Bag of Games

White Knight Chronicles International, an anticipated game by Level-5, is another light RPG to spend hours with. You’ll be seeing flying colossal airships, see birds that can project holographs from their eyes, you’ll be saving some princesses and see some giant “giant-robot” style of knight sequences. The game has sense of humor and is not too serious. Just what to expect from Level 5, and that is not a bad thing.

The graphics in the White Knight Chronicles (further known as WKC) are beautiful and clean and they work quite well during the play. It is nice to see, that the majority of the cut-scenes have been done with the game-engine. It is not perfect, but overall results are good. Every character is well designed and instead of being a grey mass of npc’s they each have a personality which just completes the work. The visuals especially come in to play when dealing with WKCs giant knights and monsters. The size of the monsters and quality of the graphics just continue to amaze me time after time.

A big part of any RPG is the music. The music in White Knight Chronicles is ok, it delivers what it is supposed to and the voice acting is good. The unfortunate part is that you can actually see that the English voice has dubbed so that you can sometimes see people talking without mouths moving. Only few times, but still it vexes me. In overall the sounds are good, the knight in the armor does sound like it and the wind, birds, and monsters are all played in detail.

The game in general does look like Final Fantasy 12, but it actually differs in many ways. During fights, you’ll be seeing action circle that is filling up before you can take some action. The speed of the circle depends on the characters abilities. Players will be using skill points to learn skills (magical or weapon skills) and place the skills to the action bar where the player can execute them from. The real highlight of the game is the White Knight Chronicles Combo system, where players can freely create their own combos by combining learned skills and magic ranging from range to slashing in mid-air combos. A simple thing, but most enjoyable! Like in most RPGs, leveling earns the characters skill points that can unlock new moves according to player tastes. You can specialize and unlock the majority of the moves in a particular discipline quite early in the game, allowing you to start experimenting with combos as soon as possible. The joy of unlocking new abilities will make you spend some time with the game, especially when you go online.

Players are able to enhance their equipment when they have enough proper materials for it. Naturally those materials are gained from killing some monsters and around the world. There isn’t a dire need to enhance the items if you want to complete the game, but the possibility to make game more enjoyable, if preferred, is nice addition indeed.

If the story mode isn’t enough, which hopefully it isn’t, White Knight Chronicles offer you quite offering online play opportunities. There are several “rooms” to join. Each room contain up to 20 players, they can freely group up to finish “quest” (purchase from NPC in the story mode) to level up their Guild Rank. The higher to rank, more quest are available with some unique equipment.

As a summary one could say that White Knight Chronicles is a good game with a good presentation. The online mode and excellent combat system makes it enjoyable, but the story (it is chronicles) so far does not make it an “epic game”. The game actually is a prologue for the later games, and yes you might already have heard rumors about WKC2. It is a good solid game to enjoy about. It’s not perfect, but still most enjoyable. A must if you have liked the previous Level-5 games