Seven Knights 2 Mobile Gacha RPG Review
Hi Playmates, how are you? I've been trying out Seven Knights 2 for some time now and wanted to share my thoughts on this beautiful gacha RPG. The review will be strictly based on my experience, so I hope it helps you to see if you want to try this game out!
Seven Knights 2 Grabs Your Attention
One of the most successful aspects of this game is its ability to grab you from the beginning. It's crucial, especially with so many options, that a game can capture your attention from the moment you log in. Cause let's face it, we will eventually grow out of games, whether in a couple of days or several years, but ultimately, even games we love, we'll stop playing. So to incite that first impression is excellent, so you as the player have some incentive to keep playing despite the inevitable boring or mundane parts that will pop up after you spend some time in it.
And that was the case with Seven Knights 2, the opening act, the aesthetics even playing on my phone - and I don't mean just graphic quality. The camera angle movements and the dialog were exciting and intriguing. I never played the original Seven Knights, but it wasn't hard to understand what was going on as a new player with the world in chaos to the power of the destruction stone and pick up bits and pieces from the carryover from the prequel game.
Seven Knights 2 Weak Story
Eventually, playing through the game, I started to pick up on what I think, in general, is a weak point in Korean RPGs: the story. There's nothing WRONG with the story, and the story itself is fast-paced enough for me to be interested in pondering what could have possibly happened in the prequel. Still, the characters are pretty canonical, and the narrative flow is very linear. For example, you can guess what Lene will say, and her lines are... somewhat repetitive, although the voice acting generally is quite good. Adding the dialogs as you travel/walk around is a nice touch. The plentiful amount of pretty cinematic scenes helps make a rather obvious storyline seem more attractive.
Now, if there is some massive twist waiting at the end for the story, that'll be VERY good, and the game would have set itself up great for that if it does happen, so I'll have to keep playing through to see what happens! I secretly think that Phine will be the dark lord incarnate or something like that, but that'll be too obvious if it went down that route.
Seven Knights 2 Gameplay Review
Enough about the story. Let's move on to the gameplay. Now, I usually play on two phones at once to save time and be able to catch up faster on my dailies on the many games I want to try out. Seven Knights 2 is perfect in that sense because of its pretty neat auto-battle system that works well for most of its content. The game is technically a limited open world, open team battle system similar to a few Final Fantasy series. I wouldn't call it an open world - more of different stages that you can explore openly - and because its other game content makes you enter instances. It allows a 4 team setup plus a pet that you can set up with different formations that give various buffs based on the formation.
The auto play is pretty fluid, with the option to customize the auto experience. You set the team leader, and if you place on auto-battle, the team will follow the team and finish each task accordingly.
There is a nice balance between content where you can't auto-play and expect to win unless you are out-leveled or out-geared for the content. For example, some bosses require you to move out of their skill range or use a specific skill to beat if you're just about the necessary level, so you have to manually maneuver (or just be so OP skill doesn't matter anymore).
This is especially true with the Raids and the material dungeons. The raids, material dungeons, and tower gameplay are gated by daily tickets, which is pretty typical.
Another thing that's gated by tickets, as usual, is PvP which is auto-only, which doesn't make any sense to me. There could be some winning strategies for weaker teams to win if maneuvered correctly around the battlefield. Still, it could be that precisely because of the many variations they had to make PVP auto, or it would be a programming nightmare.
I think the most you can do in PVP is pick who you will attack. And that's pretty boring to watch since most of the time, you have the heroes bunched up in the middle, so you don't even know who is doing what. The only way to know is to watch the icons on the top that show who is attacking who.
So basically, it comes down to which hero you have and which equipment you have. The nice thing about this game is that some lower-tier heroes make outstanding team contributions, so you don't have to have all Legendary heroes to have a good gameplay experience.
Seven Knights 2 Gacha System
That ties in with the gacha system, which I have to say are not the best or the worst. This game takes on more of a Princess Connect or Punishing Grey Raven system where you have different tiers of the heroes, and each tier counts as a different hero.
So you have the normal Lene and the Legendary super cool Lene, and they are considered different heroes, although they are the same hero. Every time you pull the duplicate copy of the hero, you get their shards which are used to transcend them, so you can release the level cap and level them higher. The regular Lene shards are not the same as the Legendary Lene shards, so you can't use them interchangeably. It's harder to get the legendary copies, so in the beginning, if you're not spending money, your regular hero version might be better than the legendary version that's stuck at some lower level due to lack of shards.
Because let me tell you, buying summons in the game is not cheap. Not at all. The gacha system exists for pets, equipment, and heroes. So far as I'm playing through, the game is giving a decent amount of gems, and free summon tickets, but like most games, I can see this initial push to get players up is going to dry up, and it'll be expensive to get higher tier heroes. I've done a decent number of pulls and have pitied a Legendary hero, but I'm at the point where I'm trying to gather enough shards to transcend my legendary heroes and see that it'll take some time for me to get it done.
I think what adds a little fuel to the grind is that the equipment enhancement system is also a gacha because the stats are random. Higher tier equipment requires higher enhancement materials, and enhancement can fail. Failure to enhance is not uncommon, but it's hard when the materials for enhancement are not shared across all levels of equipment tier content. It's a very similar concept with pets as well.
Seven Knights 2 Game Content
Whew dived a little bit into a whole of darkness there, so let's jump back up to the sunny side. There is a lot of content you can enjoy in the game, so much so that playing casually, it will take you a couple of weeks to get caught up with everything.
Much of the content comes from the various currency you need in the game, which is used to improve your team. Having different currencies means just that much more customization you can have in leveling up certain aspects of your team formation.
Each story stages have Easy, Normal, Hard, and Very Hard modes introducing a challenge portion and high replay value to the game. It's a massive game - and no, I don't just mean the app size - which is 6GB - but I don't blame it. The game itself has excellent graphic renders and many cut scenes - and has the potential to grow much more as new adventures unlock.
Seven Knights 2 Suggestions for Improvement
If I could suggest anything for the game, I think they need to have better events and possibly add in a better PvP system, and that's coming from me that's not even that big on PVP, to begin with. Adding another gacha system may also help because it's pretty challenging to get legendary hero dupes, and earning shards through the raid will take a long time due to the ticket gate.
All that to say - I am enjoying the experience still, even though I'm just about to go over that initial honeymoon phase. I think it's hilarious because I use Shane, the antagonist of the evil lady of the story, in my group, so it's funny and ironic to have her be on my side fighting her because she's evil and all that, but she's cool. If you're considering playing, I think it's best to go in with the expectation of an eventual grind.
Have you tried Seven Knights? Let me know down in the comments below!
