Dark Start
It's pretty obvious White Knight Chronicles International Edition is the beginning of... something. Unfortunately, it's also a very bad beginning.
Published: February 8, 2010
Here's the fundamental problem with all this online stuff, though (well, beyond the fact that you have to read through and approve the Terms of Service every time you log in, the broken friends list where invites often get lost and the game/PSN buddies are totally separate and the clunky, confusing interface): no matter how many materials you harvest or how much you develop your HomeTown, the fundamental questing is still built around all the boring, tedious battle mechanics of the single-player game. No matter how much time you spend online prettying up your lobby, eventually you're going to have to go on some fetch quest or monster slaying run, and the slow, boring combat will rear its ugly head.
That's not to say the game can't be quite a bit of fun with other people. Since you can only use your avatar here (sorry, no single-player characters and no transforming), and your avatar's leveling up and stat improvements are funneled back into the main game, you at least get some appreciable benefit to playing online when you eventually return to the story. Better still, the more you upgrade your town, the better the gear you can purchase without ever logging off.
Supporting other players with buffs and healing gives everything a decidedly Phantasy Star Online feel (especially because parties are limited to just four people for quests). Still, at its absolute core, it's still the single-player mechanics in a slightly different wrapper, and the quests themselves aren't nearly varied or interesting enough to make the available New Game+ option worth running through, nor getting to Level 50 where you can do a reincarnation to move down a different weapon path and do a skill rebuild.
It's weird, because I honestly could have stopped playing White Knight Chronicles about 25 hours into the game and would have saved myself a case of serious JRPG blue balls, but I didn't. I kept playing. In fact, I played through the game twice, once on the production servers and again when the game went live on the retail ones. I spent time building up my Georama, met a bunch of new friends and even now have this odd feeling like if I could just play a few more hours, something might click. It should be noted that I'm now clocking in at over 50 hours' time with White Knight Chronicles and the more I play it, the more I absolutely detest how limited it all is.
And yet... I keep coming back. I can only imagine this is what an abusive relationship might be like. Thinking that the game will get better if I can just support it. In one breath being brutally honest about how trite and boring the game is, yet secretly feeling hopeful that there's just one experience that will make it all better or redeem things. That won't happen -- that won't ever happen in this game. In the sequel? Sure, maybe; at the Tokyo Game Show last year, Level-5 confirmed that a follow-up was in the works that would, among other things, allow your avatar to actually, y'know, do something in terms of the story.
But this game? No, this game is not worth playing. It will eat away at you slowly, thinking that something will change, that it'll get better, that somehow all the tedium and boredom that starts to set in will reverse itself. It doesn't. Ever. Some of the online offerings will stave off the inevitable for a while, but eventually everyone will come out the other side worse for the experience. It's best to hold off and wait for the sequel when it arrives a year after the Japanese release; there's sure to be a recap about the few major plot points at the start of the next game. Save yourself the $60 and just wait. After all, you've waited this long. What's another few years?
