White Knight Chronicles: Review

Gotta love the art

Some of you may already know the well renowned Level-5, developer of RPG games such as Dark Cloud and Dark Cloud 2 for the PlayStation 2 and Jeanne d’Arc for the PlayStation Portable. And they’re back again!
This time with White Knight Chronicles!

White Knight Chronicles, Level-5’s first venture into the realms of the PlayStation 3, is a Role-Playing Game (RPG) starring a young orphaned teen, Leonard, who gets dragged into a series of events involving the princess of Balandor and makes a pact with the White Knight; a powerful weapon from an ancient war. With his newfound ability to transform into a giant robotic knight, Leonard sets out on a quest to save the kidnapped princess and learn more of the Knights.

Orphaned teen with a mysterious past happens to come across some epic power, and then decides to set out on a quest to save a “damsel in distress” from the evil people who kidnapped her. Sound familiar?

With that said, would this game be the original RPG with a great plot that you’ve been looking for to play on the PS3?
I’d have say no but do go on and read the review anyway.

Loved

World design: The world of White Knight Chronicles is huge and is teeming with life. Everywhere you go, from towns to deserts to even ancient monuments, you’ll see life, be it monsters or people or even human-like creatures that live with the humans. The design of these elements itself are pretty breathtaking. Greede, the humongous walking city is by far the most prominent of these unique designs.

Total character control: What captured me the most was the depth of character customisation. Even after playing a whole lot of RPGs and MMOs, not once have I seen such a wide array of sliders and customisation options to make your character resemble yourself (or the hottest chick in the game). And that’s just the beginning. Your character’s statistics and skill set is totally in your control. With each level gained, you earn a set amount of skill points which can then be spent on learning skills from eight different skill sets; two being magic skill sets while the other six being weapon type skill sets. Players have the choice of either specializing his character with a weapon type or magic or be more versatile, with skills from every other skill sets.Your character’s looks even changes instantly as you change your equipment.

These appearance changes remain during cut scenes as well.
Always a plus for me because I keep my characters looking cool in any RPG. Who cares if they’re weaker?

Combo system: The aforementioned skills can be used to make custom combos. Yes, you can form your own combos. The basic idea is just stringing the weapon skills (and maybe some magic) to dish out immense damage in just one turn. These combos however, are limited by Action Chips which can only be gained from using normal attacks.

However cool it may sound, it can get really tedious, complicating and time consuming. A character can only have a fixed amount of skills at any point of time, so a player could be spending precious time just to make sure they have the right skills for the upcoming quest.

Even so, I feel that it makes battles more engaging and visually pleasant, rather than just using and watching the same move over and over again till the enemy dies.
(FF7, anyone?)

Battle system: Essentially a turn-based system in real time, you have a meter (in the form of a circle) that determines when you can make moves. The speed of this meter is affected by the sort of equipment you have equipped which I find pretty interesting. When the meter fills up, you execute a command. When combos are executed, this meter turns into an indicator for the player to follow up his combo with timed button presses. After a move, the meter charges up again and it repeats.

The player is also free to move during the waiting period. Even though moving away from the enemy does not actually help you avoid attacks, it’s quite useful at times when you want to move your character behind to cast a spell. Enemies will usually change its target when its former target gets out of range.

The brilliance in the battle system is that it allows a form of micromanagement. You have control over one of your three characters at any one time but you can switch over to the characters anytime. While you’re not in control of the other characters, the AI will take over. This is pretty amazing and as mentioned above, the player has the ability to move his character around, and can therefore be manipulating positions. i.e. casting character moves back before cast while the others move forward to cover the caster etc.

A whole load of quests: Optional quests are in abundance in White Knight Chronicles. If you ever get bored or find that the main story line is too easy, board the quest train! Funnily enough, your created character can slip out of the main party during the main story to go on these optional quests. The reward for doing these quests is that your character gains points that will increase his/her guild rank, which of course, gives you bragging rights. Early quests you start with are pretty straightforward and easy. As you go along achieving a higher guild rank, new and significantly harder quests get unlocked.

Of course, players have the choice to either do this alone or in a party of up to four.
However, as Level-5 have mentioned in an interview, the quests were designed to be played with a party, so it might be harder to go solo. You can tell that Level-5 are trying to encourage players to play together as the online system, GeoNet, which enables players to have their own online adventure log (sort of like blogging), a friends list and they keep track of other players they’ve quested with recently in a list for you too. Sounds like Capcom’s Monster Hunter? Well, this is Monster Hunter in a traditional RPG form which definitely has a high re-playability rate in my books.

Towns: Kudos, Level-5, for excellent towns. Towns are huge, with a whole load of townsfolk with them. Interactivity in the towns was much more than I expected. Unfortunately, after awhile, you might notice that it’s a hassle to walk back and forth in the towns as they are pretty huge. There are NPCs that you can interact with while walking about. Main characters even have voice-only side conversations as you’re walking around town. Pretty cool as it adds more life and “entertainment” to the boring walk. Oh, have I mentioned they have an auto walk feature? Forget holding onto that analog stick!

Another great thing about towns in White Knight Chronicles is that you can own one. Yes, each player can have his own town, known as Georama, which acts as a lobby for multiplayer quests. Your Georama is created with materials you find. Town population can also be increased by recruiting people from the towns in story mode. Recruiting some townsfolk, however, requires you to be at a certain guild rank which requires you to go for more optional quests. These recruited people will raise the stats of your Georama and will allow the generation of raw materials, such as ore, which could be used to craft rare weapons and armour. So to create a “perfect” town, players have to play and conquer both offline and online parts of White Knight Chronicles. What’s more, players can join other players’ Georama even when the owner is offline!

