Ahh… White Knight Chronicles. I was so excited for thee when you were known as Shirokishi Monogatari (Japanese; Literally – White Knight Stories) back in 2007 when the game was announced. There were rather some high expectations for this game. Developer Level-5 was hailed to be the new contender and rival to Squeenix and potentially produce high quality RPGs as the latter.
Early builds of the game demonstrated extreme detail in combat. Contact between weapons, their targets and shields would act as you would expect them to if you were to see it in real life. Blocking with a shield would properly deflect an attack and the shield and it’s wielder would recoil. Instead attacks animations will follow through and pass through your character model regardless if there was a block animation or not. There were also team attacks that no longer seem to be present in this final version of the game. At one point your party members would be able to restrain an enemy while your character would be free to land an attack. This is not to say the combat is bad, it’s actually enjoyable. The combo system is fun to play with. You learn moves with points you earn from leveling up. Each of those moves will become an individual attack you can select and assign on the combat bar. The combos are stringed together by each of those attacks that you can assign in place of a single move. Each character has a selection of skills he or she can raise. They are common for the most part among all the characters: skills in sword, great sword, bow, polearm, divine, elemental, axes, and staves. Your characters are not limited to one skill set so theoretically you could max everything out.
The equipment system is rather impressive. Each piece of armor will show on the character models, whether it be weapons, body armor, gloves, or capes. The system of upgrading a single weapon tends to keep an early level weapon up to par with weapon shops a few cities ahead of you. You can also combine weapons to create more powerful ones and add elemental attacks to them. The only gripe here is they are done at separate vendors instead of at one place. So if you can’t remember a certain ingredient needed you have to run between the two vendors to get it right.
The story is generic. Save the princess is how it starts off. And there’s is one Super Mario moment (”… but the princess is in another castle”) that really invokes a nice facepalm. The character development is somewhat stagnant and hard to believe. The relationship between Leonard and Cisna feels awkward and forced, but I personally believe that the fault could lie in the poor voice acting. I really wish they included the Japanese voice track, maybe then the screaming in vain wouldn’t be so cringe inducing (Think Darth Vader Episode III). However the creature and monster design is nice. There is a creature with a city on its back and the White Knight itself is very beautifully designed. The landscape throughout the game is done very well and the scale of the game just in setting alone is grand.
There is also an available online mode where you can use your custom made avatar to play with friends on Level-5’s service called Geonet. You can customize a hometown a la Dark Cloud and partake on sidequests co-op with your friends. The option first becomes available once you buy a quest from a guild in town and you reach the world map and it sort of becomes a mini MMO (Yeah I know that’s an oxymoron). Oddly enough some elements of this game are reminiscent of Final Fantasy XI (Provoke, Pentaslam, Skewer, Last Resort) The avatar you create is at the beginning of the game and oddly is included in your party. He or she does not actually play any role whatsoever to the story, it’s just there, doesn’t talk, doesn’t cause anything to happen or change the course of the story in any way. But if you leave the custom character out of your party, which I did, it still levels up as the rest of your party does so you can use it online.
When it all boils down, this generation of gaming consoles has been lacking on the JRPGs, particularly since the higher caliber RPGs have extremely long development cycles. And due to that, the variety of games has gone down. While games like Demon’s Souls were good, they were also fleeting. WKC had the potential to be memorable and a great experience but sadly falls flat. Let’s be honest here, a lot of us are just waiting for March 9th, so it probably wasn’t the best idea to draw out the localization process to release the game a month before Final Fantasy XIII. White Knight Chronicles would have been a great thing to have 6 months after it’s Japanese release, not an entire year.
