White Knight Chronicles

[jth]

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.

[Yegolev]

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.

[Dtrain]

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.

[Velorath]

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

[Ard]

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.

[Dtrain]

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.