White Knight Chronicles: International Edition

In contrast to Final Fantasy XII's similar system, you're free to purchase skills in whatever area you want for a character right from the start of the game, allowing you to build a personal, specialised team immediately. Switching between characters mid-battle is straightforward, but if you'd rather just stick with one fighter, general AI behaviour can be set to handle the rest of the team, making appropriate use of the moves and combos you've prepared for each.

Single moves can be incorporated into strings, which, when triggered during a fight, require you to press the action button in a QTE-lite in order to sustain the combo through its entirety. As such, it's possible to lose hours to the team set-up, and building a balanced team of fighters is an enjoyable challenge.

However, the game's easy difficulty never demands the sort of thoughtful preparations that the system allows for. Once you gain access to the titular White Knight armour - which turns one of your characters into a 30-foot hulking knight (known as an Incorruptus) - there's even less incentive to strategise in the menus. Both combos and transformation into medieval mecha require action points, which accrue at a rate of one per fill of the turn gauge. As a transformation requires a minimum of 7 AP you need to take a long view of your combat strategy, saving up AP for the dungeon's inevitable boss battle.

Outside of the main campaign, White Knight Chronicles extends its appeal by way of the Georama, an MMO-lite arena in which you can team up with up to three other players and take part in side-quests. Experience and items won during these missions feed back into your main game, but there are more compelling reasons to keep returning to this area, especially for fans of Monster Hunter-style micro-missions.

Since its release in Japan over a year ago, Level 5 has been adding new features and refining the Georama, incorporating voice chat, a facility for players to 'blog' their adventures on a message board and the ability to build and furnish your own Georama area for other players to visit. Played in a group of four, the battle system sings, recalling the finest moments of Phantasy Star Online as team members settle into natural roles. As with Monster Hunter, the multitude of quests on offer are often too pedestrian to excite much, but in the past 12 months Level 5 has redressed this with some more exciting marks.

Despite their relative strength, the disparate halves of White Knight Chronicles fail to gel in meaningful ways. Limiting the relevance of multiplayer side-quests to monster-hunting and restricting the rewards primarily to items for crafting lessens the impact of what might have been. Meanwhile, a lacklustre, clichéd storyline that demonstrates only faint echoes of the imagination and flair that fire Level 5's Professor Layton series fails to capitalize on what is otherwise a bright, engaging world.