Is Blade & Soul 2 Worth Playing in 2022?

I’m gonna be 100% real with you guys here for a moment… I thought, going into Blade & Soul 2, that it was going to suck. Be absolutely trash. And you know what? Okay, so that may have been partially true.
But – and I never thought I’d say this. I legitimately, wholeheartedly never thought I would ever make this claim. But my god, Blade & Soul 2 is gorgeous.
The environments. The character models. The animations. Everything about how this game LOOKS is something else all together.

Now welcome back to another episode of “Is it worth playing” – where we sift through every MMORPG available right now in an attempt to find the best MMORPG in 2021. Today, we’re taking a look at what was arguably supposed to be an absolute pile of stinking garbage: Blade & Soul 2.
Why is it considered as such? Because NCSoft took what was unique about Blade & Soul: Its combat, its unique designs, and.. well everything else, and decided to throw it all out the window.
But just because they’re doing something entirely new with the game doesn’t inherently make it a bad game.

Let me start this off by stating that I’m doing this episode from the perspective of a PC player. Not from the perspective of a Mobile player. I played this on the PC, therefore I am classifying it as a PC MMORPG and subsequently comparing it to other PC MMOs.
I am not going to be holding it to the standards of a game like Honkai Impact or Black Desert Mobile.
With that being said, as a PC game.. this honestly wasn’t bad. At least, not nearly as bad as I had anticipated it being. Quite the contrary.

Blade & Soul 2 is a South Korean MMO that released just a couple months ago. It has no confirmed English version to play, and thus getting the game downloaded and installed via the Purple Platform, NCSoft’s new software that allows players to play all their upcoming games across both PC and Mobile devices, proved to be quite the ordeal.
I think I wasted 4 hours total trying to get this game to work – a game mind you that was 400MB in total. With this in mind, I feel like I should do a guide video on how to get it working on this channel sometime in the next few weeks, if this is well enough received.
After getting the game into a functional state, the game worked almost flawlessly. Sure, it was entirely in Korean, but I feel as though I’ve played enough MMOs to know exactly what does what and where each function is located.
So, with a rudimentary level of understanding of the game, I dove right in.

I instantly realized that there were only 3 races to choose between, and no classes to choose upon selecting my race.
After which I proceeded to create my character, and, admittedly, the options were enough where I feel as though I can make a unique character that I’m satisfied with. Except for the body. There wasn’t much in terms of customization for the body, which was highly disappointing.
I also noticed that the outfits present within the game were.. very different to its predecessor. Blade & Soul is known for its.. over the top levels of perversion. Blade & Soul 2 on the other hand, was much more.. conservative. Very little was shown. Ever. In any of these outfits.
Which really wasn’t an issue for me, but I know will most definitely be for a lot of fans of the.. grotesque monstrosities people made in the original.

Now at its core, Blade & Soul 2 is an MMORPG developed for mobile devices in mind. I’ll admit, this definitely felt exponentially higher quality than the titles I’m used to. Probably because the UI, the textures, everything about the game felt much more oriented towards PC players when played on PC.
But while it felt much more like a PC MMO than any other cross-platform MMO I’ve played thus far, unfortunately the features – auto-combat, auto-routing, auto-play in general were ever present.
And let me stop you there. I know I don’t NEED to utilize those auto-features. I do. But if they’re available, then people will use them. It’s just easier to.
While streaming this to.. about 500 people last week, I asked what people’s thoughts were on auto-play in their games.
Specifically pertaining to auto-play in their PC games, and then auto-play in their Mobile games. The general consensus was that auto-features do NOT belong in PC games, but depending on the type of game, it’s useful in mobile titles.
Again, this is from the perspective of a PC player, so with this in mind… the auto-play features within Blade & Soul 2 – once more, on PC, were highly unnecessary.
Yet in combat – the AI could utilize my abilities much more efficiently than I could. Granted, the AI couldn’t dodge or parry, but I guess that’ll make it much more of a necessity at later levels to be present, especially when engaging boss monsters or doing dungeons and raids.

Blade & Soul 2 offered me more features than I thought it would going into this.
There was a Gacha system present in the game that provides players the opportunity to equip heroes or monsters – enhancing their statistics quite significantly.

Graphically, I feel as though this is perhaps one of, if not the best looking Mobile MMORPG to date. I genuinely do not think there’s a better looking Mobile MMO out there. This is something my viewers continued to point out repeatedly over the course of my stream.
Even more so when we saw a fully CGI cutscene. The attention to detail that NCSoft put into this game is unparalleled. Kudos to them for creating something that looks and feels as high quality as this does.
Furthermore, there were so many unique monsters scattered around the environments. This is something that Blade & Soul suffered from: Regardless of where you went, you’d see the same reused models everywhere.
In Blade & Soul 2, not only were the monsters incredibly high quality, but they were so varied that I felt like I saw more monsters in my 4 hours playing than in all of Blade & Soul.

While I did note earlier that they changed quite a bit of what made Blade & Soul unique, there were some instances where I felt a connection between games. The water walking, gliding through the air. Even sprinting animations.
While so much of the game had changed, there was enough that remained the same that it still.. kinda felt like Blade & Soul? Just a little bit? I don’t really know how to explain it.

The narrative was also very present, and while I couldn’t understand anything going on, I could tell there was effort put into telling a unique story as well. This is one of the areas Blade & Soul really excelled, and it’s refreshing to see a strong focus on it here as well.

✔️ Blade & Soul 2 is an absolutely gorgeous MMORPG, even when compared to other PC-exclusive MMOs.

✔️ The world felt large and filled with unique, varied enemies to engage.

✔️ There were plenty of things to do while out questing.

✔️ The narrative felt engaging and the cutscenes present were stunning.

✔️ Animations were fluid, and the game, somehow, ended up not feeling like a mobile MMO.

❎ Yet while it didn’t necessarily FEEL like a mobile MMO, the number of features that were 100% mobile repeatedly reminded me that it was.

❎ The combat was mostly auto – with the exception of dodging, the AI utilized my abilities more efficiently than I could.

❎ Auto-routing isn’t a terrible feature, but the game auto-played for me so often that I’d occasionally forget I could move my character on my own.

❎ The Gacha system is severely pay to win, with the heroes you could equip providing substantial improvements over your character than their more common alternatives.

❎ The game is unfortunately only available in Korean right now, with no confirmed release date for Western players.

❎ And finally.. NCSoft is known to be a pretty crappy developer AND publisher.

Ultimately, Blade & Soul 2 ended up being a better, higher quality title than I had originally given it credit for.
Is it a bad Mobile MMO? Not at all. I’d say this is one of the better Mobile MMORPGs currently available. Is it a bad PC MMO? Once again, that’s a negative. It’s not a great PC MMORPG, but it’s far from being as bad as some of the garbage I’ve played in the past.
Would I play this in my spare time? Probably not. Too many auto-features for me and I hate Gacha in my games. Would I recommend it as a successor to Blade & Soul? Ehhh.. no. As a standalone title? Sure, but as a direct sequel? No.