Why it could have been great: White Knight Chronicles

Imagine if those two “biographies” were in competition, so to speak. Imagine if the personality forged during your online adventures were mapped back onto the single player, perhaps making your character more disposed to intervene in disputes between major cast members, to pick the left door rather than the right door, to fight with an axe rather than a longsword. Imagine that the whole balance of the drama was tethered to your multiplayer exploits.

Of course, most JRPG developers would sooner sacrifice their offspring to Satan than indulge such curiously Western notions as branching narrative paths, and throw their grandmothers in for good measure before they’d grant a multiplayer component such sway over the storyline. That doesn’t make these ideas any less interesting, though.

The city of Grede is definitely the highlight of the game's landmarks.

There’s scope, then, for some provocative storytelling manoeuvres in White Knight Chronicles, but regrettably the game refuses to acknowledge the genies it conjures from its mishmash of tropes. Player characters remain mere screen furniture throughout the campaign, smirking vacantly in the corner of every cut scene, and crossover with the online mode occurs only on a mundane level, in the transfer of items and experience points.

On the battlefield

The second and less pretentious potential stroke of brilliance is the battle system. It’s very appealing on paper: a heavily action-oriented interpretation of Final Fantasy XII’s free-roaming, MMO-influenced combat, swapping out the latter’s programmable if/then AI templates for some rather tasty customisable combos.

The results are far from a disappointment, but the interface is rather cumbersome for a quasi-real-time game. To use items, for instance, you must flip down several menus with the stick, open a list and scroll to the one you want. This might have been excusable had there been something in the way of an auto-attack, as in FFXII, letting players browse options at leisure while the character in hand takes care of the cut-and-thrust.

Do you see this sword? Because I can see your face.

Of course, the most eye-catching aspect of conflict in White Knight Chronicles is the Knight himself. Leonard acquires the ability to morph into this building-sized doomsday device early on (see also: “unsuspected mystical heritage”), trading a handful of AC points for shoulders you could park a bus across and a blade that would give Ron Jeremy the shivers. Boss encounters often invite (and sometimes require) you to don the Knight’s mighty chestplate, as the game’s villains reveal super-sizing capabilities of their own.

As a mechanic, the Knight is quite hilariously over-powered. Regular enemies can be dispatched in one hit, and bosses aren’t all that sturdier. It’s the JRPG equivalent of Modern Warfare 2′s tactical nuke.