server issues and even now, server issues remain with the usual developer explanation of “more players than we expected”.

The simple truth is, do not buy this game at full price but instead use the same money to buy a yearly subscription to the Games Pass. It is simply lacking of enough content to justify a price of £40-50, something that has been reflected in the reaction of players since release. This is a game that can be fun but equally disappointing thanks to server issues, lack of content and repetitive grinding. There is a next stage to the game once you reach the “Legendary Pirate” status by reaching maximum reputation in all the guilds but unless you are a popular streamer with hundreds of fans willing to help you boost to get there, the natural progression to this will require a tremendous amount of grinding to get to that point.

This is just another disappointing Xbox exclusive and I do wish that those in charge of the platform would kindly stop focusing on all the marketing and merchandise opportunities they can muster over an exclusive and instead just deliver a damn good game because right now Sea of Thieves shows all too well that the promise of buried treasure can often lead to nothing more than an old boot not worth the cost of the voyage to get there.

My love for JRPG’s began with Final Fantasy VII with an experience that to this day has still not been topped and seldom gotten close to having with any other JRPG since and that includes other Final Fantasy titles. It has been a very long wait for me but finally I have found one that honest rivals that first experience with FFVII, something I had hoped it would provide for me after missing out on the first game and have been watching this very closely for months and it easily achieved all my expectations and more and I have another early contender for game of the year. Ni no Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom is an absolute instant classic and joy to play.

I am probably going to be gushing a whole bunch through this review simply because Ni no Kuni 2 is as close to flawless a game that I have played in many a year, over forty hours and it never suffered a bug or glitch, crashing or elements of frustration that break the experience. This is one of the most highly polished games you can play right now on PlayStation 4 and it is refreshing to see that so much attention clearly went into making this game ready for release after a delay that has only helped the final version. I smiled my way through from the moment I hit start and it never left my face and only grew the further into the game I went and it opened up new things to enjoy. It is clear to me that even without having played the first game, that the way people were raving about it has transferred into this follow up game.

This is certainly a follow up as it has a new story with new characters and set hundreds of years after the events of the first game. It opens with a surprising opening cut-scene showing an elderly President of the USA in a limo travelling towards a city when a missile flies over head and hits the city. We then see the wreckage of the car and the President suddenly disappearing before he reappears but has somehow become a far younger man who is then discovered by a young boy who introduces himself as Evan Pettiwhisker Tildrum, the young king of Ding Dong Dell who startled by Roland’s presence heads off to summon his guards. However before Roland can work out how he has been transported here and now younger, he suspects that something is not quite right and soon comes to the aid of this young boy when the guards turn on him. Evan is the heir to the kingdom of Ding Dong Dell and the advisor to his father has now turned on him and began a coup to dethrone the uncrowned king forcing Roland to step in and help Evan try to escape the castle. Soon they are joined by Arnella, body guard and mentor to Evan to reveals that it was the advisor, Mausinger who had slowly poisoned his father and plotted to steal the throne before Evan could form his Kingsbond with the guardian Kingmaker of Ding Dong Dell. Managing to escape, Evan makes the promise to form his own kingdom which will be a place for all to live in peace and Roland pledges his loyalty to both protect Evan but to aid in the creation of his new kingdom.

The first thing that struck me was just how beautiful the visuals for this game are with the same Studio Ghilbli animation as the first game and it is just glorious to be in its world. Character design, locations and those of the many varied monsters and creatures you encounter in this world all leap out of the screen and it honestly feels as though you are part of a Studio Ghilbli animated film. It is bright and colourful and just a lovely world to be in throughout the story as you move from location to location and kingdom to kingdom, each with their own unique visual style and design. Perfectly complimented by the musical soundtrack which features some tremendous scores by Joe Hisaishi and it is just so easy to fall in love with this right from the start even before the excellent gameplay has worked its magic on you.

That magical gameplay is really what for me transported me right back to the wonder and amazement of playing Final Fantasy VII for the first time, and Ni no Kuni 2 just ticks every single box of what makes a JRPG a truly iconic game style to enjoy. Not only does it succeed in hitting all the hit spots of traditional JRPG games but it also manages to refresh many aspects for a new and modern audience. Starting with the combat which before release I was a little nervous about as I am so familiar and rather a fan of turn based combat but my concerns were quickly put to rest once the fighting begins. A party system is used which is comprised of three characters with more becoming available as you meet and complete main story quests. The player is free to take control of a party member at any time by simply switching between them to utilise their own strengths as each may use different weapons and skill attacks. The combat styles is very hack and slash and to my delightful surprise, is actually more than just a basic mashing the attack button as combos can be formed between weapon and skill attacks and is very satisfying.

Of course the most fun aspect to combat comes in the form of the Higgledies, super cute little creatures which aid you in combat and can either serve as support by offering healing opportunities or attack by using elemental attacks. They simply join in the fighting and when grouped together enough can offer a special action triggered by the player to use their special ability. New Higgledies can be discovered and added to your party and later, during the Kingdom management mini game which I will come to a bit later on, can be grown. Having not played the original I was not sure how this aspect would work with a worry that they would overwhelm the fighting but instead the support is very handy, especially during boss fights or big monster battles. Not to mention just how ridiculously cute they are as well and I am still scouring the internet to find a Higgledy plushie!

