A few weeks ago, White Knight Chronicles: International Edition released for the PS3. The developer, Level 5, has a great track record, with games like Dark Cloud, Rogue Galaxy, and Dragon Quest VIII under their belts. It would have been safe to assume White Knight was going to be a good game. Currently, White Knight is sitting at a 65 on Metacritic. Some of the White Knight reviews point to what’s wrong with game journalism today.
Now, I’m talking about if White Knight sucks, is game of the year, or deserves to be dumped in a landfill. I’m talking about the way the reviews were written. The content. The meat and potatoes.
The Backstory
First off, I own White Knight Chronicles. I bought it the first week it came out. I’ve played it a few hours. I haven’t touched it since. I got swamped by other games, namely Mass Effect 2 and Bioshock 2. However, I do plan on going back to WKC shortly.
Is White Knight going to change the face of RPGs for generations to come? Absolutely not. In all honestly, the game has it’s faults. The Japanese fascination with saving princesses hasn’t disappeared. The story is like every other RPG you’ve ever played.
A cool feature is you can create a fully customizable character to use. Unfortunately, the character has absolutely no bearing on the story. In cut-scenes, he’ll just stand in the background creepin’. He doesn’t even have one line of dialogue, nor is he the main character.
The main character is named Leonard. I have not met a single Leonard in my life. Only in a JRPG could a Leonard exist. WKC is also a JRPG to the bone. Take that whatever way you want. Is it a solid game? Probably. Worthy of poorly written reviews from several of the major gaming sites? No.
A big problem with a majority of the reviews is that the online servers didn’t go up until after they were probably finished. Arguably the biggest selling point of the game is the multiplayer aspect. That’s what the developers have been pushing for months now. White Knight isn’t designed to be a strictly single player experience. If that’s the main attraction and you haven’t been allowed to fully test it out, how can you accurately judge the game?
Do the reviewers make some good points?. Yes, they do bring up valid criticisms. White Knight released in Japan over a year ago. Some complaints should have been addressed. However, this is a JRPG. Their complaints about White Knight are complaints that could be leveled against the genre. Separating the two is what a few reviews can’t seem to do.
The IGN Review
IGN has a nasty habit of ripping into games that aren’t blockbuster hits or massively advertised everywhere on their website. They(or more specifically Ryan Clements) gave White Knight a 5.1/10. That’s a bad score. Not surprisingly, there is barely any mention of the online mode. He even admits he didn’t include aspects of White Knight in the review because he felt they weren’t important enough.
White Knight received a 6.5/10 in the Lasting Appeal portion. It mentions the main story alone takes about 30 hours to finish. Um, isn’t that a fairly lengthy game? That’s just counting the single player. It’s not taking into effect co-op or going after trophies.
Compare that to Dead Space, (random pick) a game I beat in less than 12 hours. IGN gave it a Lasting Appeal of 8.5 because you could play through multiple times to upgrade your weapons and “understand the full story.”
Funny, I don’t remember Dead Space having a a gripping, gut wrenching storyline. There’s nothing “deep” to it. In fact, it was so predictable, you can figure out the whole thing about two hours in. There are only 5-6 guns too, which quickly lose their shine after using them 500 times.
If you needed to play Dead Space multiple times to “understand the full story”, you probably need to do a lot of things multiple times, like spelling out your name or adding one plus one to fully understand them too.
Flawed Reviewing
You have to wonder why there is a sharp difference in the framing of Lasting Appeal between the two games. Dead Space is nowhere near the length of White Knight Chronicles. Dead Space was a blockbuster title advertised a lot by EA. There’s no advertising for White Knight, and it’s as niche as they come. The two games obviously have nothing in common. I just picked a popular and heavily advertised game to show how sloppy the White Knight review is.
Another drawback of IGN’s review is that in the year 2010, they still include a trivial element like “Sound” as a major part of their overall review score. The way they calculate a final score is laughable. Lasting appeal for White Knight is easily a 9 or a 10 based on the amount of hours it’ll take to finish everything.
Based on the quick comparison I just did, it appears IGN’s rating system is severely flawed and inconsistent, depending on how huge a game it is they’re reviewing. This is also seen in several other games that might not exactly be big budget titles, like the recently released Deadly Premonition. Even though the review clearly states Deadly Premonition is a 20-hour game, it somehow got a 3/10 for Lasting Appeal. Go figure.
At the end of his review, Clements states:
With all my criticisms on the table, it might be easy to dismiss White Knight Chronicles as an awful game. It’s not.
Why would anyone not totally dismiss WKC after reading a review full of complaints and seeing the terrible review score? Why would they not assume it’s an awful game when you give it a score of 5.1?
Devil’s in the Details
The worst part about the IGN review (as mentioned earlier) is that it’s clearly missing a few details about WKC- like exploration, unlocking attack and magic skills, crafting and upgrading weapons/items, or the building feature Georama. A few commenters even called Clements out for not including such information. He responded saying:
Those aspects of the game you mentioned weren’t important to me as a player, as the vast majority of the experience was troubling in other ways. I wasn’t rushed at all writing this piece. I was just selecting the most important information to describe.
Can you imagine him saying that about a game that pays IGN for advertising? Or him saying that working for a newspaper? “Yeah, I just didn’t feel those were important issues to me as a taxpayer, so I didn’t include them in my article.” Those are important elements of White Knight which should be factored into the review score. As a supposed “journalist”, it’s his job to tell readers as many details as possible, not just the ones he considers important.
I could see him going back and editing the review after someone pointed out missing parts, which would have been the right thing to do. Instead, he completely dismisses the criticism.
The 1UP Review
1UP’s review is even more ridiculous:
Friends can’t tag along during any part of the main story; they can only join in the 50 or so side missions. A basic server browser also would have helped a lot, as the current process involves going to a save point, connecting to GeoNet (White Knight’s social network), slowly scrolling through the mile-long terms of service agreement, entering random matchmaking that drops you into the first open room it finds, and then — assuming there’s even anyone in there — discussing which quests to tackle with the people inside. Things are a bit less complicated once you’ve established a few friends, but it’s a headache nonetheless.
There’s only small paragraph dedicated to the online portion, and he uses it to bitch about the service agreement. Yeah, a service agreement. Why is the online play a headache? We’ll never know, because he failed to include any supporting details. Also, why wouldn’t he be playing with friends? Does he even have friends? Why does he use playing with random people as a negative?
Much like the IGN review, 1UP completely disregards some of the same important features of WKC. The 1UP review tells you nothing about the game. Instead, it’s a list of complaints. The content is vague and doesn’t give enough details.
How are we supposed to know if the online is garbage if we’re not given that information? How many hours does it take to complete? If it sucks I wanna know. If it’s amazing I wanna know that too.
If this were any other game, say Mass Effect 2, Final Fantasy 13, or another AAA title, I guarantee you this kind of crap journalism wouldn’t take place. If it did, these so-called journalists would have a lot more game time on their hands, because they’d be out of a job. If this happened with a “traditional” journalist at a newspaper, the writer would be reprimanded. Time and time again, you see these kinds of reviews pop up.
Like it or not, reviews do shape a game’s perception early on. For a good amount a people, a review score is the be-all-end-all of a game. If game journalists aren’t going to do their job right, many games are going to fail before they’re even out of the gate.
[Photos by Sony]
Posted on March 2, 2010
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