Ni No Kunt

for this to make sense, i must clarify two things

one: there's like. no transportation infrastructure anywhere. There's exactly one port city, and we see a grand total of two boats in the main story, the sea cow and a literal ghost pirate ship, which is Not a point in the world's favor (+3 if we include quests? I think? The one with the guy in hamelin trying to get medicine to his sister). And I guess the broken one on the shipwreck shore, but again that is not a positive.

Extending beyond that, we hear a little about caravans and merchants through some npc dialogue, but don't see anything. Hamelin is pretty high-tech (for their time period), but again, no cars or wagons or anything. Tanks and the airplanes they have at the end of the game barely count.

And then the Xanadu in the room. Giant floating city with (presumably) flying machines (the cloudsweepers I think they're called?), and also the literal sky pirates??? Just inexplicably, the most high-tech form of transportation in this game is from the sky pirates. Whuh

two: the travel spell only costs 1 mp, and can transport at least four people at once (and bottomless bags)

so so so, my crack theory is that the reason for this significant lack of any mode of transportation is because their society was mostly reliant on Travel to get around. From the wizards companion, it seems like the main/only limiting factor for this spell is having been to the location previously, which could easily be remedied by. You know. Another wizard that knows travel. And we know that magic was much more widespread before Shadar started banning its usage and breaking the hearts of anyone who tried.

Like, i think if any world had a low-cost fairly easy-to-use instantaneous transportation spell, they would abuse it to hell and back.

And then when Shadar came around and fucked everything up, the kingdoms didn't have the resources/capabilities to quickly establish communications between themselves, EXCEPT for Xanadu (which could be why he destroyed the city????)

(Is the actual reason travel costs so little mp for game balance reasons? yes. I imagine in universe Gateway does not in fact cost zero mp to use, but it does in game. Also I recognize that we probably don't see any other ports because they just. Weren't important to the game's story, or the devs were limited by how much stuff you could put into a game at the time, but this is funnier to me)

My man :3