White Knight Chronicles had the stage set to make a huge splash in the Japanese market. A Christmas day release coming on the heels of less than stellar reviews from the XBox 360's Infinity Undiscovery and The Last Remnant, the Level-5 produced action-RPG gained a lot of momentum. Labeled as the first large scale Japanese RPG for the PS3 and promising over 100 hours of gameplay, the burden for White Knight Chronicles to deliver a next-gen gaming experience was very heavy. Level-5 has risen to a strong position in the Japanese developer circle off of the success of recent Nintendo DS hits but outside of their involvement with Dragon Quest VIII has yet to really capture a massive audience with a full-scale home console RPG. With White Knight Chronicles they do get a lot of things right, but some big deficiencies keep it from becoming the groundbreaking title Japanese RPG fans have been waiting for on this current generation of consoles.
 
The story presented by White Knight Chronicles follows a young boy named Leonard who stumbles into a contract with a huge armored knight that he can control. Unfortunately Shizuna, the Princess of Balandor, is kidnapped on her 18th birthday party with whom Leonard has just made a connection with. This leads him on a long journey across huge areas, barely lit dungeons, small villages, and enomrous cities where he just might discover some things about the people who follow him on this journey and this mystical giant armor. Joining him is a his childhood friend Yuri, a mysterious magician named Eduaor, and the newest hire to Leonard's job delivering wine who happens to be a character that you create. Creating your own character is quite fun and very in-depth, with possibly more options and sliders than a Bethesda game.
 
Frankly, Level-5 does a horrible job directing the scenes of character interaction in White Knight. As the story unfolds throughout the game the director has the characters make decisions that seem completely out of place for them considering their motivations and placement. It really is the worst kind of storytelling, where things do not happen logically but rather simply just because. The pacing is terrible and the manner in which the characters deliver their lines seems forced and completely unnatural. The dialogue at times feels pulled from a cookie cutter script of an adventure involving a young boy going after a kidnapped princess. Particularly the early scenes involving Leonard and Shizuna are hard to watch as neither of the characters really gets developed at all throughout the story. The only saving grace to the story is an blossoming tale between two characters that join your party and how their relationship evolves. Only until a plot twist towards the very end of the game do we learn anything about our lead character's history and even that scene is more about one of his companions than it really is about Leonard. The only background history we know about our protagonist is the aformentioned flashback and one scene of him interacting with Shizuna at a young age in the prologue, which leaves him about as well developed as your mute created character.
 
As Leonard and his party travel through the world, you'll begin to notice how beautiful the environments are. The landscaping is spectacular and the dungeons are some of the most well-designed I've had the chance to play. The world you can explore is huge, and even within one area there can be multiple layers of terrain to explore. Something that will definitely be noticed quickly is that there are no loading times within any of the environments, which is an impressive feat considering just how expansive some of these places are. One thing Level-5 does extremely well is handling the graphics of the game. Although there isn't a lot of variety in the smaller enemies with only a fewdifferent types and the attack motions of some of the larger enemies are copied, the design on the huge monsters can sometimes be jaw-dropping. A few in particular took my breath away when I first saw them. Only in some of the extremely large areas with multiple huge enemies and scatterings of smaller ones will you run into any kind of visual slowdown, which I really did not mind considering that there are no loading times and huge, beautiful environments to explore while involving myself in a deep, fun combat system.
 
Anyone who has seen White Knight Chronicles in action knows that Level-5 owes a lot to Final Fantasy XII in terms of gameplay. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is up to you, but I personally find it refreshing. Although it still is based heavily on the Active Time Battle system of old there is more than enough depth to really keep a player satisfied and intrigued. There are a maximum of four characters on the screen at once, your normal party of three and sometimes a guest character that you cannot take control of. The characters you are not controlling will act based on how you have set their AI to act as well as in game battle commands you can set on the fly in combat using the L3 and R3 buttons. Each character has various skills they can learn from 8 different skill trees, so you can develop a character in nearly however you like. The real depth comes in the form of a create your own combo system where after unlocking various attacks in those weapon skill trees your characters can perform deadly combos that pound enemies into the ground. Adding elemental based attacks and targeting specific enemy weaknesses all can play a part in how deep you want to explore the combo system. Unfortunately the main storyline is extremely easy and never really pushes you to do anything specific, so the depth really becomes a question of how much do you want to explore what the system has to offer as opposed to flying through the game, beating it, and never playing it again. Those that choose the latter will be missing out on a very large portion of what this game has to offer in the form of online play.
 
