White Knight Chronicles

2026-07-18

I make our hero hunch down for the 10th time to pick flowers. Fuck the princess and her little hologram interludes. She's on her 3rd kidnapping and I'm sick of her shit. She's distracting Leonard here--yeah the hero's name is Leonard--from picking up resources like we're prepping for a hunt in an early Monster Hunter--before Capcom turned into cowards and automated all that shit out. But here I do it for no reason. I have an inventory full of pebbles and other bullshit that I was hoping would be useful at some point. It's not. I found out you can merge weapons but even with the fastidiousness with which I sucked up every resource like Dyson designed my ass I still can't make anything good. At this point I keep picking the flowers because I really don't want to see another cutscene.

I'm here because I am the resident Level-5 stan and I am a glutton for punishment. And while we're just past that golden PS2 era--well on our way to the actual low point of Snack World--there are still the trappings of their design ethos at work. Plucky midi guitars and an accordion greet us when you hit the first small town in a song that could be ripped right out of Dark Cloud 2. We hit the main city again and there's a circus and an evil clown because Level-5 fucking love evil clowns. While walking around a dungeon Leonard randomly comments, "I hope I'm not the bad guy", because they have to have those absurd non-sequitur barks in every game. And every piece of armor and every weapon is uniquely rendered on our characters, another classic trope of theirs, reminding us Level-5 was doing Fashion Souls before FromSoft shat out a Tower Knight.

But without that reverence for The Level-5 Brand, I'm not sure what's here for you. There's no Tower Knight but there are towering Knights: giant suits of armor our heroes can control to face off against giant monsters. That's right, it's fantasy mecha. And yet they found a way to hamstring even that cool as fuck idea with everything else wrong with the game.

That is to say the one-two combo of the turd gameplay and buttwipe story all floating in the toilet of a faux-MMO.

This is Level-5's brand of 3rd person, real-time, hands-off combat at its absolute worst. You will be spending hours just waiting for that attack ring to interminably fill up so you can watch the next basic attack fire off. It's something akin to FFXII but it feels like molasses and there's no party programming. Shit, even the builds for your characters are just a huge list of attacks that seemingly do the same thing. Why not build a combo? Oh, only because it doesn't do anything, man. And also because you designed it to use the same energy resource I need to go MECHA MODE.

You'd think the piece de resistance would be Goin' Mecha Mode but even that they somehow made repetitive. At face value you morph into a giant motherfucker who does 5-10x more damage and can basically 1-tap regular mobs. The visual spectacle alone of a 20 foot tall knight slam dunking a Cerberus looking mf into the ground does rule. But the energy to transform and the MP you need as your Knight are shared with your normal human form. That means if you like turning into a Knight you have to spend the whole game stuck in first gear, conserving every bit of energy and MP by spamming your weakest attacks all day. You're that schmuck who's always on a diet refusing every snack and appetizer talking about how they got a "big meal" coming up.

And the story isn't even worth writing about. I yearned for it to be so bad it's good, guys. And in flashes it gets there. Verruca the lover "turning out" to be a giant pink frog lady might be the dumbest thing I've seen in a game--the deranged voice acting of the frog-wife angrily chewing out her cheating frog-husband "rib rib RIB RIbit", Leonard capping it off with "Wow, Verruca was...curvaceous." They even got fuckin' Master Shake voicing one of the baddies and he's the best thing in every scene he's in. But these are ten minutes of water in a twenty-hour desert. The rest is sleep-inducing. Everything is a trope, the secret evil guy is telegraphed with air traffic control wands. At one point a character you've long since clocked as Actually Bad ominously announces "I know what I have to do...but will I be able to do it"--out loud, to no one, while strolling through a forest with the whole party. What was that, big dawg? You good? The dialogue feels like it was written by 12 year olds. Which would be fine if it wasn't also suffused with cutscenes. Shittery dittery doo.

Special mention to Raus, a drunk little rabbitman with a quivering-ass "hoo ho hoo" voice and a genuine all-timer bad hang. They attach him to the slowest escort quest I've ever played: one long road with nothing on it, a man moving at a tenth of your speed, screaming "Do not forget about me!" the entire way. Raus, I am going to spend the rest of my life trying.

The source of the shit is of course that Level-5 was trying to make an MMO, which is never more clear than when you boot it up and are plopped into a legitimately deep character creator. Torso height, leg length, the ratio of your body parts--the game derives your height and weight from all of it (the "Giant" preset is a "hulking" 6'2", 180 lbs lmao). I sculpted my guy. I was proud of my guy. Then the game started, control was handed permanently to our old friend Leonard and my creation spent the next twenty hours haunting cutscenes as a silent, leering goon whom no character ever names or addresses.

The funniest part of this game is that to get the platinum you apparently need to play for seven hundred--seven HUNDRED--hours. Where do they all go? I guess what's supposed to happen is you're supposed to grind little side missions, hunts, whatever the fuck they euphemism'd them as. In the same spirit that had me picking all those flowers, I tried one quest at the start of my adventure. Maybe there'd be some cool depths to plumb, even a decade after the servers shut down. I was greeted with a barren ass map with a basic objective of "Pick up these two types of herbs." That were placed incredibly far away. That's it. Run and get the herbs, boy. Didn't even have my party, it was just me. Quit out immediately.

Even with a party of friends I can't imagine playing what amounts to Everquest-era MMO combat. But I guess this came out in 2008 on the PS3. There were no MMOs on the console and that's what Level-5 was betting on. That cynicism of chasing a buck has been Level-5's failing for the past decade plus. Instead of just making an action RPG with a lot of heart and love they need to make a franchise that can support a gazillion titles, a TV show, merchandise. See Yokai Watch and Snack World. Here, instead of just focusing on making a not-shit story and gameplay that actually sings, they strung together a bunch of bullshit hoping to rope in a million people to grind empty maps and raise their Guild Rank. Yuck.

Now I have to enter hibernation to mentally prepare myself for the toil of playing through White Knight Chronicles II. Excited to transfer my character over from the first game and have him ignored in five more hours of cutscenes.