S1: Personnel Progression

Why making friends is more valuable than any amount of XP.

Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom, Released 2018, Developed by Level-5, available on PlayStation, PC, and Switch.

Palace coups are chaotic and messy and as such make for an excellent opening sequence. You play as the adult guardian escorting the teenage prince to safety as traitors stomp through the halls of the castle to crush loyalists. There is sacrifice, a sewer escape, and on the outside of the walls, resolve.

Thus begins a journey that takes you around a fantastic world that resembles a beautiful Miyazaki film. You will help those in trouble, fight cursed monsters, and use several heaping doses of compassion to help people realize their faults and learn from their mistakes.

Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom is absolutely fascinating. I normally allot merely a passing glance to the overall mechanisms of a game to get to the main point, but I want to stop and stare just for a second. The minute to minute experience tasks you with exploring colorful dungeons with simple puzzles. Within them are monsters that must be purged using incredibly smooth action combat (a welcome change from often stale turn-based combat).

There is also a skirmish mode in which you largely leverage the same control scheme (so intuitive!) and manipulate the rock/paper/scissors balance of four squads of soldiers to take out enemy troops and win the field.

The story, while told in a somewhat corny, fairy-tale method, explores corporate excess, loyalty, apartheid, and police states. Shockingly it works! Should a game this broad work so well? Honestly, no. I’m wedged between jealousy and petty annoyance. But it does, and the binding agent is what brings us to our main topic.

As the young prince is booted from his ancestral home, he decides to found a new kingdom. In the game development version of “damn the torpedoes,” the studio has you actually build that kingdom, and it’s delightful. Quests often send you back home, which is the perfect time to commission new buildings for the growing kingdom, prioritize research and manufacturing, and task new citizens for the perfect job.

So many roleplaying games are about bigger guns, sharper swords, faster running, and finding the next key. Ni No Kuni II is instead focused on people power.

Ni No Kuni II wins the progression game by basing it all around the citizens of your burgeoning kingdom. This studio found a way to make repetitive content incredibly endearing, and it’s all due to Personnel Progression. It is a combination of choices with an emotional reward, a superior form of presentation, and tying classic progression mechanisms to a city-building metaphor.

Please indulge me for just a few minutes while I make the case for why more games should introduce a little Personnel Progression.

Let’s begin this argument with an emotional hook. This game is special, because you actually change the lives of those you help. Think back to almost any open world game filled with quests and how the second you turn in your quest, you receive a reward, a “thanks,” and the quest giver either disappears, or more likely, remains standing exactly where you found them. Nothing changes. Nothing matters. But, in Ni No Kuni II they move to your city.

In one instance, a person overlooked in the kitchen finally earned his chance to experiment and become a chef. In another, an oft maligned and eager guard went from mockery in his old community to glory and achievement in his new home. This is a distinction that just feels good. I know this sounds floofy, but it matters! I’ve discussed this game with others and heard them gush about collecting people in a way I’ve never heard them discuss a sword.

While our heartstrings are being gently tugged by the notion of helping little digital people better themselves, let’s quickly point to another pertinent truth: this method gets us out of menus. Instead of tables and buttons and trussed up spreadsheets, Ni No Kuni II lets us walk among the “buttons” and engage with them.

Personnel Progression also contributes to change you can see. I haven’t played World of Warcraft since Wrath of the Lich King (~2009), but I still point to it as the poster child for roleplaying games that provide constant and minute rewards. It is not uncommon to receive a .02% increase to your casting cost, and I get it, the game needs to last forever, but its tactical progression is boring.

In Ni No Kuni, these new people fuel your city. As you progress from a hovel to a humming hamlet, the streets are packed. You can speak to your citizens for flavor text, or to gain yet more adventures and quests. The other fact is, you need them. You absolutely hit a point where progression is tied to the size and success of your city. It isn’t just that leafy green garnish you spit out after aggressively taking a bite of your branzino. Points to the team for making the task of worker assignments an effortless task, even when you surpass that seed funding round of growth.

The last few SimCity games have sought to focus more on the individual lives of citizens, with admittedly mixed results. Kingdom for Keflings makes an entire game about tasking individuals, but none of them are characters. Animal Crossing: New Horizons is about enticing others to move to your island. But, they don’t do much. It’s purely a collection game. Ni No Kuni II creates this somewhat rare balance between providing characters, that you need to collect, who provide a benefit to the game you’re playing.

We should cover what it is your people do here, exactly. No, they don’t just talk to the adventurers so the customers don’t have to. In so many games you only need one sword. One helmet. But thanks to the mechanisms built around Personnel Progression, your need for people is limitless.

The simple fact is, your kingdom is just a satisfying, growing, living, breathing physical manifestation of a game menu. You craft swords by going to your armory. You purchase and improve spells by going to the spell weaving hut. You strengthen and diversify the higgledy (aka little helper creatures) options by talking to the breeder. I can go on. Items that improve your health are prepared by the chef, using ingredients you find on adventures. Armies are strengthened with new moves. Basic stats and traversal mechanisms are unlocked through R&D.