Soundtrack: From the opening song to the ending song, I felt that the soundtrack fits really well with the game. It gives the game a much more grandiose feel. I found myself distracted from my current objective once just because I was idling, listening to the music. Some tracks are pretty catchy as well, especially those with the wind instruments. Opening and ending songs were sung by KAZCO (actually Kazuko) Hamano.  The orchestral tracks were composed by Takeshi Inoue, Yumiko Hashizume, and Noriyasu Agematsu.

Not so loved

Story, story: As far as I’m concerned, a good story is one that is unpredictable, flows well with the plots and characters and includes that brilliant plot twist that just makes you go, “Wow, never saw that coming.” (or something like that) White Knight Chronicles, however, is as predictable as clockwork. The main plots of story are just too predictable for my tastes. You could actually tell the true identity of one of the main antagonists just by going through a few cut scenes WITHOUT any foreknowledge of the story. The story is pretty cliché. You will definitely notice the many traditional RPG stereotypes while progressing with the story.

I went “The hell, credits already?” when I first saw the credits since I did not expect a closure of the game yet. There seemed to be so much more to do, so much more to find out. However, bear in mind that Level-5 created White Knight Chronicles with a sequel planned out. So when you reach the end, if you can tell because I sure as hell couldn’t, don’t expect too much. Just know that the game ends off leaving you with an urge of wanting to know more. Wait for the next game patiently as I am doing.

Even though predictable, I actually enjoyed the story. Probably would have been way better if it wasn’t so predictable but there you go…

Huge ass dungeons: I mentioned that the game world is huge earlier on, and that includes the dungeons that you go through in the game. This is definitely more fun for the type who likes exploring but not for the faint-hearted because you could be walking on and on and on for an hour or two in just one dungeon just because you have no idea where to go or you get simply lost.

Sure, they indicate your next goal in the dungeon with a star but in multi-level dungeons, you’re left walking around like a total idiot, having to check every corner because you don’t see the star anymore since your goal is on another floor. Even if you do see a star, to get from where you are to it, a long, and I really mean long, distance walk awaits you and your party.

I wonder if Level-5 intentionally designed it this way so players have more hours clocked in their play time…

Easy as hell: The only time I ever saw a game-over screen was when my guest character died because he got stuck behind a gate while I waltzed through the dungeon, forgetting about him and looking at my map instead because I was lost (see above). With such a complicating and time consuming combo and skill system, one would expect that the game would reward you for your efficiency in optimizing combos and skills with harder battles. Don’t forget that you can transform into the White Knight which makes your battles a whole lot faster and easier than it already is. Believe it or not, you don’t actually need to transform at all to win any battles.

Amazingly, with the many skills that you can only access after awhile, the basic skills that you start with can get you through the offline game in a breeze. Something’s wrong, isn’t it?

You just exist: Remember me praising the depth of the customisation of characters? Well, yeah. It’s so awesome that you probably would have spent quite some time making the perfect avatar. I took about a half hour to forty minutes creating a nice little avatar that fits me. I was eager to see how my character would fit into the story after hearing so much about it. Guess what, though?

Yeah, your character is definitely shown to be part of the story, all right but does he fit in? Not in the slightest, excluding the fact that you were introduced to the main protagonist, Leonard, who acknowledges your existence for just that brief moment in the beginning of the game. It seems odd that your character appears in cut scenes here and there but there’s not a slightest bit of interactivity. Imagine a group of people talking in front of a tree; you’re the tree.

The character’s purpose is representing you when you play online but there you are, going on quests, gaining a nice guild rank and all in the middle of an epic quest to save the princess and no one notices you. Hell, you even helped the protagonists fight and they do barely anything at all to acknowledge your existence. Sad, huh?

UI design: By design I mean the ease of accessibility. It looks fine and all but it’s quite a pain to set skills, for example. At some point in time, you may just be pressing the wrong buttons at the wrong times. The reason why White Knight Chronicles: International Edition has voice chat implemented is because it’s a hassle just to get into the chat system, let alone type in it with just your controller.

These are the only two things I found irritating. UI is supposed to be “transparent” in a sense anyway; you won’t notice what you don’t find trouble with.

Biased

English-only voice acting: I was greatly disappointed when I found that they dropped every bit of Japanese audio in the game (except the songs). I probably would have enjoyed the game more with the original voices. The English voices are not very convincing in my opinion. They don’t really sound angry when they’re supposed to be etc. Well, it can be really convincing and amusing at times, but I’d prefer the Japanese audio over the English anytime. Some do tell me that the English audio is decent but this is just highly based on opinions so don’t let this stop you if you’re having still wondering whether to get the game!

tl;dr

I don’t get why the game’s getting all the flack from everywhere. Yeah, it’s not THAT good, with the mediocre story and all that, but the small parts that support the main game is what gives it the potential to be a great game.

White Knight Chronicles certainly is one of the better new gen RPGs to be added into the thin library of PS3 RPG games. However, if you’re looking for the kind of RPG for an epic offline experience with hours of game play and a deep, engaging story, this is definitely not the game for you.

The game’s greatness comes mainly from its online play, with bits and pieces from offline play that enhances your online experience. Even as you read this, new online quests are being planned for release as downloadable content. So if you’re into treasure hunting or questing with buddies and even people you’ve never met before, then what are you waiting for? Buy the game!

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 3:15 am and is categorised in Game Reviews.