Shixx
02-18-2010, 02:15 PM
http://img695.imageshack.us/img695/5466/whiteknightchronicles1r.jpg
White Knight Chronicles is one of those games that was a bit of a victim of itself. Released over a year ago in Japan, it suffered from a large time frame between release windows and lost a lot of hype because of it, perhaps unfairly. While it's no secret that I held high hopes for this game, what it brought me was....find out below (Har Har see what I did thar?)
Like many fantasy stories, White Knight Chronicles is a bit of a coming-of-age tale about a young man, roughly in his later teens, and his fellow companions. After the princess of his kingdom is kidnapped before his very eyes, he embarks on a journey to rescue her, using the power of a towering White Knight he was granted during the kidnapping. What's slightly different is the ability to create a character that tags along during the game, and the character creator functionality is quite deep. Sadly, your created character is like a ghost, he or she will never speak during the entire course of the game.
The story itself is rather typical fantasy stock, but there are some very bright points that sadly are not touched on nearly enough. Fairly early in the game we are presented with a possible love triangle, although it's so well managed and subtle that it's hard to tell if it's romance or just friendship. It is by far the highlight of the story, but it is a part of the story that is strangely dropped about halfway through the game, never to be mentioned or brought up again. The characters themselves are also generally interesting and fun to watch, which is anchored by solid voice acting.
Sadly, there are several narrative crutches throughout the game. By the time it's over, the amount of split-personalities and sudden stupidity by either the heroes or the villains in order to prolong the conflict is frustrating. Throw in your usual fantasy roles of fate/destiny, good vs. evil, and you've got the mix for a rather generic, forgettable story that loses site of anything that makes it good, in short the story is ****.
Luckily for us, the gameplay is the star of this performance, and it is much more successful. White Knight Chronicles runs off a somewhat modified version of Final Fantasy XII. Battles take place in real-time, not on a separate screen. A circular gauge that fills up every three or so seconds is what limits your actions. Every time it's full, you can use an action; like attack, cast a spell, use an item, etc, which then causes the gauge to empty. This gauge time stays relatively same throughout the game. The complexities of the battle system lie largely in how you make combos and spend action chips. Combos are just that; user created series' of moves that link together. Doing this removes the wait time for each attack through the time gauge. Some moves also react with one another to become more powerful. For example my Best Combo move is Called "Ur Mom" it includes 9 very awesome skills linked into Ur Mom...
These combos are limited by your action chips. These are like a second source of mana/energy in the game. They refill overtime through combat, but are used up by combos. The longer the combo, the more action chips that are used. They are also used up when you transform into your knight; more on this later. I do wish AC was gained a little quicker I found myself using just the basic attack most the time so I could Build up Chips which in return
made some battles VERY Dull, but I do see why they did it that way.
The customization opened up through the ability to create combos any way you want is quite massive. Combine that with a fairly large skill tree, and you have a system that allows drastically different characters to be created, from magic users, to ranged attackers, to heavy hitters, and everything in between.
If it sounds MMO like, it is in a way. These combos can almost be seen as user made macros, shortcuts for stringing together long moves. But whereas MMOs are usually on PCs in order to utilize a keyboard, here we have a controller. And this is a flaw that becomes very apparent later in the game. You can assign any attacks, spells, or combos to one of 21 slots. All of these slots are available in battle, split up into three rows of seven slots each. Problem is, this isn't nearly enough slots. By the time you're fairly far through the game, the amount of combos, spells, and attack skills becomes huge, and choosing 21 of them to assign in battle seems borderline unfair. And yet, if there were an unlimited number of slots, scrolling through all of your actions would take time you don't have in battle. Some might say this adds to the strategy, but it is a little frustrating.
