White Knight Chronicles II (PS3): Meh uhhh Knight....

When the PS3 first was introduced, I remembered seeing trailers and screenshots for an RPG called White Knight Chronicles. The graphics didn't seem like it was using the PS3's power but I chalked it up to being in the rough stages of the game. After a severely delayed release, and very lukewarm reviews at best, I still picked the game up. I found it to be fairly unimpressive and unimaginative, but enough happened in the story line to keep my interest to see it through, and the online aspect of the I did actually kinda like, so overall I enjoyed my experience with it. So with that I reserved and picked up the continuation of the story in.....

WHITE KNIGHT CHRONICLES II: (PS3)

Now, This game came out in September, Along with some other higher profile games so it's sat on my TV stand waiting to be opened, and I've finally caught up with everything I wanted to play so forgive me if this comes off as a bit of a dated review.

The story picks up about one year after the events of the first one, where the protagonist, Leonard, and his rag tag band of friends attained the powers of "Knights" to rescue princess Cisna and defend Balandor from the Yshreninan Empire, (I'll give you a minute to recover from the staggering originality). The 2nd opens up with a neighboring country of Faria breaking out into a civil war, and a blue clad knight who goes by Scardigne trying to escape with the country's heiress, Miu. Just as they get cornered and are about to be killed, Leonard and his friends swoop down to make the save. They join in the fight to save the girl and return her safely home, where they begin to start a quest to form alliances and learn the keys to the Knights to take the offensive and finish the Yshreninan Empire for good.

Cisna is a figurehead and driving force for the Protagonist, but is essentially useless.

As you no doubt have already noticed, this game is not exactly breaking the mold in terms of storyline. Even when I played the first game nothing about anything seemed overly original. It uses the pretty well tread evil empire/save the princess story line, and the 2nd one picks up just after that. Because so little time passes from the first to 2nd there doesn't appear to be much change in the universe and it doesn't even feel like its like the start of a new adventure. Final Fantasy X-2 while perhaps lacking in the story aspect compared to the first, at least showed some radical change in the game's world and the philosophies within it. WKC2 almost plays like a recap of what happened before, before making the jump to reach the eventual conclusion. Even the characters themselves seemed kinda bland and uninteresting. Nothing about the name "Leonard" screams savior of the land to me, but to be fair neither did "Tidus" and that was probably one of my top two or three favorite RPGs ever. All of the area locations and character names just scream young audience to me. The chief offender is the elderly party member who's name is Eldore. ELDORE. Seriously?! I would love to know the thought process that went into the creation of this character: "So we have a character here and he's some what older than the rest of the team.. He's their elder.. Elder.. Eldar... Eldore. Fuck it. Put it in." Every single time they say his name I get douche chills from it. The guy is never in my party. Every location and everyone with the exception of maybe Yulie, has a fairly common name that just spreads the blandness across the board.

The game plays like a mix of the standard JRPG, a bit of an MMO, and a sprinkle of action RPG. You have main control over your one character and the other support members follow you along. All of the enemies are clearly on the screen and unsheathing your weapon will take you into combat mode. Combat isn't exactly precise. So long as you are within a certain range your attacks will land as long as you were close enough when you first hit the attack button. There are 9 or 10 weapon classes available and some characters can't use some of them. But as you travel down the skill tree you get different variations of your attacks, that usually break into a Slash, Stab, or Smash variety and sometimes with elemental additions to them. You get three menus at the bottom of your screen where you can place your favorite attacks or spells so you can easily flip through the menus while attack or casting to set up your next move. In addition to this, you can also create combos to string together a number of attacks using action points. Your created combo only takes up one slot so you can make a few to help in different situations, (I usually would just make all slash, all stab, or all smash for enemies weak to one). The previously mentioned action points are used to use specific high level attack/spells, combos, or summon the specific character's Knights. The Knights are essentially giant Mech suits that can take a bit more of a beating and have bigger attacks. You can use them as long as you have MP to use the attacks or there are enemies to fight. I would say that combat is more exciting than a turn based counterpart, but I often found myself just running past battles after a while, as the rewards seemed kinda lacking and leveling took forever.

