I haven't played 2 yet, but I just finished Wrath of the White Witch [PS4 remaster] a few days ago and it's... not a very good game. Mediocre at its best moments, and irritatingly frustrating at others. It'd still be nice to get it here because it is quite pretty and has some charm, despite the rest. I'd probably play it again to cheat out of the most frustrating parts (alchemy ingredient farming...) and see if I could tinker other things.
What's saddest about it is, it has a core that could be turned into a great game without a total redesign or many/any asset changes. Even a lot of it just being numbers fixes. It suffers from "designed as a portable handheld design" issues: it's clear QA didn't test or didn't care about the frustration layering because they designed it expecting for short bursts of play without memory of the bad stuff, and that the extreme added grind would be well-received on a "20 minutes day on a metro" game... and it suffers severely from these elements, and is very sad that none of that was updated in the remaster; only the "pretties" were adjusted.
(World of Final Fantasy, on the other hand, is a very comparable game and is quite "smart"/"sharp". It's largely everything Ni No Kuni 1 wanted to be as a game. It even has its own art style/direction for its identity, though not as striking a one as Gibli.)
Post edited December 01, 2020 by mqstout