Take a magic user for instance. There are four types of offensive magic; fire, water, wind, and earth. You'll want a few spells from each of those to make sure that you have all of your bases covered. That's already half of your slots gone, and that's without any physical attacks or combos.
http://img521.imageshack.us/img521/7893/whiteknightchroniclesle.jpg
Combat is mostly satisfying
Sadly, there are other minor flaws. At any time during battle you can switch between active members, allowing you to really manage a battle. This is a good addition, one that alleviates having to worry about AI at times, because the AI, while not bad, isn't exactly top-notch either. While your computer controlled party members do a great job healing and keeping everyone alive, they rarely use the right offensive spells correctly (they'll use a wind spell on a wind enemy instead of an earth spell, for instance). Believe it or not, AI path is also poor. Several times during the course of this game I had party members get "stuck" on a rock or similar object, unable to move around it for several seconds.
The user interface is also a bit clumsy. Creating a combo, for instance, is only good for the character you created it for. You can not load it onto another character, instead you have to recreate it again. Moving items about between characters is also a bit unclear, and the game fails to have any in-depth kind of tutorial that explains all of the UI aspects, or even other aspects like the online play (I'll talk about that later).
Nonetheless, seeing the fruits of your customization labor pan-out in battle is very rewarding, and, if nothing else, the game is forgiving enough so that these flaws won't become to apparent. The game isn't terribly hard, and transforming into a knight is a quick way to win any battle pretty easily. While you can't transform at will (doing so uses up all of your action chips), the knights are so grossly overpowered (you'll gain more than one over the course of the game), that they make any moderate challenge evaporate. Helpful hint; if you want more of a challenge, try using the knights as little as possible.
This brings me to another problem featuring the game's difficulty; enemies are more tedious at times then challenging. Rare is the battle you enter and realize "wow, I can't win." What does happen is that you'll realize "wow, I have to whack at this guy for five straight minutes."
I've dwelled on combat for a while now, and while I touched on several flaws, the main system is fun and fresh enough that it is generally quite enjoyable. But to many people, RPGs just aren't about the combat. And while the plot may not be too memorable, the world around it is.
The town you start in is generic fantasy style, and many of the locales you visit are, but everything is injected with a healthy bit of Japanese Monster Hunteritis. That is, if it can be made bigger, then do it. Enemies tower above you you several stories. Some characters in the game could eat Jabba the Hutt for breakfast. And The Free City of Greede, a sprawling steampunk metropolis on the back of a Demithor, a giant walking creature, is so Flipping huge and imaginative that it's impossible not to say "wow" when first seen.
http://img94.imageshack.us/img94/8042/whiteknightstory2006092.jpg
Yep, it's huge (That's what she said..Sorry)
And though from a technical standpoint the graphics aren't amazing, the bold colors and different in-game architecture is so vivid that you can easily overlook the below average character models and lighting.
The other production values are more of a mixed bag. Voice acting, as mentioned, is pretty good, but the soundtrack is repetitive and mostly forgettable.
There is, however, two other extremely large portions of the game that are quite fun. The first is online play. White Knight Chronicles features an online system that is about as robust and fully featured as they come. Signing in to what's called "Geonet" at any save point grants you access to in-game message boards and user created towns. From towns, you can meet up with other players and embark on up to fifty quests with your created character. You can also attempt all these quests solo, but you can only do them with your created character, not your other party members, which can make them a bit hard to do alone.
These user created towns are built through Georama, an in-game system that gives you full customization over the town. You can buy all kinds of buildings, merchant shops, etc., and place them however you would like. It's similar to Level-5's other games like Dark Cloud. You can even recruit NPCs from in the game to come live at your town, granting it stat bonuses that rewards you with better items to purchase, and just all-in-all making it feel more alive. It's a nearly addicting system that is very rewarding, and lasts long after the game is finished.
These additional features add depth to an already engrossing single-player experience, and give it a leg-up in replay value that most all RPGs lack. While some UI problems hinder this game from being excellent, the overall fun of combat, sense of discovery, and huge customization options separate this from most in the genre. While non-RPG fans may not be able to overlook some of the flaws, those who like character customization, a fresh battle system, and an engrossing world will be right at home here.
