White Knight Chronicles

The single player experience of a multiplayer-intended gameby Jyggalag

Thanks to the brilliant piece of video gaming artwork that is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 my opinion of online gaming has certainly changed over the past year or so. My first experience with online gaming was on UT (Unreal Tournament) on the PC and as we all know most online PC gamers are complete and utter wankers whose greatest pleasure is to rip into new gamers so they don't have to feel bad about their tiny shlongs. Okay, I made a penis joke thus proving the immaturity of my comment but I am sure there are many who agree with me... maybe. With COD:MOD2 whilst there was an entire single player game to complete with storyline and missions the main attraction to the game was its multiplayer aspect (which I would happily call flawless). I didn't play the multiplayer at first, I stuck to the singleplayer asect of the game, but once I did go multiplayer well... I couldn't go back. Killing AI is nowhere near as fun as killing and teabagging that fourteen-year-old player whose been quickscoping you for most of the match.
I have a friend who dislikes online gaming. He buys games for the singleplayer aspect believing that multiplayer games sacrifice storyline and in-depth gaming. I was once inclined to agree with him but now I'm not so sure. To try and get a good feel of singleplayer gaming in a multiplayer-intended game I'm going to talk about a game I have played both offline and online. The game was developed by Level 5 (the makers of the Dark Cloud and Rogue Galaxy) and is called White Knight Chronicles. Now I'm guessing very few have heard of White Knight Chronicles. Firstly its a ps3 exclusive so that already put it into quite a small group when compared with other console exclusives and secondly... its far from brilliant.

White Knight Chronicles main attraction is clearly is multiplayer part. And the multiplayer in the game is pretty damn good. The missions are imaginative and challenging and is something akin to Monster Hunter, which in my opinion was a good game. However the game required A LOT of grinding and in most modern RPGs there's no need to grind at all. It's an outdated aspect, just like the turn-based combat we had in Final Fantasy VII. But I digress. This is about the singleplayer game and not the multiplayer.


What's interesting to say about WKC is that before you start the game you create your character (known as The Avatar in the online community) and this is the character you play as during the online game but he/she is also there during the singleplayer game. Any items, equipment and experience you gain from one game is kept whilst you're in the other so if you played online and maxed out your character then you'll be maxed out in the singleplayer. This however is game breaking and certain missions are only available depending on how far into the story you are. The story of White Knight Chronicles begins in the Kingdom of Balandor where an envoy from the neighboring kingdom (which was previously at war with Balandor) arrives in the capital complete with a fancy parade and riding what appears to be a giant white camel.

A young wine-clerk named Leonard (with the worst ponytail in the history of all ponytails), his new colleague (that's your Avatar) and his childhood friend Yulie all get caught up in a crazy adventure whilst they deliver a big cart of wine for a fancy do up at the palace. It's during this party that an organisation known as "The Magi" attack, killing the king and kidnapping the princess. I know what you're thinking: "this isn't exactly original", but JRPGs don't aim for originality these days. Leonard somehow makes a pact with a giant medieval mech known as the White Knight (yes that's THE White Knight of White Knight Chronicles) and sets off to rescue the princess with the help of a strange man named Eldore. WKC has all the elements of a typical JRPG. You have your rag-tag group of misfits in the forms of Yulie the pan-faced, Leonard the Gary Sue (who is about as lovable as a soggy fart and spends most of his time calling bad guys "bastards"), Eldore the bearded who practically screams "I will turn evil" (but he doesn't), Kara the inevitable-betrayer, Caesar the skirt-chasing dickhead and finally Daniel my doppelganger who neither speakers nor is spoken to during the entire course of the storyline. But he's always there, looking handsome to boot.

The storyline to the singleplayer game is shit (trust me, that's an appropriate term) and is simply used as a precursor to the online game. The voice acting is either terrible or good, nothing brilliant. This saddens me somewhat because such well-known (and very talented) voice actors such as Nolan North, Crispin Freeman and Kari Wahlgren all voice major characters. The character designs are also on opposite ends of the scale, either being great or shite. There are two characters who really stood out to me. The first was a spirit named Phantom that Leonard has to fight when forging the pact with The White Knight. Phantom looks very cool and speaks with a Shakespearean eloquence rarely found in video games. The second one was one of the "early villains" named Belcitane. Aside from sporting a kick-arse red coat and hairdo he also has an impressive vocabulary. Up until Belcitane I'd never even heard the word pestiferous before! The environments are nice to look at (not a patch on Pulse from Final Fantasy XIII though) and the combat and levelling up systems are simple yet allow a lot of room for customisation. But it doesn't seem worth it when the game takes only around fifteen hours to complete (including watching all cut scenes). It all plays out like fanfiction. Characters seem to suddenly remember things in order to cover up a plot hole, romance blooms from quite literally nothing and some of the writing is so bad its unreal. It leaves a very bitter taste in my mouth. From the looks of things it seems that after designing most of the game one of the devs at Level 5 suddenly remembered that a singleplayer game needed to be added as well and so they rushed something together and this did not work in their favour.

Famitsu only gave WKC a 29/40 and Eurogamer gave the game (shockingly) 8/10, which is surprising to say the least but of course they reviewed the multiplayer aspect too. Without the multiplayer I doubt WKC would have enjoyed the success it has because as a singleplayer game it is incredibly weak. You can't get the best armour or weapons without doing certain online quests and the Georama system (players of Dark Cloud will be familiar with this) is pretty dull unless you've reached a certain GR (Guild Rank) level. And unless you're spending lots of time online your GR level is destined to stay low... so very very low. Yet somehow the game has convinced me not to sell it or trade it and it is still a part of my diminishing collection, so maybe there it's doing something right after all?

Because it's a video game, it's okay for a creepy old guy to hang out with a bunch of kids