White Knight Chronicles uses Geonet to connect players to their own social network where people can write and comment on blogs about the game, join friends to do quests in their own rooms, and meet others playing the game. In addition to Geonet it also features a questing system where by buying a quest from the guild it opens up an area that you have completed and sends you on a quest there, with a bit tougher enemies and the promise of better items and crafting materials to improve weapons and create rare items. You can play with your friends through Geonet or through the world map screen with random players. The quests are varied from various fetch quests to taking down a large special boss. While not exactly innovative the online questing gives a decent alternative to the gamers that have been wanting a Monster Hunter-esque system on consoles. The addage that any game is made better when you are playing with friends really does ring true with White Knight as well.
 
The gameplay is only made better with the amazing soundtrack. The background music to some areas really astonished me, particulary in the town of Greed. I thoroughly enjoyed the music to this game and it really was a big part in keeping me into exploring the huge areas. When a song gets a bit too repetitive you can really start to tire of a game, but the music in White Knight Chronicles is really stupendous. Oddly enough the voice acting comes off quite a bit flat even though they have some premium talent. Satsuki Yukino (Chidori from Full Metal Panic, Kagome from Inuyasha), Daizuke Namikawa (check out his credits), and the legendary Sakamoto Maaya lend their considerable talents to this game but are drastically misued with the laughable dialogue and poor direction of the story.
 
White Knight Chronicles is a true HD RPG. I feel this game couldn't have been accomplished on any other console. The gameplay depth, story, and areas are all huge plusses in the games favor, but ultimately the faults of the game keep White Knight Chronicles from becoming a real pillar next to the Dragon Quests and the Final Fantasies. While the difficulty of some of the later guild quests does offset how ridiculously easy the single player story is, White Knight suffers considerably from the problem of poor direction that has plauged Level-5 RPGs. There is certainly something here with the world and gameplay that can still be explored but suffers from third-rate directing. The story shows small signs of life but I would really recommend that people looking for a deep, moving tale to unfold before them play Valkyria Chronicles if you have to play a PS3 RPG. If you don't mind the story and are rally intrigued by the gameplay though, this game will have a lot to offer you.

White Knight Story : des quêtes à venir
Par Puyo, Gamekult.com
 
 
Level-5 assurera dès demain 15 janvier le service après-vente de White Knight Story, avec la mise en ligne sur le PlayStation Store de nouvelles quêtes à télécharger pour son jeu de rôles. Celles-ci se destinent évidemment à la partie Live du jeu, celle qui permet d'envoyer son avatar en ligne pour l'aguerrir avant de lui faire rejoindre la troupe de héros dans la partie solo. Les trois nouvelles quêtes nécessiteront un personnage de niveau 36 au minimum et un rang de guilde de 7. A la clé, de nouveaux matériaux à synthétiser pour obtenir de nouvelles armes et de nouvelles protections. Le studio japonais promet de surcroît la mise en ligne régulière de nouvelles quêtes pour toujours plus d'équipements de haut niveau. De son côté, Sony n'a toujours pas confirmé la commercialisation de son RPG chez nous, ou même aux Etats-Unis.
 
http://www.gamekult.com/articles/A0000073015/

De son côté, Sony n'a toujours pas confirmé la commercialisation de son RPG chez nous, ou même aux Etats-Unis.

Nevertheless, there's a lot of scope for fine-tuning character development and combat strategies, which, along with an elaborate weapon synthing system provides plenty of incentive to continue with the online quests even after you've completed the main story. And while that story verges on simplistic at times (you will be amazed at how many times you can catch up with the kidnapped princess only to see her snatched away again), and while some of the environments seem under-populated, and while there will be moments where you have no choice but to grind your way to a higher character level, there is something about White Knight Chronicles that is compelling enough to see you through to the end. You'll be left with memories of faraway places, exotic races, and an online community that, so far at least, is welcoming and friendly. And that's just the beginning: White Knight Chronicles is just the first part of a planned trilogy which will eventually encompass over a hundred hours of gaming. It's a pretty decent start.