White Knight Chronicles

There’s a lot to love about Level 5. They’re the bods behind Rogue Galaxy and Dark Cloud – both of which are massively enjoyable games. White Knight Chronicles looked, when it was shown off previously, to be awesome. The graphics were beautiful and it looked like everything a Level 5 game should be. If you’ve read Kirsten’s Final Fantasy XIII review then you’ll start to think that Ready Up hates RPG games. We don’t, believe me. It’s just that recently we’ve had so many excellent releases and these games that should be a shoe-in for awesomeness don’t deliver.

The first thing White Knight Chronicles presents you with is the chance to create a playable character. Pick your hair, your face, your gender – all the usual trappings of customisation – and create a character. I called mine Jake, I’m that original. Then the game begins and your well crafted character is resigned to being a mute who stands at the back of the cutscenes, looking slightly gormless and like he hasn’t entirely been invited to the party. When playing the main adventure, you play the part of Leonard – princess-smitten wine delivery boy who is, as always, tasked with saving the day. It’s only once you’re into the game a little way that the reason for your Avatar becomes clear, and where the problems with White Knight Chronicles start to become apparent.

White Knight Chronicles has a lot going on – as with many Level 5 games. You’ll stagger upon weapon customisation (using the traditional method of getting a frog to do it), you’ll unlock the ability to create your own village using stuff you’ve collected in the game, you’ve got the main adventure to play and the Adventurers Guild quests, which makes the game feel more like an MMO than a standard RPG. Not to mention the really quite annoying readout that occupies the left-hand side of the screen. While you can adjust this, turning it off completely leaves you in a situation where you have no idea what items you’re collecting throughout the game. You’ll also, during the first quest simple quest, probably die a lot after being hit by enemies that are quite a way across the map.

Your initial couple of hours with the game will be awful. I won’t kid you. The cutscenes are long and look pretty rubbish – they’re generated in-game (thus including your mute, gormless avatar), the battles are annoying and you’ll find yourself losing interest as you play them. The battle system is based, it would appear, on an MMORPG set-up – a list of commands you can select using the d-pad during the fight. It’s a flawed system that feels clunky on a console, and while there are a multitude of battle options on offer, you’ll probably settle on one move and stick to that from the outset. At one point I looked up at my screen and found that I’d died. I have no idea what happened – I don’t even remember being in a battle, I just lost interest in what was happening on screen. If you stick with it, however, the game does improve and things generally get a little bit better.

Once you unlock the White Knight, and embark on the main quest proper, you’ll find that being able to call on the power of the Knight at any time does reduce the difficulty of the battles somewhat. Or, in a more realistic situation, you’ll get a bit bored with the constant encounters and want to blast through them quickly with a big-assed Knight doing your fighting for you. If you use the Knight as the game probably intended, to fight the boss battles, you’ll notice that it starts to feel like an episode of Power Rangers – particularly as the boss creatures tend to be massive and the Knight will turn to the camera once the battle is over.