Inventory management is also just perfectly handled here and whilst other games can suffer from very complicated systems and grinding to find new weapons or armour, here almost every encounter will reward the player with new weapons or items to equip to the party and the inventory clearly shows what the quality of weapons, armour and accessories to help decide what should be equipped to the right party member. This system is clean and gives a fast quick aid to party management which helps sort out new stronger items from the lower value ones. I also appreciate how each character, regardless if you are actively using them in the party or not, will also level up as the main party does meaning you can change your party members at any time and thanks to the inventory system, everyone can be equipped with the best items for them in seconds.

Now all the above comes in very handy for this game has so much content to play through outside of the main campaign that at first you can feel an almost overload of side missions and additional things to do. But the beauty with how the game handles this is truly sublime as it sections the main campaign into story chapters with main goals to be completed in order to progress the story but each chapter also provides an absolute freedom to go off and complete the various side missions made available by just exploring new locations or revisiting previous ones as the main campaign unfolds. The game never forces you to stick to the main campaign or to drag you back if you are like me, happy to just go off on a tangent and spend time in the world doing side quests. Just as with the inventory management, quest management has also been simplified so you always know where the main story quest is and also listing all the side quests available at any one time. You will also meet the task keeper, someone who will offer more side quests to you such as gathering a certain amount of items and will reward with task points which can then be traded with him for items you may not find in normal shops but required to complete side quests. The elegant nature in which this completely plays into simply enjoying the game and playing it makes it a great addition as I found that the majority of tasks he offers you will naturally be ready to be completed because you have already obtained enough of whatever is required. He will also reward you by scouting out new people to recruit to your kingdom to strengthen it and aid in boosting production of a store or research center.

This tidily brings me to the additional mini activities that become available that also fit so nicely into everything else this game has to offer players. First will be the Kingdom management game which will have the player work to grow and build up Evan’s new Kingdom of Evermore throughout the game. Buy opening shops and research centers; you can build up a kingdom that truly feels like a living breathing community of people as you make farms, gardens, ship yards, armour and weapon shops. As the kingdom grows and advances new facilities can be created and thanks to the side quests and Task Master Missions, you will soon start recruiting new people that will offer more opportunities for growth. I found this a fun and brilliant distraction that only served to aid me as I could buy supplies cheaper and improve my weapons and armour through those stores and even develop magic that will help in other side activities like the Skirmish battles or to open new side quests. At the forty hour mark I had still to complete the game and still had an abundance of side quests to complete if I wanted to or just working to improve the kingdom further and the game invites you to do all this or just focus on the main campaign quests. That is a freedom I really appreciate in a good JRPG and Ni no Kuni 2 delivers this in spades for players.

I love the story the game tells as Evan grows as a potential king in his mission to unite all the kingdoms together to form a peaceful world for every race and though this happy ever after almost Disney film aspiration could feel rather cringe at moments, it also has enough darkness and reality checking elements to make this a deep and enjoyable story to enjoy. The highlight has to be in the localisation of all the characters with so many of the UK home nations represented by main characters who are English and Scottish, Irish and Welsh and how the game tells the story to the player showcases this so fluidly. Cut-scenes will often have the characters fully speaking their dialogue but some will be text based and the accent of the character comes to life every time with their own contextual subtitle text. For example Evan’s own Kingmaker Lofty is clearly Welsh with Niall the forest ruler being Scottish. Their text has enough localisation that just reading their words puts the accent in my mind effortlessly and impact fully. The attention to detail in every aspect of this game is staggering at times, and brings me back to just how polished the final version that released was making the two release delays it had completely justified and welcomed.

I struggled to find anything to really criticize with this game as I said above, I am yet to discover or encounter anything that stops the game being fun. If I was to think of any particular niggles it would only be the side quests that you can get early on but require a much higher level in order to complete or reach a location till later in the game meaning your side quest list will be constantly full of quests you are unable to do just yet. I did feel the game does have Evan required to do a lot of basic fetch and return quests which as a King kind of makes so sense and even Lofty at some points reacts to the request in a more truthful manner then Evan should. Seriously there is very little to complain about there and if like me you appreciate JRPGs at their best, this is perhaps the finest example of it in recent years.

I came to love so much about Ni No Kuni 2 that I can honestly place it alongside my benchmark title of Final Fantasy VII in terms of the very best of this genre in gaming. If you have never played a JRPG before, this would be the title I recommend to jump into with and even if just for the sheer ration of price to content and satisfaction, this is a game that has over sixty hours of game to play through without having all side quests completed and the items of DLC that will arrive post launch with the season pass.

Within minutes of starting this game I was smiling and I never stopped till the end, I had the most complete and refreshing experience with this game that I could happily play it all over again and no doubt will be my go to JRPG for years to come.