White Knight Chronicles

Unfortunately the actual online questing in White Knight Chronicles still has the same problems it did a year ago. To recap, the online mode is entirely distinct from the single-player story - you access isolated multiplayer quests from the world map, taking your custom-created avatar into an instanced level with up to three other players.

It's not, disappointingly, a co-op version of the main game, but rather a collection of MMO-style slaying and fetch-quests, which the superbly flexible combat system can support admirably. Voice chat and keyboard support have been added as concessions to the Western way of doing things - unlike our Japanese friends, we like to communicate through more than emotes - and the quests can be fun, but they lack variety, and accessing them at all can be completely impenetrable thanks to a bewildering sequence of menus.

The game also doesn't let you dabble in online questing until hours into the game - it's almost as though you have to earn the right to have any fun - so players hoping to have a quick go at an online quest just to see what it's like are out of luck. Even when the online quests do open up, the game still does a terrible job of explaining how to go about them, hiding everything behind layers and layers of menu obfuscation.

Originally you had to purchase online quests from a vendor in a town, then start them up from a save point; the international version comes with around 50 missions ready-unlocked on the disc, all of which pop up on the world map as soon as the online mode becomes available.

This is actually problematic, as all of them are far too high-level for beginner players - people are likely to want to jump straight into an online quest as soon as the opportunity presents itself and will find themselves swamped in a sea of far-too-difficult slaying quests without anyone to share the burden. If you hadn't played White Knight Chronicles before, it would be difficult to even tell the difference between the single-player story quests and the 50-odd optional ones that suddenly materialise. It just doesn't do a very good job of explaining itself.

Level-5 really needs to make this more accessible. Admittedly the game's online features are primarily designed for players who have completed the single-player quest, but there's no way of knowing that. A lot of people are going to be buying White Knight Chronicles on the promise of its online multiplayer, or at least be curious about it, and they won't appreciate having that aspect of the game withheld from them for so long - or how difficult it is to understand when you eventually do get there.

White Knight Chronicles might be bigger, then, but it's no better than it was before - the translation and voice-acting are competent, the Georama system is a great but a superficial improvement, and the online questing has, if anything, become slightly more confusing. It's still strongest as a single-player game with an inspired combat system; the multiplayer is admirably ambitious, but it's still not an essential aspect of the game. There are many, many extra hours of extra content hidden away in there, but you still have to be very patient to find it.