White Knight Chronicles 2

Review from Mirne - Sunday, 31 July 2011 @ 11:06pm

It had taken me four hours to get to this point. Screw up after screw up, I had been reliving the last half an hour of my life over and over, like someone mashed up an abridged version of Groundhog Day with Transformers and some vaguely European accents. This game was proving to be hard, frustratingly so. It had surpassed my usual reasoning of, 'Well, I’m kinda shit at most games anyway' to 'Wow, this game is challenging and requires strategy and skill to defeat the enemies'. I gasped loudly as the giant, looming figure of Ban Nanazel, leader of the Red Army, shattered before me. Four hours and twelve deaths later – I had defeated the first boss of White Knight Chronicles 2.

White Knight Chronicles 2 is the direct sequel to Level-5’s J-RPG White Knight Chronicles, which was touted as a full length J-RPG for the PS3. Now, my only real experience with Level-5 was with the Professor Layton series, and I wasn’t entirely sure on what to look out for. So if you’re like me and hadn’t really paid much attention to the original game, never fear, as apparently you weren’t expected to. Every copy of White Knight Chronicles 2 has been bundled with a remastered copy of the original to bring you up to speed.

It’s for the best too, as playing through the original it is almost crucial to fully understanding and enjoying the sequel. The only foundation White Knight Chronicles 2 provides is a lacklustre, 'The Story So Far…' which is nothing more than a thinly veiled slap in the face to anyone who didn’t play through the prequel. And before you rub a sore cheek indignantly and say that you didn’t really care about the story anyway (why are you playing a J-RPG again?), the original game serves a secondary purpose as a 100+ hour long tutorial for the sequel as the latter provides no in-game tutorial as you go, opting to contain all extraneous (and vital) information in an in game ‘Help’ menu.

Fighting a big thing!

So, as the introduction to White Knight Chronicles 2 is woefully bad and you might prefer to skip the ultra long tutorial, let me fill you in on what’s just happened. Your princess was kidnapped so you buddied up with some other people with a lot more personality than you (not saying much), and together you fought a lot of oversized monsters to save her. You start the sequel being sent by the Princess, now Queen, to aid new allies in the coming war.

It’s not groundbreaking, but it’s simple, it’s solid, and it serves its purpose as a stage for the real showcase of the game, the Knights. Several characters have, or are able to obtain, the ability to become a Knight, which is essentially a giant suit of armour that makes the oversized enemies I mentioned before seem almost cute, cuddly and actually defeatable - perhaps in the way a snake looks to a mongoose. The Knights are also one of the main focuses of the game, being both integral to the story and having sometimes-mandatory activation in the more intense battles. And there are plenty of battles.

Roughly three quarters of your time in game will be spent in combat, and that time can be divided into regular doses of grin-inducing achievement, numbing monotony and teeth-grinding frustration. The combat system has been revamped from the original (although if you play the remastered original included in the package, you will never tell the difference) proving to be more sleek and efficient, but still just as difficult to master. If you aren’t familiar to the game play, or chose to fight without strategy, prepare to die a lot. The characters are controlled one at a time, with the ability to move freely amongst them, save for NPC’s that help out with combat but are wildly unpredictable. You fight with pre-assigned skills and magic that need to be carefully picked before battle, before launching into real-time assault, with a continuous circular gauge which provides set lapses in time between each command. Combat requires the right skills to be used against the right enemies at the right time, and if you don’t have all three of these things, battles are chanced rather than won.

I think I can see up her skirt. A bit.

At the beginning of White Knight Chronicles 2 you are given the option to wipe your characters’ slates clean and are given 35 levels worth of skill points to spend with no more guidance than a ruffle of the hair and a pat on the butt in the direction of the ‘Help’ menu. I chose my avatar’s skills with the same amount of finesse as cracking a coconut open with a soccer ball, and left the other character’s pre-designed skill sets very much alone. Any attempt at allocating all further skill points was done with only a fleeting understanding of the character’s pre-determined path.

With the exception of the avatar, each character is an archetype and specialises in different weapons and magic, but you’re able to control where they develop skill wise. So, if combat in this game is considered king (if only in it's difficulty and frequency), customisation is definitely a member of the royal court, maybe even a duke. Or a corgi. Your first taste of this begins when you design your avatar, before the adventure even starts. The range of customisation tools are incredible and rate as some of the best I’ve used in any recent game. Your character can look as realistic or as stylised as you’d like; every detail down to the pupil can be chosen and altered. With the amount of detail you can put in a character there is no excuse for not creating your perfect avatar. I’m guilty of restarting the game three times in order to design the best possible character I could, because once I saw my character against the others I knew I could – nay, had – to do better and with the amount of choice, who could resist?

These look like friendly fellows! Join my party, chaps?

In fact, you'd best make your avatar as visually stunning as possible, as they are practically the poster-children for 'seen and not heard'. Your character stays mute and puppet-like the entire way through the story, much as they did in the original, providing to be nothing more than spell-flinging, axe-wielding furniture with wooden faces locked in perpetual smirks. During cut scenes I felt empathetically awkward for my character, who stood there looking like the boring kid at school. You know, the one who didn’t say much, and everyone thought he was probably a little slow, but the other kids let him hang around because he had unrestricted access to his dad’s liquor cabinet. Or in this case - his armoury.

At least one of the better changes in White Knight Chronicles 2 allows your avatar to have their own fully customisable Knight, which you did not have access to in the original. I could draw parallels between this and another kid-at-school story where my friends would play with toy ponies during recess and I didn’t have one and they would play in front of me while I sat there silently, being ignored except for when they asked me to 'gather some more hay' – but this is totally not like that at all, right, Emily?

NO! To the pain!

Moving on, the game also features an online Geonet mode, where you can build your own virtual town and invite friends to go on quests (that are accessible offline as well), or just chat and hang out in each other’s towns for a bit. The dungeons are all that's good about death traps and labyrinths (with a little less David Bowie and a lot more 'Why is there no save point here?' frustration), so I could definitely see how questing through these with a bunch of friends would be a lot more fun and sanity-preserving than it is in single player. Regrettably I only had a cursory glance at this feature as I did not have any friends to go questing with, so if you do decide to get the game, come to my town and we’ll compare swords. I guarantee mine will be bigger.

Pros

• A visually stunning game, with beautiful character, monster and scenery design.
• Great range of customisation choices in regards to avatar and skill trees.
• Inclusion of the original is like two games in one, both easily providing 100+ hours of playtime.

Cons

• Lack of tutorials and guidance can make combat and choosing skills difficult.
• Story and voice acting is simplistic and grating, respectively.
• Lack of involvement of avatar has a disconnecting effect with the story and makes immersion difficult.