Pros:
-Fun combat
-Engrossing world with several "wow" moments
-Solid voice acting
Cons:
-Clumsy interface
-Tedious at time, instead of challenging
-Over used story/plot
My Score-
7.0/10
White Knight Chronicles is one of those games that was a bit of a victim of itself. Released over a year ago in Japan, it suffered from a large time frame between release windows and lost a lot of hype because of it, perhaps unfairly. While it's no secret that I held high hopes for this game, what it brought me was....find out below (Har Har see what I did thar?)
Like many fantasy stories, White Knight Chronicles is a bit of a coming-of-age tale about a young man, roughly in his later teens, and his fellow companions. After the princess of his kingdom is kidnapped before his very eyes, he embarks on a journey to rescue her, using the power of a towering White Knight he was granted during the kidnapping. What's slightly different is the ability to create a character that tags along during the game, and the character creator functionality is quite deep. Sadly, your created character is like a ghost, he or she will never speak during the entire course of the game.
The story itself is rather typical fantasy stock, but there are some very bright points that sadly are not touched on nearly enough. Fairly early in the game we are presented with a possible love triangle, although it's so well managed and subtle that it's hard to tell if it's romance or just friendship. It is by far the highlight of the story, but it is a part of the story that is strangely dropped about halfway through the game, never to be mentioned or brought up again. The characters themselves are also generally interesting and fun to watch, which is anchored by solid voice acting.
Sadly, there are several narrative crutches throughout the game. By the time it's over, the amount of split-personalities and sudden stupidity by either the heroes or the villains in order to prolong the conflict is frustrating. Throw in your usual fantasy roles of fate/destiny, good vs. evil, and you've got the mix for a rather generic, forgettable story that loses site of anything that makes it good, in short the story is ****.
Luckily for us, the gameplay is the star of this performance, and it is much more successful. White Knight Chronicles runs off a somewhat modified version of Final Fantasy XII. Battles take place in real-time, not on a separate screen. A circular gauge that fills up every three or so seconds is what limits your actions. Every time it's full, you can use an action; like attack, cast a spell, use an item, etc, which then causes the gauge to empty. This gauge time stays relatively same throughout the game. The complexities of the battle system lie largely in how you make combos and spend action chips. Combos are just that; user created series' of moves that link together. Doing this removes the wait time for each attack through the time gauge. Some moves also react with one another to become more powerful. For example my Best Combo move is Called "Ur Mom" it includes 9 very awesome skills linked into Ur Mom...
These combos are limited by your action chips. These are like a second source of mana/energy in the game. They refill overtime through combat, but are used up by combos. The longer the combo, the more action chips that are used. They are also used up when you transform into your knight; more on this later. I do wish AC was gained a little quicker I found myself using just the basic attack most the time so I could Build up Chips which in return
made some battles VERY Dull, but I do see why they did it that way.
The customization opened up through the ability to create combos any way you want is quite massive. Combine that with a fairly large skill tree, and you have a system that allows drastically different characters to be created, from magic users, to ranged attackers, to heavy hitters, and everything in between.
If it sounds MMO like, it is in a way. These combos can almost be seen as user made macros, shortcuts for stringing together long moves. But whereas MMOs are usually on PCs in order to utilize a keyboard, here we have a controller. And this is a flaw that becomes very apparent later in the game. You can assign any attacks, spells, or combos to one of 21 slots. All of these slots are available in battle, split up into three rows of seven slots each. Problem is, this isn't nearly enough slots. By the time you're fairly far through the game, the amount of combos, spells, and attack skills becomes huge, and choosing 21 of them to assign in battle seems borderline unfair. And yet, if there were an unlimited number of slots, scrolling through all of your actions would take time you don't have in battle. Some might say this adds to the strategy, but it is a little frustrating.
