How to Turn Off Auto-Battle & Auto-Play in Ni No Kuni: Cross Worlds

As you set off on your adventure in Ni no Kuni: Cross Worlds, one thing you may have noticed is that it’s set to auto play by default. It makes sense that a lot of traditional gamers aren’t too happy about that. So, what can be done? Since Cross Worlds is — by its very nature — a mobile game, it stands to reason that the game would feature ideas found in other mobile games.

Here’s a guide to turning that pesky feature off if you’d like a more involved experience.

How to Turn Off Auto-Battle

In normal gameplay — after you have completed the Familiar Egg quest — click or tap the crossed swords button. It’s located near the bottom of your HUD, all the way to the right. If you click it, you’ll see that there are three options to choose from MANUAL, SEMI-AUTOMATIC, and FULLY AUTOMATIC.

Whichever mode you pick depends entirely on what kind of experience you want from Cross Worlds. If you want to fully control your character as you would in an ordinary MMO, MANUAL is your best bet. If you’d like an experience reminiscent of a traditional turn-based RPG, go with SEMI-AUTOMATIC. It doesn’t really need saying, because it’s the default option, but FULLY AUTOMATIC is exactly what it sounds like.

It should be noted, however, that turning off auto-battle does not apply to quests. If a quest requires combat, it’s fully passive, so use that time to stretch your legs or grab a snack.

How to Turn Off Auto-Play / Auto-Questing

In Cross Worlds, when targeting a quest, your character will head for that quest automatically. If you’d like to turn this off, simply click or tap the quest box to the left of the HUD. It will stop glowing yellow if it’s a main quest, or blue if it’s not a main quest.

It would also seem that both of these functions can be controlled from the main menu in addition to the method listed here. I fail to understand why this isn’t an important enough feature to properly explain in the tutorial, but c’est la vie.