f13.net

Holy shit at the character generator.

More later I suppose. Let's use this thread to organize multiplayer also.

Worst lipsyncing in the beginning of video games. Mike Tyson's Punch out was more impressive.

lol

I bought it, but won't be able to delve into it until the weekend.  Work has me  :uhrr:

IGN gave it like a 5/10. Pretty damn bad and the reviewer said he was a fan of the other games by this company.

Yah, reviews scared me off. Most I've read were absolutely savage.  Too much stuff coming out and I still haven't bought ME2.

So what?

What's the jist of why it's getting bad reviews? I've just heard the weapon creation system isn't that great.

From one review:

Boring.
Bad plot.
Bad zone layout.
Bad voice acting.
Easy combat. 
Pretty.

Granted the guy reviewing it said a bunch of dumb shit as well.  So who really knows? But I haven't really seen any praise for this title either.  Seems like a cool concept, however.

It might be bad, I don't know.  But I do know that the PS3 doesn't have many real traditional RPGs, so I'm gonna snatch whatever I can.  If it's a boring story, then w/e.  I've sat through worse, I'll wager. 

Also, I trust an IGN review about as far as I can throw them. 

I waited since PS3's launch to get this game. And with that, it's time to sell the PS3 if it's that shitastic.

God damn it.

Yea, I'd have a kneejerk reaction and sell my PS3 before The Last Guardian too.

Totally in your camp here, Lorekeep.

:groan:

Since you're defending it so much schild, how is it? I've had this preordered for a while now, but haven't picked it up yet.

I complimented the character generator, which is fantastic.
I then made fun of it.
I then made fun of someone, anyone, quoting an IGN review (what, should I not have, I don't care if it was for Imagine Babyz).
I then called Lorekeep out for saying something daft.

As such:

What the hell are you talking about.

Also, I can't answer how it is yet.

I'd like to hear about the game's combat.  This clip (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItpLU7sMDRg&feature=channel) has some Voltron combat at about 2:45 and it looks painfully slow.

I played a little of it at the last E3 and "painfully slow" was a good way to describe the combat at that point. I forget how the system worked exactly but it included a large amount of waiting for meters to fill up or something like that.

Touche.

Intuition tells me I'm going to enjoy the game, although I only spent 45 minutes (yeah, only) in the character generator and then went through opening cinematics.  I like the art and while the syncing is terrible, I cut it some slack by being a dub over.  Can't say much about the reviews yet.

Not going to say anything about the combat, but the map. I hate hate hate maps that simply draw the edges of accessible terrain. It's like the cheapest way to make a map and not immersive at all. "Hey here's the limits of our theme park/potemkin village, it's like a cave with a sky coloured roof."

Nothing in this thread is definitively negative so far.  Complaints could be used on any number of JRPGs.  I'm probably on board.

I has a feeling...

(http://jameslaicreative.com/downloads/xkcd-f13.jpg)

I think the graph for this game is more of a dromedary.


Maybe the JRPGs you slog through.  We know about Blue Dragon.

The game is more or less what I expected personally.  It's a pretty standard level 5  rpg, and the character building is pretty ludicrous between looks, skills, and equipment.  The city building thing is interesting, but the direct hook into city building component DLC in the menu is pretty  :uhrr: 

I'm only a bit past the intro so far though, and have just gotten the knight and my village, but I'm pretty much not disappointed by the game.

So, while I don't usually agree totally with them, usually when they savage a game that badly and I buy it anyway I end up disapointed. Right now this game is running at 65 on metacritic which isn't exactly making it a critic's darling. While I have been known to shrug this kind of stuff off (Dynasty Warriors usually rates low but I enjoy some mindless button mashing from time to time) it is also usually a sign that the game in question has serious faults.

The main complaints from the IGN review:

1) Poor story. I can sometimes look past this in an RPG if the characters are interesting enough.
2) Tedious MMO-like combat. Hmm...that sounds worrying to me. The reviewer specifically mentions that other than changes due to elemental defenses you can just use the same spell or attack over and over in each battle.
3) "Range" doesn't matter since monsters can hit with close range attacks from across battlefields. Hmmm....odd.
4) Pop-in of graphics, mostly enemies.
5) Some complaints about transforming back from the white knight even if other enemies are nearby and you still have enough magic to maintain the form.
6) technical issues. He says it only happens a couple of times so I'm willing to let this one slide.
7) Poor character models.
8) Bad lip synching.

