Christmas came just on schedule in Japan yesterday, when thousands of players nationwide took White Knight Chronicles home and near-immediately realized the character creation system lets them freely adjust female characters' breast size.
The breast size slider in question is shrewdly titled "glamor".
For years, players have toiled with character creation tools that allow them to customize nearly every minute element of their character — from the distance between the character's eyes to the chubbiness of his or her ankles — and though it's often been possible to make a female character's chest proportionally larger by increasing her body size, we've never had an explicit breast size slider.
White Knight Chronicles changes this, making it possible to make a female character who is amazingly short, with 0% body fat, with a head as large as her torso, and breasts the size of watermelons.
Or you can do what I did, and make a girl who looks just like Caska from the manga "Berserk".
That's not all White Knight Chronicles does different when it comes to character-creation, though. It's actually very clever about the whole thing, on paper at least: the avatar you create is the tagalong character who for some reason sticks with the main character from start to finish.
When you choose "New Game", White Knight Chronicles segues immediately from the title screen to the character creator. The process is exhausting — and that's not just a color adjective. I really mean it. I was literally sleepy by the time I finished. Once you've finished your character, you can start the game.
Around fifteen minutes of cut-scenes ensue. There's a princess. It's her sixteenth birthday. We see a flashback in which her mother is murdered. We see the king planning her birthday parade. We see a shady evil knight looking over the city on a horse. We see a mysterious old man use The Force to make his way past some castle guards. We see a king of a far-off land being carried into town; he makes small talk with some soldiers. We see the owner of a winery, yelling at his lazy employee, who just so happens to be the hero of the game: the princess's birthday parade is our big chance! I need you to go get the wine from the wine cellar! And bring this new guy with you!
The hero of the game goes over and introduces himself to the new guy. The boss yells: no time for chit-chat! We see that the "new guy" is the avatar we created.
It's wonderfully clever, in theory — until we see how ugly our character looks compared to the professionally designed hero. A man got paid thousands of dollars to design that hero; meanwhile, we paid money to design this avatar. Seriously, I was so frightened of how abnormal my character looked next to the fresh-faced hero that I had to start over. I started over three times before thinking "Forget it — I'm going to make a girl". That's when I discovered the breast size slider. Ahh, it was all downhill from there.
"GLAMOR"
It might interest you to know that "glamor" is one of those gray-area loan words in Japanese that has a meaning distinctly similar to its English meaning, though is very often soaked in the connotation of something slightly unrelated. "Glamor" in Japanese can mean just that — fancy dresses and diamond earrings — though if you type "グラマー" into Google Images, you're going to get several photos of large female breasts. Curious!
The term "glamor line", for example, describes a girl with feminine curves and ample bosoms.
Even more curious is that the "glamor" slider exists for creating male characters, as well, though as far as I can tell, it doesn't do anything. I thought maybe it would create some kind of crotch bulge, just to be fair, though it's impossible to tell, seeing as the female and male characters all wear the same clothing (a big ugly potato-sack-esque dress-like peasant tunic).
I will work around the clock to determine what a "glamor" slider setting of 100 means for a male avatar.
Anyway, because the governing rule of the internet goes something like "pics or it didn't happen lol", I have taken photographs. Note the "グラマー" ("glamor") slider at 0, 50, and 100. Hot stuff!
Warning: the following photos might not be safe for work, if you work in a Sunday school. If you work somewhere like where I work, chances are they are very safe for work ("vsfw"). In fact, they might even get you a promotion — or, at the very least, a raise (we call that a double entendre right there).
Either way, if you're at work on the day after Christmas, you probably deserve a look at some very clothed cartoon boobs, seriously.