It is just so satisfying! I walk down a street I built, crowded with happy people I convinced to immigrate, who are working jobs performing tasks I need to succeed, and as a result, every monster I fight and evil villain I best is the result of my people.

Let’s get back on track! A hot take I’ll remove from the oven is that XP often doesn’t provide new choices, but a people fueled progression ecosystem does. It’s really simple. Most roleplaying games provide XP for every activity, and Ni No Kuni II is no different. You kill monsters, complete quests, and discover new locations for steady progression. But, I’m failing to recall a time in other games when I chose to continue a quest first, or specifically seek out someone to help, for the XP provided.

But, in Ni No Kuni II, I might help a shipbuilder because my royal vessel needs bonuses only they can provide. I sought to help generals first to provide an edge to my tactical adventuring. I chose who to help because of what I needed from them.

In the game, they make it very front and center that most quests will reward you with a new citizen and they tell you what that citizen brings to the table. This isn’t mere aesthetics. You can dabble in all things, or prioritize Higgledy, weapon, spell, or armor development per your preferences. I sampled broadly, but to maximize ratings on Skirmishes, complete certain advanced dungeons, or purge all of the cursed monsters, I would have applied focus to my recruitment.

This is a big game, with dozens of hours of content, and having a reason and the information on how best to pursue the content in a way that also makes me happier? That’s fantastic design.

Finally, this game avoids the typical trappings of a huge party game. I personally hate having to spend hours using a worthless Pokemon only to get to the good part. I hate having to carefully manage weaker party members and make abstract, arbitrary decisions so that I don’t ruin something for myself later. Ni No Kuni II keeps my adventuring party separate from my citizenry. I don’t need to manage them. I don’t need to level them. More friends, sure, but not more problems. It isn’t often breadth isn’t also paired with additional complexity, but this game does a wonderful job of tamping down its burdens.

People love to collect things. Pokemon makes this abundantly clear. But, I don’t think people love managing tedium quite as much. Ni No Kuni hits the 1% of this glorious Venn Diagram. It’s a one in a million shot.

I love this mechanism - Personnel Progression - and I think it would make so many games better. When discussing The Last of Us Part II, the Triple Click podcast (which I love) mentioned how much they wanted to learn more about the town of Jackson. That isn’t the game Naughty Dog made, but I love the idea of helping survivors in a zombie apocalypse to build a new community and seeing those people reward me in kind with their skills and ideas. Isn’t that the premise of Station Eleven to some degree?

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus has you save members of the rebellion and bring them back to the submarine. You see them around in between missions, but it’s merely a visual performance. How much cooler would it have been to have them matter? If you save one person, they give you a special gun. Save another and they give you intelligence to take out a Nazi commander.

I’ll admit that many of the One Cool Things I mention on this blog are incredibly niche and potentially tough to apply elsewhere. But, I love this one. It requires investment and thought, but it works in so many places.

The One Cool Thing

Personnel Progression pulls players’ heartstrings and pivots potential grind towards palpable pleasure. More than anything, it gets us out of a menu. It distances us from bars that fill and simply tell us we’re more powerful. Tangible manifestations of accomplishments are too rare in games. Begone, spreadsheets. My friends are here.

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Preview for Next Time

The next post will be our fifth and final for Season One. If you recall, every sixth post, I’ll combine the previous five One Cool Things and pitch a game that uses them. You should share your own pitches in the comment section! I’d love for this to be an interactive moment for the readers.

I will be writing about Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, which I know is a bit limiting as it is a PlayStation 5 exclusive and those consoles are still very difficult to obtain. But, I’ll be talking about something the franchise tends to do really well, and it is a franchise that has been around since the PlayStation 2. Hell, I played the original in college!

If you don’t have a PlayStation 5, you can still follow along and get the gist if you play any of the games on any previous PlayStation console. Grab your little robot friend and head back here March 11.

Currently Playing

I had to make a quick trip to Texas to help my parents move this week, so I didn’t get much time to dig into my new game, Firewatch. But, what I have played is quite delightful. It is the perfect palette cleanser from my last game.

Walking around the Wyoming wilderness is lovely and immersive, the writing and performances are excellent, and I am very curious about the game’s twist. After the first day in-game it feels like another shoe might drop and I cannot wait. You can play it on PC, Switch, Xbox, and PlayStation.

A Recommendation for Silence

February 25 is National Quiet Day. Please read the rest of this section in a mental whisper. I just wrote about the noise-oriented stealth in The Last of Us, so you likely don’t need to know more about whether that is for you.

However, another subtle, quiet game from the twisted Danish studio Play Dead is Inside. It’s available on every platform (PC, consoles, Mobile), is relatively cheap, and only takes four to five hours to finish. But also, it is so atmospheric, creepy without being scary, thrilling without being overly challenging, and let’s just say the ending is delightfully weird.

Go Inside, walk softly, and don’t get caught.

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Thank you for reading! If you liked what you read, please subscribe and share, but also, let me know what you think. See you in two weeks to end Season One!

Edited by Joshua Buergel