Mmmm, I don't have a problem with the character models, but I'm pretty used to Level 5's art and tend to like it.

After FFXII I can't really imagine how someone could complain about MMOG combat in an RPG :shrug:

I'm playing mostly for the metagame anyway. Which is incredibly robust and I imagine Yegolev will play and enjoy it for the same reason. It's why I play all Level 5 games really (much like NISA titles).

Well, if memory serves FFXII was fairly controversial for its MMO style combat. I like Factor 5 stuff, heck DQVIII is one of my favorite PS2 games. It just sounds like this one may be a misfire. Most publishers have at least one in their catalog.

 :awesome_for_real:

It's hanging at 65 because there have only been 7 reviews total, two of which were IGN and Gamespot dragging down the average pretty severely.  If you have any question at all as to the quality of the game, give it a week or two, and wait for more reviews to actually come out, and then check what the real average is.

I mean, honestly, most of Level 5's games have reviews that go all across the board.
Dark Cloud 1:  average 80, low 60
Dark Cloud 2:  average 87, low 50
Dragon Quest VIII:  average 89, low 60
Rogue Galaxy:  average 83, low 60

I mean, really, the only trend you're seeing here is that IGN and Gamespot have gone out of their way to ding it pretty severely.  It also doesn't help that this is one of the very few rpgs for the PS3 right now, and likely getting compared to what people are expecting from FF13, despite the fact that the game is over a year late making it to the US.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to sit here and defend the game to death.  It is what it is.  I'm already predisposed to liking Level 5's games due to their past history, and I more or less got exactly what I expected.

Does it compare favorably with Rogue Galaxy? Never played DC1/2 and despised DQ8, but I did like Rogue Galaxy.

The game was pretty clearly built off of Rogue Galaxy, if that helps you make your decision. 

I haven't touched Rogue Galaxy since it came out and I never beat it, so my comparisons will be a bit sketchy.  It's still a 3 person party, but you have, at the same time, both more and less control in this game than you did in Rogue Galaxy.  You can give them general orders, like spread out or focus attacks, etc, and you can set up their attack bars, but as far as actually triggering attacks, the best you can do is generically order them to do "something", but who goes and what they choose to do are kinda up in the air far as I can tell.  It's probable I've missed something though, since I didn't even figure out how combos worked until after the prologue.  The tutorials and manual could use some help  :|

You directly control all the character building, and all the characters use the same advancement choices, although all the ones but your character have a few varying  weapon trees greyed out.  The options are still absurd though.  You basically pick a weapon tree, and unlock skills and passives in it, which further unlocks more skills and passives.  You can mix passives between trees, but abilities only work for the weapon in question, so at best you can mix one weapon type with magic.  You also can enchant and modify equipment to change damage types, resistances, and stats.  Not sure the actual usefulness of this though.

Really large MMO style zones, with all the mobs on screen, pretty much the same as all their other games, although maybe a bit larger in size.  The game felt a lot like FFXI to me in look and feel in this regard.

Not sure what else to add since I feel like I'm retreading over what's been in the preview videos anyhow.  Go watch those if you haven't.  I'm not far enough in the game to comment on length or quality.  So far I liked Dark Cloud 2 more out of all their games, just from a sheer style perspective, but I've found nothing really to dislike on this one yet.

Yeah, I'm sure that C- review it just got from 1Up is going to bring that Metacritic score shooting right up.

It's an .. okay game?

It's pretty. It's got controls that are about as clunky as trying to play an MMO with a PS3 controller (seriously, it's a combo of reading the manual, referencing it again after the help prompts, and fucking around pressing all the buttons to figure out how to do some things.  Transform took me a few minutes of re-reading everything and finally figuring out it was under the same bar as Items now, wihch I'd never used)

Skill tree is puzzling, but not too bad. Just confusing about what you need to take to unlock what.

Party members are FUCKING ANNOYING, and worth -3 points out of a 10 scale for their incessant repeating of the same statements while you explore. Especially fuck you, messages that we've already gone this way. The game MAKES you backtrack, that's what we're DOING you stupid pink haired punk.

I like it, I just think it needed more polish. Some of the monsters are glaringly misplaced, too. The second real zone is realistic looking and the monsters kinda fit for the world, the then boss just looks like he was done by a completely different artist trying to animate a different game entirely.

Hows the Combat :: Cutscene ratio? While I loved DC I and II, Rogue Galaxy turned me off because (at least in the first few hours) I was watching more than playing.

