white-knight-chronicles posts (Subscribe to this feed)

The hype for White Knight Chronicles seemed to run out in the long wait between its 2006 announcement and its 2010 North American release. Had it been released closer to the PS3 launch, it might have wowed some gamers with its large enemies and online integration, but the time seems to have elapsed for that as well.

Instead of the grand system-selling RPG many expected back then, Level-5's PS3 debut is a fairly standard JRPG with excellent character building options and nothing incredibly special to do with those characters.

Sony made us wait a few years for a North American release of White Knight Chronicles, but it's not waiting at all to give us a chance to spend more money on the game -- the official Sony blog has news that the first DLC for the game will be out ASAP, offering up microtransactions for items to fill out the in-game "Georama" space, as well as a $4.99 "key" that will allow you to completely re-customize your character without having to start the game all over again. Of course, Sony guarantees that "there is PLENTY for you to work with in the game itself," but just in case you want to pay a little more of your hard-earned paycheck, Sony will be happy to take it.

And finally, just in time for launch day, it's offered up a brand new trailer. That won't cost you anything but a click on the link below, as it's available to watch after the break.

[Via VG247]

Further expanding on LittleBigPlanet's catalog of costumes portraying PS3-exclusive game protagonists, Media Molecule has revealed that the next set of in-game duds will come from White Knight Chronicles on February 25. According to the PlayStation.Blog post announcing the new content, the costume pack will include the garbs of four of the RPG's legendary heroes: The White Knight, Black Knight, Dragon Knight, and ... Leonard. One of these things is significantly less awesome than the others.

We'll be frank -- there are quite a few JRPGs heading to consoles in the next few months. From Last Rebellion to White Knight Chronicles to Final Fantasy XIII, it's kinda hard to get excited for yet another in Resonance of Fate. That being said, the game's screens and video have thus far been unbelievably impressive (with the new gallery below serving to further that point), and our last hands-on with game was fairly positive. We'll do our best to remember all of that when the game releases on the same day as FFXIII. Seriously.

The American version of White Knight Chronicles has just earned a release date and a subtitle. SCEA is calling it the "International Edition," thanks to the addition of 50 new quests, voice chat, Georama and Live Talk. However, we think "The Incredibly Tardy Edition" is probably a more apt title, considering the 14-month wait fans have had to endure.

White Knight Chronicles' February 2nd release date places it before other big 2010 games on PS3, such as BioShock 2, Dante's Inferno, Star Ocean, Heavy Rain, and most importantly -- our lord and savior Final Fantasy XIII. We wonder if Level-5's Yoshiaki Kusada will be happy with the distance between these two PS3 RPG juggernauts.

Now that Uncharted 2 is out, what first-party exclusives do PS3 fans have to look out for? Well, not much: other than Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time and God of War Collection, the holiday pickings are quite slim. Next year, on the other hand, is a different beast altogether. MAG will represent January, and according to this new trailer from the PlayStation Network, White Knight Chronicles will be ready in February.

Such an early 2010 release should give players a few months time to delve into Level-5's world before Square Enix launches Final Fantasy XIII. That should make Level-5's Yoshiaki Kusada pretty happy, right?

Ha! You guys are still waiting for White Knight Chronicles? That's old news, folks. It's time to get hyped about its sequel. Unofficially titled "White Knight Chronicles: Awakening of Light and Darkness" (according to Andriasang), the sequel takes place immediately after the events of the first game. Leonard and his allies return to a world in chaos, with the City of Greed, the Kingdom of Barandel, and the Magic Republic of Foria all in trouble.

You'll create another avatar to join Leonard on his quest, and this time you'll be able to transform (a power unavailable in the first game). In addition to the requisite new areas, monsters, equipment and skills, White Knight Chronicles 2 will also feature a brand new female knight, and the ability to have six characters in your party.

SCE didn't reveal when the second White Knight game would hit Japan, but we do know this: English-speaking fans shouldn't expect to it see any time soon.

