White Knight Chronicles

Normally I research new games before buying them, be it reviews or wait for friends to try them. I didn’t actually pay attention to the words of the previews or reviews of White Knight Chronicles, any game with good looking anime-style graphics where you can transform into a giant knight to hack up giant trolls and ogres is going to be my kind of game. If there’s one thing I’d like to do in Dragon Age Origins, it would be exactly that (turning into a bear or spider doesn’t count – not big enough and doesn’t use a sword). For the record using the white knight is fun, not using it and getting trampled on sucks. Transforming, to a cry of VERTO (Latin for Transform because English isn’t cool enough) you turn the tide of a battle in an instant, give passive buffs to your team, crush man sized scorpions with a single strike then go toe-to-toe with whatever golem or dragon was giving you grief – marvellous.

The World

So asides from that mechanic how’s the rest of the game? good but nothing groundbreaking sadly.  For when it was released in Japan (ie last year) the graphics are good but have since been superceeded a lot. I have to give props to the town designers though.  The towns are lively and although they aren’t filled with side quests for you, they are often full of background info and pointers to help you out if you are lost. It is a welcome change to see multiple shops of the same type in the big city – not enough games have this even if the duplicates sell identical ranges. It just seems more real and is another draw into the world.  The world itself is split into areas, you have bog standard fields, desert and canyons as well as mines and caves & dungeons – typical fair asides from the awesome city on the back of a giant creature.

Characters

At the start you create your own avatar, who is a member of your party and used in the online mode. Sadly it isn’t you who transforms, Leonard is the main character in the story mode and the one who transforms. Still, you can do some nice setups for your avatar in single player, using the White Knight to knock a golem senseless and let your avatar pick up the final hit for the VERY satisfying kill.  There isn’t a single character I absolutely wanted to gut but at the same time, I can’t say Leonard or any of the others are characters that will stick in my mind for life.

You get plenty of options for building your character’s appearance, but when it comes to upgrading their skills it’s no Dragon Age Origins – you only chose which weapons/magical powers to use for your character and the others in your party. Essentially you pick whatever skills you want from different skills trees, the more from one tree you pick, the more skills (and more powerful) you unlock. The catch is, that there are general stat boosts in each tree so just maxing out one tree without paying attention to the others is going to end up with you missing a ton of various hp and magic,dext upgrades while spreading them out and you may not have enough deadly techniques. A surprisingly good system.

Combat

Combat is plentiful due to respawning random encounters. You can see the enemies on the map but if you or your allies stray too near then the enemies will move towards you. With that said, you can just keep running in a lot of cases and not have to fight if you so wish, which is a relief if you are directionally challenged like me.

You use action points to do attacks and can make custom combos. You are restricted to assigning moves to 3 command bars and then chose pick attacks during combat from there. After each attack you have to wait for your character to recover from the attack and then you can pick another attack. The heavier the armor, the longer this takes.  You can switch between characters but its a case of using select and then picking from a list rather than the more refined button combos of games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2.  My biggest annoyance with the system is that you can’t pause the action to send commands to your team. After playing games which let you (and to great effect) I found myself not worrying about using my allies. The AI is in fairness, good enough to keep them alive and they do fine at healing you and your other allies when they can. You can set up some great individual combos but again sadly these don’t link up with your teammates.

Also it should be mentioned that the fights and enemy HP are designed fairly well. Killing regular foes is fairly quick but killing a giant foe as a party of humans will initially take a long time, transforming and it’s a relatively quick and fun experience. I didn’t have to grind through any area repeatedly killing enemies because the next group were one shotting me. The difficulty throughout is set on the side of easy but boss fights are still a challenge if you didn’t prepare and used all your action points on your way to the boss.  I’ll still take a fun 5 minute over a laborious 10 minute boss fight just because the boss has insane HP.

Online

There is also a fairly large online mode to keep you busy. The online is a pain to set up – there is an additional free signup required on top of PSN and it’s case sensitive… Anyway once set up it’s easy, you can set up your own guild or join a friend’s or some random person and take part in quests. You can build up your guild from a grassy area with a couple of equipment vending stalls to a small town which may appeal to some. I’m more interested in wailing on trolls but I appreciate it is there and did waste an hour or so building up a little village just because it was there. By building up to a town, you also gain the ability to just mine/farm items required for mixing into new items which if you were going for those trophies would be invaluable. The quests are up to 4 player and while some can be solo’d, you’d need to be a much higher level to try.

Story

I enjoyed the story but minor spoiler hated the Bowseriffic rescue efforts throughout the early goings on but it improves as you get further in to the game. The story wants to be epic but doesn’t pull it off in the same way FFXIII does. I wouldn’t be suprised if this was intended as being a trilogy and that this is just the first part. In fact by the time you get to end game, things were just getting really good and it is set up nicely for a sequel which has already been announced and I would readily recommend that based on this game.

Overall

White Knight Chronicles is a highly enjoyable action rpg, or is it an mmo? it kind of blurs the lines. The graphics and story are good, but like pretty much everything bar God of War 3 and Uncharted 2 get blown away by FFXIII.  If this had come out a few months earlier it would have had a much better chance of making a big impact. Same applies to Yakuza 3 which I have brought and remains virtually unplayed because Sega decided to bury it by releasing an rpg the same week as a new FF… STUPID.

Back to WKC and given the lack of competition for online multiplayer console rpg/mmo games, I hope it will find its own place amongst gamers as I enjoyed my time with it and I hope to get back to it at some point as the single player story mode is only part of the many things to do in it.

The only thing I can say is that this is the year for games with stories and rpg elements, FFXIII and Dragon Age Origins Awakenings, more Valkyria Chronicles DLC and even Yakuza 3. My free time has never been more keenly contested.