White Knight Chronicles Review

Plotting Points by Tan(x)
Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher

Game: White Knight Chronicles
Platform: PS3
Played For: 20 hrs

When the PS3 was first slated for release in the States several years ago, there was a small buzz about an upcoming RPG by Level 5 with gorgeous graphics and an engaging world. Always interested in a good JRPG, I filed the title away in my mind for future review. Now, several years later, the White Knight Chronicles have finally emerged… but as I sat down to play I discovered something about the title that I had not anticipated. It seems that someone spilled some Massive Multiplayer Online content in my expected Single Player Role-Playing Game. Can White Knight Chronicles live up to its hybrid mission in providing both a satisfying single player experience as well as a rich online world for those so inclined to continue their adventure?

In White Knight Chronicles you play the role of a mute, extremely customizable but somehow impressively generic MMO avatar who attaches oneself (kind of like a groupie) to a bunch of fancy protagonists on their oh-so important quest to rescue a princess and do other heroic stuff. Don’t expect to be really part of the group, however, for after an initial scene or two your presence becomes completely superfluous to both the plot and to the other characters. If you’ve ever fantasized about traveling to a lush, beautiful fantasy world only to be completely ignored by everyone around you, this game is your voyeuristic dream come true. Thankfully, most of the obviously “important” characters (meaning not you) aren’t really worth getting to know… I soon settled into the minor role of my proxy character, as the stupidity regularly evinced by the heroes made me want to disassociate myself from them as quickly as possible. Plus, being an unimportant side character made me think of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which is a very funny play indeed.

You have to stick with the heroes for a bit, however, for while the world is full of hills and streams and gorgeous views, your character is suffering from a local gravitic distortion that won’t allow jumping, wading, climbing or really any kind of movement other than running at constant speed on straight flat surfaces. Small fences, tiny streams and shrubbery are all equally daunting, making your character not just ignored by people but also incapable of frolicking around nature as well. Okay, so you can occasionally dig around in dirt patches, flower beds or stone walls for various exciting items like pebbles and inchworms and the sort, but this doesn’t exactly make for the most exciting of fantasy vacation itineraries.

The point here is that every journey between towns is teeming with monsters, including lumbering giants that are a pain to dispatch without the help of your giant robot friend. Did I mention that one of your so-called buddies has attached himself to a giant suit of magical armor reminiscent of the anime series Escaflowne? You can’t really run or climb away from said monsters (see problems with gravity, above) and there is an additional dilemma imposed by a very strange convention that makes it even more necessary to travel with a group.

To illustrate, consider my character’s expertise with a bow. According to the famous Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu, a man with a bow at short range is a man without a weapon. Thus, you would think the strategy would be to keep your distance and pick of enemies before they can approach you. However, every monster from spiders to lizards to tiny monster gnomes with atrophied arms can swing their claws and hit you, regardless of how far away you stand! Thus, having a bow is no different from wielding a club or a sword, as you can never be outside of a creature’s reach. The only way you can avoid taking hits is to have a monster target one of your so-called friends (it becomes very necessary to have them along when a monster can interrupt your actions every round if you are the sole target.) Suddenly it makes a lot of sense to stick around with people you don’t especially like so that they can absorb monster hits for you… clearly good practice for continuing in the MMO.

While you can choose to inhabit and control any of your characters during a battle, the lack of a pause key makes it inconvenient to switch points of view. I did like the customizable menu bar system the game provides you for battle. As characters gain new abilities, you assign them slots in your menu bars in order to use them at the click of a button. You can group abilities into combos, which then take up only one slot for multiple attacks. For instance, I was able to create a combo for my archer that launches a monster into the air and then hits them again while they’re off kilter.

Unfortunately, most of the abilities I’ve enabled for my characters look about the same. There are few over-the-top attack animations, and even the White Knight’s attacks are often nothing more than a sword slash. The camera can also have some trouble when commanding the White Knight in battle, getting stuck behind the robot so the enemy is not visible. Large enemies often have multiple locations you can target for an attack, but you can only hit the exposed locations at any given time. When you can’t see what to attack, you have to rely on the menus that pop up at the bottom of the screen, which is a bit distracting and interrupts the action.

True to expectation, the graphics are very pretty, and some of the locations you visit are outstanding (the industrial city strapped on the back of the super lizard monster is particularly memorable.) The various monsters and bosses you’ll face have great animations. However, you’ll often find yourselves fighting the same monsters from one level to the next, just colored differently to indicate a change in difficulty or elemental affinity. While it is nice to see such deep faith in the process of speciation and evolution, it does call into question whether White Knight Chronicles offers enough variety to keep players interested in the continuing online adventures. I’m sure Level 5 is committed to offering new content on a regular basis, so if this is an issue it will probably improve with time.

While I liked the variety of people you encounter in town, it was a little jarring to see how short your window of vision really is. As you run around the streets of any city people appear and disappear out of thin air as the PS3 labors to draw in everyone you are facing. People wink out of existence at a distance of about 10 to 20 paces, as if you’re meant to experience the world from the point of view of a solopsist with ADD. I did like that almost every person you encounter has something to say. Most comments are either asinine or geared to tell you where to go next, but there are enough quirky little exchanges to make it worth the time to see what townsfolk have to say.

White Knight Chronicles really, really wants you to go online and continue to play. You are given the ability to build and customize your own home room or Georama, after which you can post it to the net as a place for other players to gather. Most Georama pieces are available for purchase based on items and gold found in the game, but you can also recruit NPCs you meet in towns to come generate wealth for your hometown. It all looks like it could be quite a bit of fun, if you are into MMOs. But before you proceed further, you should watch these Youtube videos and decide… are you certain you want to go adventuring with people like this?