White Knight Chronicles — best RPG I never heard of?

In the PlayStation store, this RPG had no pictures, no movies, and only a note that the game’s servers had closed down a decade ago. Couldn’t download it, could only stream it, and it wouldn’t allow any screenshots or streaming.

The game loaded up, I made my character, jumped into the game, and realized pretty quickly that the character I made was not the main character of the story — she’s just someone who always just seems to be lurking around in the background. That was… so weird. But the story was good and the combat was interesting and I was getting these constant FFXI/FFXII vibes and I got drawn in. So read on for an RPG that time forgot. Or maybe it was just me.

White Knight Chronicles is two games in one. The main one, the offline one, follows a common wine seller’s assistant as he discovers an ancient armor that he finds he can control. His task is to save a princess and stop a pointless war before it begins, aided by a childhood friend (not the player character), a grumpy old knight, a dancer assassin, and other characters I haven’t yet met. And also the player character, who helped him get some wine from a neighboring village and just never went home afterward. The other characters will never acknowledge the PC’s presence.

The second game, the online one, has been dead for a decade. In this one, you play as your character with up to three other human players. These play out as bits of story that you can buy with ingame currency to improve your guild rank and get ever more dangerous and more rewarding missions. You can still attempt these solo, but you’ll miss those three other characters.

There’s not really classes or jobs in the game. You buy skills based on the weapon that uses them, but anyone can equip any weapon, and certain skills carry over no matter what weapon you are wielding, such as HP and MP boosts. You can slot about twenty of these skills, and even form them into combos that use combinations of AC (ability chips) and MP to perform powerful chained attacks.

You control one character at a time, with the other characters choosing from the abilities you have slotted for them, using the strategy you set (all out attack, defensive, healing focus, etc). You can change characters at any time. I typically set Leonard tanking and then switch to my character, who I’ve built as an archer, to plink away with combos. When I’ve used all the combo points up, I swap back to Leonard. Yulie, who I have made as a nuker/healer, I let alone. I typically don’t use the other characters because I am being obstinate and keeping my character in the party.

When the going gets tough and a giant, dragon, or giant piece of armor steps up, it’s time to go Ultraman and have Leonard summon his White Knight armor. This takes a big chunk of ability chips, so I typically leave the ability using to the other characters so that Leonard always has the White Knight ready to go.

The White Knight has its own abilities and gear. Its abilities work off of MP, and when the MP is exhausted (or the battle ends), Leonard drops back into normal human form.

A lot of people are pretty sore that a wine seller’s assistant has control over this armor, and some of those people have captured the princess that Leonard is chasing. Other people with their own mechs pop up from time to time, and I just smile when that happens because it’s just all my Power Ranger dreams come true.

Each new city typically brings along new armor and weapon upgrades, but both of each drop. Mined and harvested resources can be used to enhance weapons and armor. They can also be used to “bind” older gear and resources together to make unique weapons, although you’ll have to increase your faction with the binders by donating treasure to them in order to get to the good stuff.

The game crashed last night when I accidentally tried to access an online feature and I lost a couple hours progress. That discouraged me so much that I deleted the icon from the home screen (it being a streamed game, there was nothing to delete). In the morning, I loaded up the old save and quickly played to where I crashed because it is just a pretty neat game.

It (and its sequel) only ever came out for the PlayStation 3, and the current generation of PS3 emulators can’t run this well. Right now, streaming it through Sony’s premium pass is the only way to play it at all. If you subscribe to the service, give it a shot. You might like it.

I still smile every time I catch a glimpse of my character just accidentally lurking around in the background. It’s weird, I know.

Pros

• Deeply customizable combat system
• Unique towns and cities
• The whole Ultraman/Power Rangers/Voltron thing it has going on

Cons

• Standard RPG plot
• Player character is not the main character
• Can only play it as a streaming PS3 game on PlayStation Plus Premium

I like it.