Take a magic user for instance. There are four types of offensive magic; fire, water, wind, and earth. You'll want a few spells from each of those to make sure that you have all of your bases covered. That's already half of your slots gone, and that's without any physical attacks or combos.
http://img521.imageshack.us/img521/7893/whiteknightchroniclesle.jpg
Combat is mostly satisfying
Sadly, there are other minor flaws. At any time during battle you can switch between active members, allowing you to really manage a battle. This is a good addition, one that alleviates having to worry about AI at times, because the AI, while not bad, isn't exactly top-notch either. While your computer controlled party members do a great job healing and keeping everyone alive, they rarely use the right offensive spells correctly (they'll use a wind spell on a wind enemy instead of an earth spell, for instance). Believe it or not, AI path is also poor. Several times during the course of this game I had party members get "stuck" on a rock or similar object, unable to move around it for several seconds.
The user interface is also a bit clumsy. Creating a combo, for instance, is only good for the character you created it for. You can not load it onto another character, instead you have to recreate it again. Moving items about between characters is also a bit unclear, and the game fails to have any in-depth kind of tutorial that explains all of the UI aspects, or even other aspects like the online play (I'll talk about that later).
Nonetheless, seeing the fruits of your customization labor pan-out in battle is very rewarding, and, if nothing else, the game is forgiving enough so that these flaws won't become to apparent. The game isn't terribly hard, and transforming into a knight is a quick way to win any battle pretty easily. While you can't transform at will (doing so uses up all of your action chips), the knights are so grossly overpowered (you'll gain more than one over the course of the game), that they make any moderate challenge evaporate. Helpful hint; if you want more of a challenge, try using the knights as little as possible.
This brings me to another problem featuring the game's difficulty; enemies are more tedious at times then challenging. Rare is the battle you enter and realize "wow, I can't win." What does happen is that you'll realize "wow, I have to whack at this guy for five straight minutes."
I've dwelled on combat for a while now, and while I touched on several flaws, the main system is fun and fresh enough that it is generally quite enjoyable. But to many people, RPGs just aren't about the combat. And while the plot may not be too memorable, the world around it is.
The town you start in is generic fantasy style, and many of the locales you visit are, but everything is injected with a healthy bit of Japanese Monster Hunteritis. That is, if it can be made bigger, then do it. Enemies tower above you you several stories. Some characters in the game could eat Jabba the Hutt for breakfast. And The Free City of Greede, a sprawling steampunk metropolis on the back of a Demithor, a giant walking creature, is so Flipping huge and imaginative that it's impossible not to say "wow" when first seen.
http://img94.imageshack.us/img94/8042/whiteknightstory2006092.jpg
Yep, it's huge (That's what she said..Sorry)
And though from a technical standpoint the graphics aren't amazing, the bold colors and different in-game architecture is so vivid that you can easily overlook the below average character models and lighting.
The other production values are more of a mixed bag. Voice acting, as mentioned, is pretty good, but the soundtrack is repetitive and mostly forgettable.
There is, however, two other extremely large portions of the game that are quite fun. The first is online play. White Knight Chronicles features an online system that is about as robust and fully featured as they come. Signing in to what's called "Geonet" at any save point grants you access to in-game message boards and user created towns. From towns, you can meet up with other players and embark on up to fifty quests with your created character. You can also attempt all these quests solo, but you can only do them with your created character, not your other party members, which can make them a bit hard to do alone.
These user created towns are built through Georama, an in-game system that gives you full customization over the town. You can buy all kinds of buildings, merchant shops, etc., and place them however you would like. It's similar to Level-5's other games like Dark Cloud. You can even recruit NPCs from in the game to come live at your town, granting it stat bonuses that rewards you with better items to purchase, and just all-in-all making it feel more alive. It's a nearly addicting system that is very rewarding, and lasts long after the game is finished.
These additional features add depth to an already engrossing single-player experience, and give it a leg-up in replay value that most all RPGs lack. While some UI problems hinder this game from being excellent, the overall fun of combat, sense of discovery, and huge customization options separate this from most in the genre. While non-RPG fans may not be able to overlook some of the flaws, those who like character customization, a fresh battle system, and an engrossing world will be right at home here.
Pros:
-Fun combat
-Engrossing world with several "wow" moments
-Solid voice acting
Cons:
-Clumsy interface
-Tedious at time, instead of challenging
-Over used story/plot
My Score-
7.0/10