White Knight Chronicles

Flavor of the month for: 2+ months occassionally

Overall opinion: Short flavor, 2/5

Summary: WKC is a console-based rpg for PS3 that has a fairly extensive set of quests that can be performed online with other players. It is through this that you can actually get to the true endgame gears by leveling your guild rank. However it seems the only purpose at the moment is to get the good gears... and then what? There is currently no pvp at this time, but maybe that will change when the sequel title comes out.

Gameplay: Game play is pretty simple and painless, and may take a little bit of getting used to combo timing. My only real complaint is that during the times when you are still building AP, battles can feel reeeeally slow.

Character Progression: I've got a mixed opinion on the characters progression in WKC. on one hand, the skills available are completely open, and you can mix and match all you want. However, the two main cons with it is that eventually, after reincarnations, you can max every stat bonus, and still master all of your weapon choice's skills, which doesn't leave for very much build creativity, paired with the fact that some skills are clearly better than others, leading to "best" builds, with very little variation.

PvE: At the moment the online play only offers PvE quests. Many of these are chock full of mobs to kill, but every quest's ranking depends on your overall clear time, so most all of these are always skipped over to accomplish the objective as fast as possible, so it seems like a big waste. You do get point bonuses for every thing you kill, but it in no way makes up for the time lost in the overall ranking. Another major complaint is that for each range of levels, there emerges a 'best' mission to run. Now, there's nothing wrong with efficiency, but this goes to an extreme level. A very large majority of the quests take an extensive amount of time to finish, each new one offering a very slight bit more points than the last. However, very early on you unlock one quest that takes easily less than 3-4 minutes to complete, compared to the others' 30 minutes minimum. While you could still go enjoy yourself playing a variety of quests, due to the high leveling requirements, you'll without a doubt find yourself repeating this one easy quest hundreds of time in favor. At higher levels? There's a version 2 and 3 of it. Very boring. Speaking of boring, you wont find any sort of challenge in the fights either until you get to a very high rank as well.

PvP: Non-existant

OST: Not bad, but nothing really stands out among the tracks other than the opening theme.

Community: There's a pretty helpful forum community built into the game, where you can find a lot of interesting tips that were never stated anywhere in the game manual or help, some very important things about how to build your combos so that you don't receive completely unexplained damage reductions, as well as what stats influence what attacks, another thing completely untouched by the game itself. That aside, remember we're playing a console game, with people that have headsets, online. Your ears have been warned. While it's certainly nice to have built-in voice chat during complex quests that require people to be in different places at the same time, not to mention the fact that actual chat gets drowned out by the battle log easily, some people's headsets are just terrible, and you cannot understand a word they're saying. Why this is, I have no clue. I picked up a cheap bluetooth headset for $3 after a rebate, and everyone says I come in loud and clear. Of course, there is also the downside in that this type of voice chat is "always on" rather than Push to talk (PTT) so you will end up hearing every little thing going on in your partymate's living rooms.

Overall:I think this game really had a lot of potential, the graphics are nice, the 1Player mode is rather enjoyable, and the online connection doesn't seem to suffer any from lag or delays. However, the evil cookie-cutter rears its head to make character progression boring, and the actual lack of content and quest balancing currently make it a very short-lasting flavor.

My Characters:
Shiken - Spear/Shield Tank