White Knight Chronicles was originally released in Japan way back in December 2008 but took until February 2010 to be released in Europe and North America. Releasing the game in the week before the biggest RPG of the year (Final Fantasy XIII), developers Level-5 had their work cut out persuading gamers to buy White Knight Chronicles and the game sank almost without trace, lost in the massive hype for FFXIII.

As a fairly standard JRPG (Japanese Role Playing Game), White Knight Chronicles conjures up a run-of-the-mill storyline which unfortunately tends to be quite dull for most of the time. You are the usual ‘zero to hero’ character, Leonard, who has to save the obligatory princess by beating up baddies and occasionally turning into a huge ‘White Knight’ who is essentially a super-powered version of himself with new moves. You’ll only really use the White Knight at boss battles and even then the game is quite easy so you can get away with only using it two or three times if you really want to make the game a bit more challenging.

You begin the game by creating yourself an avatar, which isn’t as customisable as many other RPGs but isn’t bad. You are then plonked into the game as a silent party member and by default you will then take control of Leonard, leaving your avatar to be controlled by the AI. However, a quick flick through the menus will allow you to switch back to controlling your avatar, which makes sense as this is the character you’ll be playing with online. You create a party of three for most of the game (plus one or two stragglers along the way whom you are forced to include) and like most party-based RPGs it’s a good idea to have at least one healer and probably one ranged fighter as well as a melee-based ‘tank’.

Once you make your debut into the outside world (after some cumbersome NPC chatter and cut-scenes) you’ll find a pleasant-looking and wide field of gameplay which is quite exciting, though the actual tracks you can run along as relatively narrow and the game is nowhere near as ‘open-world’ as it looks. White Knight Chronicles is more open than Final Fantasy XIII, but don’t expect anything on the scale of Oblivion. It’s probably closer to Dragon Age: Origins than anything else. The world is split up into distinct ‘lands’ that are almost Crystal Maze-esque with the ‘Grassy Zone’, ‘Industrial Zone’ and ‘Desert Zone. There offer a nice level of variety which helps to break up the gameplay and allows for a moderate sense of exploration as you play through the game. You can go back and grind any of the previous areas at any time, and to some extent the enemies tend to get harder even when you go back to very early areas, allowing for some useful grinding if that’s your thing.

The gameplay itself mainly revolves around choosing an attack, waiting for your ‘cooldown’ period of a couple of seconds, then executing it. Sadly, this repetitive task soon gets tiresome and the minimal variation in cooldown times exacerbates the problem. Selecting spells and attacks is done in a similar vein to World of Warcraft, with different bars to which you can apply shortcuts to your most used attacks. This works surprisingly well and the lengthy cooldown at least allows you enough time to select your next attack without rushing. Most monsters take a couple of hits to be dispatched and you automatically loot them, putting any items you gain into your personal inventory or, if you run out of space, into your larger backup storage. It’s a nice touch not to have to bother looting everything you kill and this helps minimise the stop/start nature of combat.

Exploration around the world generally consists of killing monsters in the open field, moving into a cave or dungeon, then into a town to stock up and progress the storyline, though there is some slight variation on this theme throughout. The monsters are very limited in design which is a shame as the gameplay areas are generally quite distinct from one another and it would have been good to see a wide variety of enemies to match. Instead the enemies are generally divided up into hateful gnomes, big lizards, big flies and aggressive-looking mammals, with differing elemental enhancements like fire and ice. On top of these standard enemies, there are also much larger enemies that are much harder to bring down and often require good team work from your party in order to keep everyone healed etc. These larger monsters, though few in number and type, and impressively large and do add some much-needed diversity to the combat.

The graphics are fairly solid but not exceptional, and compared to Final Fantasy XIII they are pretty bland. The towns themselves are one of the highlights, and generally look fairly detailed and at times quite expansive. There are very few frame-rate issues, though the occasional pop-up does spoil the illusion from time to time. In a  similar vein to the graphics, the music and sound perform their function but don’t stand out in any way and the battle music does tend to get repetitive after the 500th monster you’ve slain.

It’s very hard to recommend the single player campaign to anyone; veterans of the genre will find much better RPG action elsewhere while gamers new to the genre will probably find the gameplay frustrating and the storyline ridiculous. Where White Knight Chronicles does leave its mark is with the clever but unpolished multiplayer mode. The menu navigation throughout the game is clunky, requiring several steps for very simple commands, and the multiplayer mode is no exception to this. However, once you have managed to set up or join a gaming lobby the game becomes much more enjoyable online. As well as the simple MMO-like questing that you can perform with friends, you can actually build your own lobby in the form of a town, called a Georama. Using the in-game tools you actually get to build and populate this yourself using resources and NPCs that you encounter on your journey through the single-player game. The Georama is a genuinely interesting and fun feature which, if you have plenty of time on your hands, offers hours of gameplay collecting your desired items/NPCs and putting all your hard work together you and your friends to use. The multiplayer gameplay itself is fun, though it feels unfinished and doesn’t quite fulfil its potential. You get to choose tasks to perform in online versions of the single player areas, generally resulting in a series of fetch and kill quests, for which you gain guild reputation. As your reputation increases you are able to unlock further quests as well as recruit fussier NPCs to your Georama.

Overall, White Knight Chronicles is a fun but flawed RPG that few will truly enjoy. If you can find a copy for £10-£15 and you are bored of all the other RPGs out there, then you may appreciate White Knight Chronicles.  The great looking towns and the multiplayer mode in particular will give hardcore gamers hundreds of hours of gaming value if they can look past all the flaws in the game. For everyone else however, the flaws in White Knight Chronicles make it hard to recommend as a purchase.