... poor so far. It's cutscene-tastic. I'm not far in though, but I've already started skipping cutscenes if they go on for more than a minute to introduce a plot point.

I didn't say it would get better.  I said wait a week or two for more reviews to see how it actually shakes out, since their games tend to have very large ranges for review scores.  Honestly, this is probably one of the most transparent games on the market as far as quality goes if you actually went and looked for it, given how long it's been out in Japan already.  As I said, I got exactly what I was expecting with this.

Giantbomb has a Quick Look on WKC: http://www.giantbomb.com/quick-look-white-knight-chronicles/17-1971/

FFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUU-

Rogue Galaxy turned me off because I got too wrapped up in trying to keep my weapons upgraded and felt like I had to grind to play the game effectively.

That said, if you're whining about cutscenes RPGs might be the wrong genre for you.

I'm only a little ways in, but it definitely has that Level 5 "Just make it past the first 5 hours and it will get awesome" feel that DC 2 and Rogue Galaxy had.

I've never skipped soooo many cutscenes.  Overall it's a decent game but the cutscenes are really over the top on this one.

I completely forgot about transforming for the boss just prior to the Nordia Caves, just took it down with combos.   Hopefully things will get a bit more technical, it wasn't any more or less difficult than taking down a troll or treant.

And Lost Odyssey.  Did you know that a trait of psychopaths is that they cannot learn from mistakes?

Luckily I learned not to play any more Dragon Quest.

This is yet another JRPG that should've come with a 200-page manual.  Don't want to wait for your attack ring to recharge?  Well just string your attacks in a combo!  Of course, we won't tell you what attack does what in a combo, so good luck putting them together!  Collect random shit from places!  We won't tell you what it does or how to use it.  Why are you carrying around a hundred pounds of withered tree branches?  We don't know either, but we're sure it's essential at some point.

I see a lot of potential, but it's going to take a lot of Google and translating Japanese websites to make any fucking sense of the obtuse game mechanics.

And yes, it's pretty.  Unless you made your avatar into a horrible abomination.  Which is all too possible.

Additionally: http://wkcinfo.blogspot.com/

One complaint I've heard from my coworkers is that your player-created character is not the main character. Is that the case?

Seems that way but you can choose who to play (when it's not a forced split like 2 hours in). I assume the in-game character is for multiplayer. Leonard is the storyline "hero."

I'm not far into it, but so far I'm not seeing the bad.  Granted, I haven't played a console true RPG in over four years or so, but it's got everything I need so far. 

Where I am, I'm pretty disappointed that they moved away from the action-oriented combat of Rogue Galaxy and Dark Cloud for a sit-and-wait system.  Let me tell you how much I enjoy watching timers count down before I do my next move!  This game seems to have an incredibly complex crafting system sitting on top of one of the least complex combat systems I've seen in years.  The combat feels Magna Carta bad right now.

Edit: Actually, it's reminding me a lot of a slower and less complicated Final Fantasy XII.  But I liked FFXII, so I'm still figuring out why this game feels so much worse to me.

So far, I think that Rogue Galaxy is the better game.  Which is more that Rogue Galaxy is an excellent game than White Knight is a bad game; WKC is just lacking in some of the pizazz that Rogue Galaxy had.

They call those strategy guides now-a-days.  :why_so_serious:

Actually, if I think back, the last strategy guide I did buy was for Dark Cloud 2.

http://www.rpgfan.com/reviews/White_Knight_Chronicles/index.html

The opening point is a good one, and one I hate to admit. Western RPG's are getting their day in the sun, and J developers are off their A game. Even the best JRPG out atm (Demon's Souls) is pretty untraditional, a bit on the action side, and very western in art style. Perhaps the second best JRPG (Tales of Vesparia) is a pretty action like too.

Anyhow, I was looking forward to this, but it'll have to wait.

This game is definately a mixed bag. Combat is ludicrously easy; there's little reason to Transform into a Knight unless you want to speed up the inevitable demise of your foe or you're forced into it by the "story". The voice acting is crippled by the fact that the material they have to work with is so banal. If they had dropped the party "banter" the Metacritic score would gain ten points.The Georama part I find oddly compelling. Unfortunately I've grown my town to the point where I need to start working my GR level up through online questing if I want to expand it (and I do). Crafting I haven't really delved into yet as I don't want to use up goods I've foraged or gotten from drops and chests on marginally upgrading a weapon or armor only to discover that what I used was somewhat rare and a necessity for a key build in my Georama. I'll probably check around online to see whats what in that regard but I was concentrating on getting a straight playthrough in first. I'll have to see how the online quests are before passing final judgement but I can understand why some of the reviews are so harsh.