Graphically the game isn't all that impressive. It used pretty standard anime archetypes down to the oldest person with the squintest eyes being the villain. They don't even really go out of the way to improve the graphics from one to two. Enemies also seem to have the problem of only really being 6-9 different types of monsters with different color schemes, and even still the monster types aren't even that imaginative: wolves, bees, spiders. Yeah yeah I've seen it before.  I will concede that they did a pretty good job with all the CGI animations. Most of those are very sharp and fun to watch, usually in situations where there is a large monster or some epic war scale battle about to place. They move smoothly and cleanly but other than that nothing about this games presentation is anything to write home about.

When you start the game, you are taken to a character creation screen. When I first started the first game, this  had me incredibly worried that it was going to be one of those stories where people address a mute character, or make some joke about them not talking. Silent protagonists made sense in earlier days of gaming, but games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age 2 showed that you can create a character without having to make them a mute. So after designing my amazonian woman who would specialize with greatswords, I found out that the character plays more in the backdrop of the main story. She is occasionally addressed or noticed, but essentially she is just a silent helper for to use if you don't like some of the other characters (like Eldore). So you would ask if they have no functional point to the story, why include them?

The main reason for this is the online aspect of the game. As you go through towns or find new area's of the world map, you can buy or unlock online quests you can do for experience. You can play these when you enter the world map, each specific location has a set of quests you can do granted your "Guild level" is high enough. You can chose to play these online with other players for experience or item rewards, or you can play them offline with your current team. The difference there is you can only play your created character. So some of the boss fights can get tricky as you can't bounce to another character to use a specific ability or spell. If your created character drops, the mission for you ends unless its multiplayer or there are specific respawn rules. Its an interesting and entertaining mechanic, but its not something I did very much of. With one or two hour time limits, it gets draining going across the maps chasing a checkpoint sometimes. That being said I did do a little of and did a little commentary to show some of it. It probably sucks but here it is.

Something I was pretty happy with is that it gave me a fairly significant bonus for keeping my WKC1 save. In addition to letting me keep most of my stored items, money, and equipment, the game starts me off at level 35 and gives me all of skill points so I could re-allocate them wherever I wished which allowed me to hit the ground running. Most games that carry a save give you a fairly minimal bonus so getting this huge jump out the gate was nice.

Something I was not happy with, surprisingly, is saving my game. I know that sounds idiotic, but most games only take a few seconds to save, but White Knight? Well, just take a look....

I actually hit 80% at about five seconds and it more likely stopped at 32. But still, if saving my game took so long that I didn't want to do it, then thats a serious problem for my progression and willing to save often to be safe.

These games are pretty short too. I was able to beat both WKC1 and WKC2 in about 30 hours so as far as the standard RPG goes you could probably hammer one of them out in the course of a weekend. The biggest complaint that I have with WKC2 is that there is virtually no innovation or deviation from the 1st game. There is nothing really new that is immediately apparent to me. So I suppose my question here is, did we just get one full length game broken up over 2 releases, or did they just intend for them to be shorter because of the online features of the game? And if it is the latter, why did it take so long to release a sequel that was pretty much a carbon copy of the first game? There didn't even really seem to be very many new maps as you tread the game basically in reverse order from the first one.

Its hard to even hate on this game because it feels like picking on a 5 year old school project for "special" class when you are an adult. It is incredibly disappointing because I have come to expect so much better out of Level 5 games. The first game I played by them was on the PSP in Jeann D'arc which as far as tactical RPGs go, is one of my most underrated and wonderful surprises ever. They also produced the Professor Layton series so I know they know how to produce good, solid video games. So for them to produce an incredibly lack luster game, and then wait two more years to give me the same game again with a little furthering of the story, just leaves me feeling cheated and disappointed. Despite this tear I've been going on, I hesitate to call the game "bad". It's just so average on every aspect its not worth getting excited over, either with enjoyment or anger..

I would say this game could be good if you don't have a lot of time to invest in a deeper RPG like Elder Scrolls, Final Fantasy or Disgaea, or if you are just looking to get the RPG bug out of your system. But other than that a recommendation for a game like this is about as lukewarm as its reviews. Wait for it to hit a bargain bin, because it most likely will. At least they have the courtesy to provide both games on the Blu-Ray for WKC2 so you only have to buy it once.

Hopefully I'll have something after holiday with a bit more meat on it, so hang tight.