White Knight Chronicles

White Knight Chronicles was my most anticipated game of ’08.  Then, it was my most anticipated game of ’09.  Finally the game comes out in ’10.  Was it worth the wait.  Well, no… but… yes.  I have such a love-hate relationship with this game.  So many good ideas that were not executed all that well.  Overall the game feels like a combination of Rogue Galaxy, Final Fantasy XII and Monster Hunter.  Odd combination to be sure.  I would be hard pressed to review this game in a manner that is normal for my style simply because there are so many things I like and don’t like about every aspect of the game.  So I’m going to do things a little differently this time around.  I’ll talk about each aspect of the game, what I liked about it, what I  didn’t like about it and what they could do to fix it.  Why am I doing this?  Well, WKC2 is in development and I guess part of me hopes that someone at Level-5 gets wind of this review and takes some of my suggestions into consideration (Yeah right.) Hope you have time for a long read.

Story:

bad > good
The bad –

There’s not much to like about the story.  At least the main story.  Oh no, the princess has been kidnapped what to do.  There characters have very little… character.  Your avatar has NO character even though he or she is in every real-time cut-scene, he or she will just sit in the background looking completely awkward.

The dialogue is pretty bad overall. Then there is the “your princess is in another castle” syndrome that you run into.  It’s pretty juvenile over all and I have a feeling that’s part of the reasoning for it. Maybe they were trying to appeal to a younger crowd?  Hopefully? Outside of all of this, what annoyed me the most… you’ve been betrayed–no you haven’t– yes you have– and again, oh wait, no you haven’t.  What the hell? Just make up your mind!

The good –
The game does take jabs at itself a few times (at least I hope that was what they were trying to do).  For instance, at one point during the game one of the main antagonists throws out the line “Must you always arrive just in the nick of time?  It’s very cliche.”

About half way through the game, you get the gist of the REAL story of White Knight Chronicles.  The underlying story arc that will span into the next game.  This story is significantly more interesting, and has to do with the five Knights.  By the end of the game, part of me began to think that the game spent the entire story actually making fun of horrible JRPG cliches.We can’t  know if that is actually true, but it would explain a lot.

The fix –
Get rid of the JRPG cliches that seem to be so prevalent.  It’s time we moved away from all of the cheesy dialogue and the characters with no character.  Make your avatar actually have a voice and actually take part in the story rather than sitting back awkwardly in the background.  I like the idea of having the underlying story arc unfolding behind the main story, but make the main story something more than “OMG They kidnapped the princess!”

Presentation:

bad = good
The bad –
The character models look very dated and generic.  This is somewhat understandable since the game was released in Japan in ’08 and took this long to get over here.  The animations are also pretty bad in some cases but most of those cases have to do with combat so I’ll touch on that later.  NPCs and enemies suffer from pretty bad draw in as well.

The “Live Chat,” a feature in the game where the characters will randomly talk with one another, is a nice touch but there needs to be more variety of what they say and every character does not have to be involved in every conversation.  By the time you get to the 4th or 5th character, what they are saying becomes pretty pointless and more annoying than funny.  Along with that, some character should never speak.  For instance the first rabbit looking guy you run into– I wanted to break out one of my combos on him every time I heard him say “Don’t forget about me!”

Lastly, the map system needs an overhaul, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

The good –
The environments are very large and beautiful (well except the desert, but what desert is?).  The level design is great and some of the maps will make you want to come back since there will be so much more to explore.  The music is fantastic in just about all cases.  There are a few exceptions, but many of the tracks got stuck in my head, in a good way.

Creating your avatar is also a huge plus in this game.  There are so many options for how he or she will look.  Only problem with it is that there is only one option for clothing, but you get a change of armor pretty quickly during the game.

The fix –
Even though I know this won’t happen, I would love to see the beautiful cell shaded look to the characters that  Level-5 gave to Rogue Galaxy.  However, making the characters look less generic is a start.

Don’t make the Live Chat system be just one character or every character.  Leonard and Yulie can have a chat without everyone else chiming in.

