White Knight Chronicles 2 (henceforth WKC2) is the direct sequel to, you guessed it, White Knight Chronicles. Leonard is still the protagonist, toting around the chipper Yulie, dour Elric, and the ever-silent player-created avatar in a quest to save the world yet again. While the game has received some polish from its predecessor, it’s just that: a polish. The graphics look nicer, the battle system is a tad smoother, but WKC2 is largely a game for fans of the first game and as such doesn’t make any huge changes. And there’s nothing really wrong with that. Just be advised that if you didn’t like the first game, you won’t like the sequel, but on the other side of the coin, if you loved the first game, chances are you’ll like the sequel just as much.
A mixed blessing of WKC2 is that you start off the game at level 35. Players who completed WKC can even import their characters directly overt to WKC2, which is a nice touch. As WKC is included on the WKC2 Blu-ray, everyone conceivably has this opportunity. For those of us (*raises a guilty hand*) that did not complete the first game, you can create a brand new character at level 35. You start off the game in an airship with a special interactable object where you can completely reset your party members’ skills. So I, for example, immediately got rid of the default sword skills they slapped my avatar with and picked up a bunch of the healing/support skills as well as a little staff combat action.
Now, I say that starting off at level 35 is a mixed blessing because even though it feels pretty awesome that you’re starting off the game with all these awesome skills (that I never even got to in WKC), there’s absolutely no explanation on how to play the game. There’s a help menu that provides brief explanations of the basics, but there’s essentially no introduction to the gameplay at all. It is obviously expected that you played the heck out of WKC and you’re ready to continue right where you left off. For WKC vets, it’s probably a relief that you don’t have to sit through the game babying you through stuff you well know how to do, but for those of us who played less than a dozen hours of the first game about a year and a half ago, it can lead to a puzzling hour or two of re-remembering how to play the gosh-darn game.
The good parts of WKC certainly carry over into WKC2. For example, the character customization is still pretty extensive, and the unique combat system is still the same. Similarly, however, the not-so-great parts carry over as well. The combat menu is still unwieldy to the point of being not fun at a times and there’s still often a frustrating lack of guidance. And the co-op is pretty much exactly the same (which means, slightly underwhelming). Which brings us to the co-op.
As I said, WKC2 is a continuation of WKC, and this carries over to the online co-op quests as well. One unlocks most quests through a confusing Guild Rank (GR) system where players must earn points through the primarily single-player-based errands and bounties system. Upon earning enough points, players then level up to the next rank. Upon getting certain ranks, players can then unlock the online quests which require that GR. The quests for WKC2 require at least GR16, so newly-created WKC2 characters will have lots of grinding to look forward to before they can get to the 6-player co-op. Fortunately, WKC quests are also available in WKC2, so you will have the opportunity to grab some of these quests before GR16. These are only up to 4-player co-op, however, and while higher levels of difficulty are available for the lowest level quests (unlocked by the required GR, of course), it feels a little disappointing to jump into a new game and be confined to the first game’s online quests.
On the bright side, if you can find an open city (the quests are hosted through player city interfaces) where a player is setting up a quest AND that quest has an open spot, it appears that for many quests you can jump on it even if you don’t have either the quest itself unlocked or the corresponding GR. Unfortunately, though, that’s a lot of conditions that rarely line up. And god help you if you want to try to get two people in on a quest together who don’t have any quests unlocked. While playing WKC with other people is certainly a nice change of pace from playing the single-player, the quests are often very simple in structure (collect things, talk to people, kill X number of enemies, kill Y boss, etc.). That combined with the forced grinding in order to have a reliable way to play with friends makes me feel that players who like this kind of online system may be better off looking somewhere else (read: any MMO). It really confounds me why a developer would want to make it so much of a headache for friends to play a game together. Why should co-op be the reward for sinking hours upon hours into the single-player portion? The co-op in WKC2 is certainly a supplement and nothing more, which is very disappointing (especially since, as a sequel, one might have hoped they would have taken the opportunity to improve).
I certainly wanted to like WKC2, but between the mechanic frustrations in single-player and frustrations of even getting into the co-op mode, I ended up, well, frustrated. As I said before, if you really dug the first game, WKC2 will probably be right up your lane. WKC2 was certainly made for fans who completed WKC and will likely provide those types of people with up to hundreds of hours of content. More casual players, or players who just want to jump right into WKC2, will find less to enjoy here. Between lack of explanation and locked content which pretty much involves grinding to get to, WKC2 certainly does a disservice to this type of player.