White Knight Chronicles: International Edition

                                                               

White Knight Chronicles

 I had picked this game up off eBay for $20 bucks, and I thought that it wouldn't be too disappointing considering the price I paid for it. I was wrong.    
Just a note before I start my criticism though. I am a huge Japanese RPG fan. My obviously-broken brain finds cliched stories, bland game play and teenage heroes amazingly awesome. So when I say that White Knight Chronicles is bad, I am judging it as a fan of drawn-out games and as a previous fan of Level-5 Inc.
 

The first thing I'm going to pick on is the the combat system. The combat in this game seems slow and laboured, requiring a ten second wait in between each attack. Yes, I mean every single attack. I don't know if there was a more entertaining way to go about this, but I had mashed my X button into a some kind of paste. Of course, you can chain up these attacks by using 'Action Chips', which regenerates whenever you're in combat. It seems like a good idea, but White Knight Chronicles executed it poorly, making it a boring task to gain action chips by forcing players to simply use single attacks. 
Although the game does use a system where you can 'cue' your teammates to go all out in a fight, which is convenient so you don't have to constantly switch through characters executing combos. Sometimes though, when I wanted a character to bodyslam the monster to oblivion, the character would completely misinterpret my cue and start healing companions, or conserving their MP which made me think they were retarded or just incredibly inept at reading the situation.
 
 Constantly, throughout the whole game, you will hear the characters say things related to t

he plot. This is a good feature, and I generally enjoyed hearing their quips and conversations with each other. Even if it wasn't your thing, you could turn it off in the Options menu. Except, I completely hated one character. Imagine a character that was completely inept at any witty repartee and dumber than the average female JRPG character. Now, think about what kind of lines that character would say, and over the span of thirty hours.  I was prepared to simply kill her off in my party and deal with just having two characters.
 
 Some may consider this to be a spoiler, but if you honestly can't work out that MAIN CHARACTER IS IN LOVE WITH FEMALE LEAD CHARACTER then I'm sorry to have ruined it for you. The relationship between these two is... unexplainable. I don't mean that in a way that it's the next Romeo & Juliet, I mean it by simply that they have no substance together. From what I could tell, they've only met each other once when they were both children, and even then, they didn't speak. However, the main character is enamoured with her and is willing to do everything for her. Every time their relationship was brought up, I had to keep myself from drinking laundry detergent and just ending the inane imitation of a romantic relationship.

 
I wish they would've developed more on the other characters who actually carry a real personality and were - god, forbid - interesting.   
 
There is a multiplayer function to this game, but the community is effectively dead. If you were hoping to traverse the quests with some random strangers online, you're better off buying the game for a friend and strapping them down with bolts to get the platinum trophy.
 
My play through of the game took around 30 hours, which made me consider what I actually did in the past 30 hours. The story at the beginning is bland, the middle is the most climactic and makes you think that it's all going to be worth 30 hours, and the end made me want to rethink why I ever play games anymore.