The more I've played, the more I just want to play Final Fantasy XII again.  Although I liked the party banter personally, it added a bit of flavor to the tedium of grinding my way through each gigantic level.  The reason the georama works is because, unless I'm mistaken, it's lifted from Dark Cloud 1 so they've had some time to think about improving it.

Has anyone figured out how to make the AI heal status effects without controlling them manually?  Or do anything marginally useful besides cast party healing spells when only one person is injured?

Is that a new avatar?

Slower than FF12 would be FF11, and we all know how invigorating that game's combat was... Actually, looking at these videos, this looks even slower. I didn't even think that was possible.

Mine?  Yes.  I was tired of wearing my scarlet letter.

Really though, I should dump one that's even worse on you for choosing such an ugly avatar this time around.

It irritated me, so I adblocked it.

Oddly enough I had been doing a replay of FFXII when I picked WKC up. One of my gaming goals in life is to finally obtain the "secret" ultimate clan rank in that game.
Back on topic I didn't see anyway to explicitly set up a 'Status Ailment->Remedy' parameter. There were a few times that they did so on their own but not in any pattern I could discern and certainly not with any regularity. Try stacking all the various cures on the first action bar of your healer and hope the AI takes a cue from that? It's not as if any of the ones you get hit with are particularly debilitating anyways, none of them excepting Poisin last very long and they only serve to lengthen a fight somewhat.

I'll try to get online questing started tonight. My PSN ID is FortusDei and I kept that as my World/Online ID in-game and my toon is named Fortus. Giving that info out in case someone wanted to group or you feel the need to trample my Georama's Herb Garden.

Changing avatars is so 2000's

Why do you all hate Big Trouble in Little China?

Edit: Do the other characters only use abilities that have been assigned to their hotbars?  That would mean a ton of micromanaging if you wanted to make a hybrid mage.

That is a very good question.  I maxxed Leonard on longsword then gave him a bunch of healing abilities then watched a fight from my avatar.  Never saw him heal once.  He was set to fight as he sees fit while yulie was heal first but there where a few times Leonard should have healed but didn't.

The biggest bitch about wkc I have is the difficulty but I'm not sure the design of character control could handle anything more.

Phildo I have no clue how the AI chooses which actions to use. I had set my party members up with some nice combos but they never used them. Possibly if I had chosen 'All Out' for their behaviour they might have. Once I realized that there was little reason to use anything other than the default base attack though I didn't bother studying the combat mechanics further.

I keep my AI characters with one row of stuff and a heal and rez at the end and they always heal and rez when needed. Two slots are regular attacks and the other two are combos (and they use them).

Schild how do you have them set up as far as behaviour and the R3 button command? I'm through with the single player currently but if I do NG+ or want to bring a different character through I'd be interested in knowing how you got that working.

Focus one target.

Hmmm. That's what I had as well. What setting do you have for their general temperament or whatever that's called? I know I had Yulie as 'Heal First' and Leonard was 'Mixed Action' I think? Will have to check exactly but he wasn't Heal or the All Out setting.

Edit: Leonard is set to 'Auto'

If you think combat is slow with a melee, try a pure mage. :oh_i_see:

Anyway, not important since you can switch to anyone whenever.  Combat is pretty easy but slow.  I mean that anything takes forever to kill and usually it won't kill me if I am paying attention at all.  Even transforming barely helps against a troll or treant, at least while I am around level 6.  Maybe I need to stock up on inspectacles.

I can tell you that a NPC will use whatever is in the action bar you left him on, tested with my character who has a Wind bar, a Fire bar and an Earth bar.

I still like it.  Everything that isn't combat is enjoyable.

Yegolev.Island

Ok, so I'm delving into this a bit and have a few issues.  I'm not so hot on the combat and I'm hoping to get some advice to make the best of it.  Otherwise, it's a pretty neat game. 

1.  I've heard that armor type determines length of time between attacks.  Is there a way to determine what type an armor is by looking at it?  There's no descriptor that says if it's heavy, medium or light.  Do I simply have to guess at them?  Some are easy, like a Copper Chestplate is obviously a heavy armor and Cotton Gloves are obviously light.  But I have an item called Adventurer's Pants....  wtf is that? 

