Click here for part one: http://www.examiner.com/article/the-good-the-bad-and-the-unfortunate-white-knight-chronicles-ii-part-1
Part Two: The Bad
Beware, dear readers. For there is an angry rant a-brewin' on yonder horizon.
In the last episode of The Good, The Bad, and The Unfortunate, you took a little look into the positive aspects of a little PS3 game called "White Knight Chronicles II". Now, you may have read that article and thought, 'Hey, that sounds cool. I would like to try this fine video game'. But before you make the decision to do so, take heed. There is more to every game than just The Good.
For every good aspect contained within "White Knight Chronicles II", there are several little problems, and even some big ones, that really drag down the overall quality of an otherwise good game.
Firstly, the game, much like the last installment, seems to go for a game feel that marries the likes of "Final Fantasy XII" and "Phantasy Star Online", and as a result, WKCII ends up playing like a really slow MMO with a flawed Active Time Battle (ATB) system and enemies that take much longer to defeat than necessary. The ATB system should be done away with entirely. In all games.
And with each battle taking such a long time to finish, it becomes a real chore to play the game when the dungeons are so large and there are enemies everywhere and they weren't all aggressive to you. Sometimes, the player may just need to run through a screen, but they can't because they constantly have enemies chasing after them. At the very least, low level enemies should not become aggressive until the player attacks them. And with so many enemies, you will end up hearing the battle music that was so praised in the last episode a lot.
Even that may have been acceptable if the AI characters accompanying the player were not so, put bluntly, stupid. They pay no attention to enemy weaknesses and will even run out into the middle of nowhere for seemingly no other reason than to get the attention of an enemy that the player is trying to avoid. They also simply will not use certain spells, like Refresh, no matter how useful.
The in-battle camera is garbage. It get firmly anchored to the enemy that the player is targeting, and if the player wants to target a different enemy that happens to be offscreen, they have to run around like a clown until that enemy is in sight, and only then can they be targeted. Also, when fighting large enemies, the player cannot choose which part of the enemy to target from a list. They have to run around until the part they want to target is in their reticle. It's extremely annoying, especially when the enemy moves and the player ends up attacking a part that they did not want to.
Though the item and equipment creation is great, sometimes getting items for it can be a daunting task, with some items only being dropped by a single enemy that only appears in a single room with next to no chance to drop said items. It's very conceivable to spend hours trying to get one of a single item. Or maybe it's an item that can only be obtained in a high-level Georama... maybe.
But the worst part has got to be the Errands. This is a new feature added to this game that immediately makes it a great deal worse than its predecessor. Basically, Errands are just menial tasks that NPCs ask the player to complete. And they all come in the form of general, boring fetch quests or worse, simply talking to people over and over again, many times running between cities upwards of five times each just to talk to the same two or three people over and over and over to complete one Errand. It's so mind-bogglingly boring! But you don't want to skip them because you can get some really important things from them, so you do all of them until you want to pull your hair out.
Now, those are really the worst problems. There are plenty of smaller problems that, when alone, they are negligible. But when combined, they become a force with which to be reckoned. But for fear of making this article much longer, they will not be explained in detail. If you wish to know more about them, the comments section is always open.
Stay tuned for the final part of this review of "White Knight Chronicles II", Part Three: The Unfortunate.
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