If there are multiple levels of an environment, allow the player to scroll through the floors of the map.  If I’m carrying around blueprints of a 5 story building, the page for the 3rd story doesn’t go away just because I’m on the 4th story.  Zooming in and out of the map would be nice too.

Gameplay:

good > bad
The good –

This is where this game starts to shine.  The game gives you every opportunity to completely customize your character’s abilities with eight different skill trees that you dump skill points into.  With the skills you learn, you can build customized combos to really tear up enemies– as long as you have the required action chips and MP to pull them off.

The AI is really good at keeping you and your party well protected.  Cures to status effects will kick off almost immediatly and sometimes before you even know you’re affected by that status effect.  Healing is almost never an issue.  As long as your party members have heal potions or a heal spell and MP to use it, you probably don’t have to worry about healing yourself all that much.

They will attack with any basic attack that you put in your command bars and their tactics can be changed on the fly during battle.  Telling a character to go “All Out” will tell them they are allowed to use combos you have created and put into their command bars as well.

During the single player you get the opportunity to break out the White Knight during battle, which is a very interesting addition to the game. There are a couple of “Form Blazing Sword” moments, but it doesn’t take away from the fun of killing stuff as a giant knight while the rest of your party is picking away on the ground.

The Story Mode will take you a good 20-30 hours to complete.  There is also a New Game+ mode where you get to play through again with all of your characters already leveled up.  Why would you do that?  During your New Game+ playthrough, there are new treasure chests along the way that contain high level (Guild Rank 7 and 8) weapons and armor.  Since you can skip all of the cutscenes, you can get through New Game+ in about 6-10 hours.

The bad –
AI is good  at healing, horrible at attacking– at least when it comes to spell casting and elemental attacks.  “You’re casting ‘Arctic Lance’ on an Ice Giant? Really? REALLY?”

As mentioned earlier, the animations are not so good.  There is only one animation for each skill which can make combos not flow so well and look awkward.  When you do aerial combos, the animations look worse, especially if you throw a spell at the tail end of the combo.  It all just looks so uncomfortable.

The game will flash tips in game while loading, one of them says something like “execute combos with well timed button presses.”  “Well timed?”  No. You can just rapidly press the X button and pull off any combo you put together and all moves are done by just hitting X.  However, the game will penalize you for doing so.  Simply rapidly pressing X will result in a 10-20% reduction in damage done by the attack you’re attempting.  So, well timed attacks are rewarded.

Probably most annoying is that you’ll constantly be battling the camera.  After defeating an enemy, the game will autoselect your next target.  You can switch targets using the shoulder buttons.  No problem right?  Wrong!  Many times you will see the target selection make no sense what-so-ever.  It will focus you on a target that is 20 feet away rather than the one that is standing right next to you.  Then, if you want to switch, you have to have the new target in your line of sight.  The camera, however, will not let you move it in a way where your current target would be off the screen, which can get really frustrating if your closest target is behind you.

When you’re doing combos, the camera will start spinning around you for effect.  This make sometimes make it difficult to time your attacks correctly. It’s hard to time your combos when you can’t see your character’s animation due to the camera pointing at a tree.  Then after defeating that enemy, it will all of a sudden snap to some undetermined position. If you’re moving in a direction, it won’t keep you moving in that direction, and will instead switch based on the orientation of the camera.

Also, if your next target is behind a bush or a tree and you defeat an enemy, your character will put his/her weapon away!  Then you have to run until the enemy is in line of sight to pull your weapon out again. In the meantime, it is probably still attacking you and doing damage.

Range is also an issue, sometimes you will see an enemy running toward you, stop about 20 feet away then hit you with a melee attack.  WHAT?  It’s really not as bad as it sounds in most cases.  This issues will negatively effect gameplay, but not very often.  But when you’re soloing a quest online and you are taking on 4 or 5 enemies at one time, these issues can really start show themselves and become frustrating.