2.  Is there a simple method for setting up character AI?  I made my character a sword tank and I can control him pretty well, but I want to make sure others are actually doing the things I set them up for.  How in the world do I set up combos for them and myself that are efficient?   There's so many abilities that seem like they're doing the exact same thing as others and I haven't determined how they should be used situationally. 

The combat feels like getting a game without an instruction manual. 

So I'm finally getting into this, and I'm surprised I haven't seen too much about this, but this game is just about ruined by it's interface. Seriously, it's one of the worst UIs that I can recall in recent memory.

1. What do these stats do? LOL I DUNNO WUT
2. For every hour of game time I end up spending 20 minutes fucking around with combos and skill choices.
3. Why do the descriptions for the skills give me such pointless descriptions. This one is "A vertical chop." This one is "A horrizontal chop." Thanks for that.
4. Need your ally to do something specific? Mash R3 and watch as they pick something at random, with a 3/4 chance that it won't be the most effective element.
5. Geonet. LAWL.

And it's sad, because I think I really could have liked this game.

Spoiler: Due to the combat system being quite broken, you'll do perfectly fine with giving everyone only Lunging Slash and Heal, and a few combos for those characters that you will be controlling. Lunging Slash tends to do more damage than any other attack against pretty much anything so you'll want AI to use only that.

If you want to use other weapons than swords, each of them also has one attack that works better than others but most of them still do less damage than Lunging Slash.

I don't even have to try that hard.  I have different people do different things, one with Heal, and my personal character uses elemental magic since that is the thing that requires the most micromanagement.  I pretend it is harder than it actually is.

Yeah, the game is ridiculously easy, probably as a direct result of being limited by the constraints of the UI. While I prefer a challenge, I can tolerate an easy game if it doesn't get in my way. This game pushes you into the lowest common denominator with it's interface. It may sound like an assinine complaint, but games that don't let a player excel bug the crap out of me.

Just 1 example: 3 spell levels, 2 spell versions (direct and AE,) 4 elements. 24 total attacks. I'd like to be able to use them all, usually to manage mana or action points, sometimes for unique status effects - but no way can the game let you slot that many skills. And it shouldn't let you slot that many skills either - it's a console game, time shouldn't be spent picking through that many menus. This is the type of thing that a PC MMO (just to use an example,) can get away with, because of the level of control over the interface that the average game affords it's player. The solution for the console needs to be much more elegant. They could have made the newer versions of the spell better in every way than the older versions. Alternatively, they might also have made the different levels and versions of the spell selectable by button combo (only requiring 1 version of the spell to be slotted.)

Unfortunately, I just blast everything with the highest level elementally opposed spell that doesn't consume action points, make frequent trips to the save crystal to recover MP, use the occasional hyper combo when my AP is high enough, and wish vaguely that the game could have been more.

The sequel is being released in Japan in a couple months.

The single player game is mindlessly easy.  The multiplayer game, where you're not dealing with retarded AI players in your group, you actually have to use the combo system, and things that can actually kill you is another matter.  If they'd just released this more as a phantasy star online clone, it probably would have gotten more traction.

edit:  I suppose I should put a slightly better explanation here.  People have an odd view of this game because of how it was marketed, and how people treat rpgs.  Everyone views this as a single player game.  It's not really.  The single player game is shit (although I still enjoyed it), and it's really a story built around a multiplayer game engine.  This is akin to people buying MW1/2, playing the single player game, saying it sucks, and never playing it online.  The single player game in both of these might as well not exist, compared to what it was meant to be.  Now is this the greatest online experience of all time?  No.  It need some work, but I derived a few weeks of fun out of it on and off, but the online far outshined the single player component for me.

Maybe I had to be there at the inception of the game to appreciate it (of course that begs the question is, why is it so bad now,) but what is so great about the multi-player?

There are player cities, but each player = a different city.  The browser usually returns only 1 or 2 results, and there's not that much going on in the cities themselves anyways. The quests are not overly complex, and there are only so many of them which become stale very quickly. The difficulty is shigher than the regular game, but not in a way that changes my tactics. Maybe now I slap a boost into the equation somewhere, but the only real change the difficulty effects is the need to have 1-3 other players do the quest with you.

It's actually in the multi-player that my complaints become more pronounced. I *WANT* to get in there and use all different levels of the spells at my disposal to make judicious use of my MP supply, APs, and status effects as they stack up against enemies of various stats. I want to stand out for my tactics, but there are only so many abilities that the game will let me slot, so... LCD.