Gallery: White Knight Chronicles 2

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Sony Computer Entertainment and Level-5 have been slow in bringing White Knight Chronicles out of Japan. We talked with Level-5 manager Yoshiaki Kusada about the lengthy delay of the international version, and if the developer is concerned about competing against Square Enix's Final Fantasy XIII as the PS3 JRPG of choice next spring.

Joystiq: White Knight Chronicles has been out in Japan for a very long time. Why has it taken so long to find release in America?

Kusada: When Level-5 launched the Dark Cloud series in the past in Japan, we tried to incorporate feedback from users to make updates before releasing it overseas. In terms of White Knight Chronicles, since it's an online game, we have received a lot of feedback from users. So, we wanted to improve the title more based on the feedback from the users before releasing it overseas. In fact, in the Japanese market, these improvements have been made available through patching. We are awfully sorry we have been keeping the US users for so long, but we wanted to make sure that all the updates and improvements of everything up to the so-called "Second Wave," which includes Georama, before delivering it to the US users. After the "Second Wave," we started the localization of the game for the international market. We are so sorry that it has taken so much time. For the time, we believe we are able to deliver a much better game for the US market. So, I would like to ask for a bit more patience.

This PS3-exclusive RPG takes heavy inspiration from MMO games. You'll be grinding, fetching and questing to get this game's time-consuming Platinum.

We know the wait until gaming's favorite new Q is unbearable, but hopefully this new White Knight Chronicles trailer will help ease the pain. We've waited a few years -- what's a few more months?

A new trailer released at Gamescom showcases the various characters, and in the process reveals Sony's English localization and voice acting. Can you wait to play as a rogue mech-transforming warrior named, er, Leonard?

Level-5's made some aesthetically pleasing games in the past, but none have been quite as jaw-droppingly beautiful as White Knight Chronicles. A recent deluge of screenshots from the game appeared around the end of the San Diego Comic Con -- we've wrangled them, and slapped them in the gallery below.

Oh, sure, we've been seeing content from this massive RPG since the game came out in Japan last Christmas. Still, these shots are from the American version of the game -- that's the most beautiful thing of all, in our humble opinion. Woo! Go America!

Level-5's White Knight Chronicles won't even be out in North America until Q1 2010 (the time vortex into which all games are being drawn), but the developer may have already announced a sequel.

An image, purported to be a partial scan of a Famitsu article about the "2nd Wave" update for the Japanese release (the 1st Wave came out this spring), depicts a sidebar with the heading "A sequel is in the works" (as translated by Kotaku), and an caption "Unfinished story" (as translated by us). We aren't entirely certain about the veracity of this scan, and since this is all we have to go on, we can offer no details about this possible game.

[Thanks, Jason and Marius]

White Knight Chronicles is targeting a Q1 2010 release date in the US and Europe -- over a year after its Japanese release last Christmas. The reason the game is taking so long to get to the West is because Level-5 is working on extra content, which will be included on the disc. This content will be patched in to the Japanese version for free at around the same time.

Smaller features that are going to be added to the western release of the game include an autorun feature and improvements to the targeting system. The extra online missions that have been released since the Japanese launch -- roughly two a month -- will also be on the disc. Level-5 is also adding a system that was key to their Dark Cloud series, Georama, which will allow you to create your own town during the online portion of the game. Exactly how it'll work or how it will affect gameplay is unclear.

Level-5 is looking in to getting Japanese voices into the western version of the game for Japanophiles, and is still "working on" voice chat, but White Knight chronicles will definitely support cross-region play for the US and Europe when it launches.

Do you like your RPG trailers with an extra helping of drama and guy-trying-to-sound-like-the-movie-announcer-guy? We hope you said "yes," because the latest official video of SCEA's White Knight Chronicles is pretty bombastic. It's also just plain pretty. The footage is pieced together from in-game visuals, as we saw when playing WKC for our recent hands-on. We even battled as the giant mech White Knight itself, which looks like it could have leapt right out of RahXephon. So, after watching the trailer, what do you think -- is Level 5 doing the PS3 justice?