Intro
White Knight Chronicles was released in Japan December 25, 2008 and now it has been 2 years for the North America and Europe to get a shot at White Knight Chronicles. White Knight Chronicles is a new IP created by the makers of Dark Cloud and Rouge Galaxy. This is Level 5’s first game on the Playstation 3 platform that they made and will it be as good as Dark Cloud and Rouge Galaxy. So here is the review for White Knight Chronicles.
Story
White Knight Chronicles will take you on adventure with your main hero Leonard and your own avatar. The kingdom of Balandor was a peaceful kingdom till one night the kingdom would have a party but, a group called the Magi would crash the party and start attacking. Leonard would soon save the princess and learn about the white knight and then the princess gets taken and your adventure begins there. The plot of the story is very simple but, very much well-done. Save the princess and uncover the secrets of the knights. The story will take you about 15-20 hours to complete and have many different locations to go. From a forest to caves and to a desert the many different environments keeps the game at the good pace. With some plot twist here and there, and some weird story issues that doesn’t make sense at all are just very little to stop this pretty good storyline. Overall the game has a story that follows a very safe and simple guideline that makes it a unique story on its own.
Gamplay
The gameplay for White Knight Chronicles is a third-person RPG that is in real time. You battle creatures in an open-field and it pretty much like Final Fantasy XII. White Knight Chronicles does have a little twist to the combat. You pick the skills you want for any of your characters and also you can to make your own combos from the skills you have learned. White Knight Chronicles does have a customizable character progression system and you choose what your character will excel in like; swords, spears, axe, white or black magic, and more. There is also AC into play and AC stand for Action Chips that let you cast even more powerful attacks, combos and to activate the White Knight for Leonard. The White Knight needs 7 Action Chips for Leonard to transform and become the White Knight. The White Knight is pretty powerful but, you will more or less use the White Knight for Boss battles and creatures that are bigger than your normal characters. White Knight is cool to use but, is sometimes overkill for the creatures that are smaller than the white knight and sometimes just makes it too easy. There are some gameplay issues that need to be fixed. The enemy attack range has glitches from attack thought doors and a half a mile distance attack and also AI issues that some enemy don’t attack when there are too many enemies on screen.
Online and Geonet/Georama
Online is a very fun experience that last long and short term affects. Your created avatar can join the many other created avatars on quest to boosted your Guild Rank(GR) and get valuable items to being back for the single player and for Georama. Online will have you do about 50 quests with your friends from helping lost children to saving a caravan from being destroy. The quests have much variety and will keep you for a long time. Georama is a fun and very much expansive thing to work on. This will keep you for a while too. Georama is more or less creating your own town and you need to find people to work in your town and buy things for your town. Georama will put your hard earn time and money into it and its also a base/lobby for you and your friends to hang out and do quest. Georama is based from the Dark Cloud game and you can put your buildings anywhere but, you do have to level up your Georama space to level 10 to get the full feature and more space to put things in your town. Online and Georama is all used by Geonet and Geonet connects you to your friends and lobby. Geonet also have message boards and bigalow mail(The mail service) to talk a chat to friends or any random person for help or just wanting to talk and make friends. With the international edition of White Knight chronicles you are also able to use Live Talk and Voice Chat.(Later Patched for Japan) The only downfall in Online is that there is no feature to trade, or get any money from people buying in your hometown.
Custom Avatar
The Custom Avatar is a great and in-depth feature that let you make your own person. The depth they put into this makes it a very fun and pretty neat experience. You have about unlimited body types to choose from or to your liking and pretty much you use the sliders to make you person fat, skinny, tall or short and also give them a name. The only thing that bugs me is that your avatar is very quiet and doesn’t do much and just stares like it was say “What did I get myself into.” Overall it a neat feature but, the avatar sometimes just feels out of place.
White Knight Chronicles is a pretty good game. With more White Knight Chronicles coming soon we will just have to find out what happens to Leonard and his friend in future installments. This trilogy is only beginning and will get better with time. Give White Knight Chronicles a shot and it will give you a reason to come back to JRPGs
Pro: Pretty good story, Custom Avatars, Great Music, and Online is very fun.
Cons: Out-dated Graphics, Some story plot issues, and some online and gameplay issues.
Developer: Level 5
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Platform: Playstation 3
Release Date: February 2, 2010(NA), February 26, 2010(EU)
