White Knight Chronicles II

Peel back the MMO veneer and there's a routine JRPG beneath - evidence that Japan's development community is still more concerned with paying lip service to Western fashions than implementing genuine change. For genre fans, that's no bad thing. Despite the treacly introduction and the initial feeling of lonesome powerlessness in the game world, White Knight Chronicles II is a competent if unremarkable Japanese RPG: a largely linear, battle-heavy experience whose unique selling point is granting you the ability to transform into a giant, blade-wielding knight during battle.

As you fight enemies, you accumulate Action Chips. Collect seven and you're able to transform into an Incorruptus, a towering Jekyll to your diminutive Hyde. During battles you fight a mixture of human-sized monsters and giants who can only really be felled by transforming to their size.

At an early stage, you learn the rhythm of battle: hacking away at smaller enemies until you have accrued enough chips to transform, at which point you can decimate the opposition. There's some additional tactical consideration as, if you save up until you have 10 or 15 Action Chips, your Incorruptus will be stronger.

It's a good idea but, as with the first game, the execution is lacking. Strikes with your weapon lack bite and the awkwardness of switching between targets during a battle leads to frequent frustration.

Level-5 gives you generous freedom to set up your team of fighters howsoever you like. Each character is given a bank of skill points, which can be spent on acquiring new abilities in any of eight different disciplines. Each category has 60-odd different abilities that can be purchased to build up your fighter's vocabulary of moves.

Once you've spent your points, you must then assign these attacks to any of the 21 action slots available to each character. In battle, you only have access to these hand-picked moves - so full responsibility for, say, ensuring your team has an adequate healer rests with you.

While this tactical freedom is welcome, in battle the interface for picking attacks is clunky, and too often your focus is on the battle with the menu screen and not the monsters behind it. The result is a battle system that is interesting but rarely enjoyable: a design that works on paper, but fails in execution.

Yet, at moments, the game looks nothing short of beautiful. Purplish mist drifts through dark green forest glades while swarms of pinprick fireflies hover lazily in the warm air. The wind exhales and trees and plants bow in unison: a simple, naturalistic effect not used nearly enough in games.

Level-5's eye for detail can be seen in the yellow butterfly flapping around a bloom of flower heads and in the grand, snow-capped canyon that carves a path through ancient rock. Catch the game from the right angle and it's as pretty as Final Fantasy XIII, all soft light and hard detail. Likewise, enemy designs are rich and interesting, and the world enjoys a welcome diversity of locations and people.

The story, however, is lacking. In a generous bid to help newcomers bed in with the characters, Sony includes the International edition of the first game in the package. But even with full familiarity with the cast, this a far from engaging yarn. Far too often, plot points exist to facilitate thinly-veiled and uninspired fetch quests - a huge disappointment coming from a developer whose work with the Professor Layton series exhibits boundless creativity in this regard.

As such, White Knight Chronicles II flounders. It's a hybrid that fails to find its own identity in terms of its structure, and its convoluted battle system is poorly explained and, once mastered, reveals itself to be broad but ultimately shallow. Those improvements from the first game are overwhelmed by a more general sense of ennui; what were once interesting innovations lack the polish and endurance to inspire over the course of a sequel.

A disappointment, then - for fans of a genre for whom disappointment is a familiar bedfellow.