The Fix –
Give some indication that a well timed attack was successful during a combo, whether it be a special effect and/or a different sound when the button is pressed.  Tweek to the camera so that the player can actually see what he or she is doing during a combo.  Also, mix up the button presses.  Have some moves require different buttons.  Maybe slash moves are X and thrust moves are O or something like that.  Make the combat more interesting.

Focusing the camera on the players’ next target is a good idea, however keep the camera free roam so they can easily switch targets to something that may be behind them.  If you’re going to move the camera into a different position after assigning a new target,  rotate the camera smoothly rather than snapping and rotate the orientation of the directions of the stick so that the player keeps moving in the direction they want to move.  Then snap the orientation back when they center the analog stick.

And for the love of WKC’s gods, allow me to decide when my character sheathes and unsheathes his or her weapon!

Online:

good > bad
The good –
This is THE reason to play this game.  The online is fun  and has a VERY Monster Hunter feel.  From the huge bosses to the materials gathering for weapons and armor; if you are into Monster Hunter, you’ll see it.  You and your friends gather in a “Georama” which is basically a customized town that you get to build and populate with characters you meet in the story mode.  The Georama acts as an online lobby.  Up to 12 people can be in the lobby, then you split off into groups of 4 to go on quests.

There are 50+ quests to choose from on the disc and Sony has recently come out and said that they will be releasing DLC quests weekly until June for FREE!  Full on voice chat, plus text chat as well and it all works wonderfully.  The quests can take anywhere from 5 minutes up to an hour and a half and you get ranked on the quests based on how well you did.  Ranking is based on the number of points you get during the mission.  Points are earned by killing enemies and finishing the quest quickly.

The bad –
The biggest issue with the online;  to unlock the quests you are FORCED to play the single player game.  Quests unlock as you open up different areas of the story mode and, as I said earlier, the story is pretty juvenile in the beginning. So unless you can suffer through the first 10-15 hours, you probably won’t ever get to unlock all of the quests.

Want to make an alternate character?  Go for it, but you have to play the entire story mode AGAIN to open up all the quests for that character.  I guess since the characters are all saved on your PS3, you could just use multiple slots to save your characters then branch them different ways.  Then if you really want them to be different, pay the $5 to change your character’s appearance.  Hope you want to keep the same name and gender though, because that $5 won’t let you change that!

Also, once you get to Guild Rank 7, the amount of Guild Points to move to the next rank becomes ridiculous for what quests are available.  Makes the game become incredibly grindy.

The fix –
Don’t force the player to play all the way through the story to open up the online– and even if you do, at least allow the player to make new characters that can access all of the online quests after beating the story mode.

If you are going to charge people to change their appearance, let them change their name and gender as well.

Finally, offer more quests that will help the player get to higher guild ranks.  Running “Best Served Cold” 100 times to get from guild rank 7 to guild rank 8 is NOT fun.

Other:
There are a couple of other things I should mention that I feel are separate issues.  First; the game takes WAY to long to save.  I’m talking 30-40 seconds.  It can really take you out of the game–quite aggravating.

Also, during the story mode, your party can consist of 3 characters.  However, you will occasionally get a forth character in the form of an NPC, so why can’t I have 4 characters in my party?  This is an issue that annoyed me in FFXII as well.  Luckily, it’s not nearly as much of an issue in WKC compared to FFXII since everyone earns experience regardless of participation in WKC.  Still though, if I can have 4 characters in my party with an NPC, then let me have 4 without an NPC.

The single player and the multi-player portions of this game fare very differently as far as how the are received.  The single player definitely brings the game down.  The multi-player is fun and has a ton of content that you can come back to, especially if you have a good group of friends to play along with.

After finishing the single player game, the online will be completely open and the enjoyment is as much as you make of it, but getting through the single player is the problem.  If you can get past the cliche JRPG story and lack of personality in the characters, or combat can carry you in these types of games, then you will probably enjoy yourself.  There is a reason I have put almost 100 hours into this game.

Online: Major Distraction
Offline: Minor Distraction
Score rounding: Down – The player is forced to play through the single player to open all the quests in the multi-player and if they want another character, they have to do it again!  If the player could just create a character and jump into the online, this score would have easily been rounded up.