Part 62: The Arc Knight (Part 2)

Okay, so let’s get into the specifics of the Arc Knight then.


The first thing you notice immediately after you get done talking to Framboise is that if you head into the Combat Setup menu, the Avatar now has a filled in “Equip Incorruptus” option on their submenu options.

The thing about the Arc Knight is that it’s entirely optional, so a lot of people never even bothered to claim it. And why would you, honestly? Would you want to put yourself through that kind of bullshit for something so hobbled by Level-5’s poorly thought-out gameplay design?


So this is the default Arc Knight you get access to right from the outset. This is all the majority of players who obtained it saw of the Arc Knight.

As you can see it’s very sparse and generic, lacking personality and looking nothing at all like the Arc Knight we just saw in the actual chapter itself. So do we get from there to here?

Well, if you were playing legit, it would probably take you a solid five months to grind everything you need to make my Arc Knight. We’re going to do all that in five minutes.


So now that we have the Arc Knight, the Incorruptus Weapon and Armour tabs open up in the Incorruptus Workshop.

Here you can see the only weapons we have available to bind at this point in the game are the Steel Sword, a generic version of Whitesteel which the Arc Knight can equip, a generic version of the Draagon Knight’s Larvaint spear, and the base hammer weapon for the Knight, the Steel Hammer.

You also have available (if you downloaded them) the free DLC versions of the four male Knight weapons: a generic version of Talion called the “Saintblade”, a generic version of a weapon we haven’t seen yet for the Dragon Knight (the Lagus-Guine) called the “Dragonfang,” and generic versions of the Black Knight and Sun King’s Darkblade and Lawblade weapons, and a generic version of Argent Shield called the Wizel Sheild.


On this tab are the various Knight armour pieces you can bind. You might recall last time that this entire page was blurred. Well, the time has arrived for it to be unblurred.

Ordinarily all you’d have access to before you’d cleared Redhorn Isle would be the three tiers of the story Knights’ Relic Arts armour sets. However, paid DLC Knight armour sets are available to bind immediately after you get the Arc Knight.


These DLC pieces are cosmetically altered copies of the in-game Knight armour that have the audacity to be billed on the PSN Store as being “cheaper” to build than their in-game alternatives. And I will at least technically give them that: the materials needed to bind each of these pieces are both easier to come by and less quantitative than their in-game counterparts, though that just means you’ll only be farming materials for hours instead of days.

DLC Knight armour sets are $1 per set, and you can see the game’s full DLC catalogue here.

Knight armour sets are broken down into five separate parts, they are, in descending order: helmet, armour, fists, tassets and greaves. Each piece of the armour must be bound separately, and each piece has its own usually unique material requirements. Which again need to be farmed judiciously to get anywhere close to binding them.

You’re starting to see why I caveated this chapter “Some Assembly Required,” now, aren’t you?

People have spent more time farming materials for the Arc Knight than they have clearing the plot of the game. Just google “White Knight Chronicles, 1000 hours,” and weep.

There’s a reason the Arc Knight is listed prominently on TV Tropes’ “Bonus Feature Failure” page, given how much Level-5 hyped up that you would get YOUR OWN FULLY CUSTOMIZABLE KNIGHT in the game. …Only to get it two hours out from the endgame, after a terrible plodding stretch of the game where it would have REALLY come in handy to have it, and then once you get it everything single selling point about it turned out to be locked away under a maze of nigh-insurmountable restrictions and requirements.

Because let’s never forget for an instant that Level-5 hates you, and by extension, the Avatar.


…Moving on.

On the Incorruptus Workshop, the two tabs sandwiching “Enhance Core Unit” are now filled in: Colour Incorruptus and Edit Incorruptus Name.


I’ve already gone over the Enhance Core Unit tab. It gives you more AP (Artifact Points) with which to equip more and better equipment on your Knights.


The only difference between the Arc Knight and the story Knights is that the Arc Knight’s Core Level goes all the way up to 12 giving you a total of 60 spendable AP, whereas Leonard, Caesar, and Yulie’s Knights top out at Core Level 5.

The Arc Knight gets more AP because it has more items you can equip on it than the other Knights do. It also has the potential to become the strongest of all the Knights if you pour enough time and effort into it.

But why would you EVER do anything as insane as that?


Let’s take a look at the Colour Incorruptus tab. Also, please forgive the Canadian spelling. I just don’t have it in me to spell colour without a U in it.


So you can see here that there are four colours: Main Colour, Sub-Colour A, Sub-Colour B, and Sub-Colour C, as well as a fifth option for the Knight’s finish as well.

The Main Colour is kind of obvious as to what it pertains to. Sub-Colour A is usually shoulder/knee armour accent colours. You usually want to colour these ones a darker shade of your main colour.

Sub-Colour B are minor body accents.

And Sub-Colour C are the armour highlights.

You also might have noticed something odd with the Arc Knight’s internal colouring, the green lines and gem in the Knight’s abdomen. In that, well, they’re green. The story Arc Knight’s internal colouring was orange. What’s up with that?

And the answer to that once again is “CHEATING! ”

I don’t know if it was intended to be a feature at one point and was cut or if it’s a weird programming quirk, but the internal colour of the Arc Knight can be altered, you just need a Game Genie or similar program to do it. In this case, there’s a specific PS3 Game Genie cheat that lets you alter the colour to anything you want by inputting that colour's hexadecimal representation into a certain line of the code.

In this case, I chose orange because it’s a better contrast for the Knight’s green colour scheme than just more green.


Finish is what type of material you want to the Arc Knight to be made out of. It just changes the shininess of the Knight. There are five choices: Matte, Ceramic, Glass, Steel, Metallic, and Blasted.

Matte is flat with no shine to it at all. Ceramic is slightly shiny and gives the Knight that whole wavy energy wash pattern to it. Glass is the one that most closely mimics the finish of the story Knights. Steel and Metallic turn the Knight bright and shiny like polished metal, and Blasted is pretty much like Matte on steroids.

At the outset, you only have Matte and Ceramic available. To unlock the other three finish types, you need to clear the post-game dungeon Vellgander. And how difficult was Vellgander to clear even when GeoNet was online? Hahaaaaholy fuck.

Level-5 hates you.


How much does Level-5 hate you? Well, you can see this lovely expansive colour pallet here of all the colours you can paint your Knight? Guess what? In an actual unmodded game, only the four green swatches in the upper right portion of the grid are available to you from the start.

But that’s not all…

Each of these colour swatches has to be bound at a Binding Post. Once again, you need to farm materials like a madman to create the colours you desire. Each individual colour is its own separate bindable item.

And on top of that, each colour swatch is a consumable item, so if you use it to colour your Knight, you’d better be committed to that colour, because you’d have to farm and bind even more items to get the colour back to where it originally was if you fuck it up.

The colours in the bottom two rows and the right half of the bottom third row are an even worse case of patented Level-5 dickery. These five colour sets are meant to mimic the five story Knights’ colours. To bind them, you need to first clear a certain section of Vellgander (of which there are 11 separate levels), and defeat the end boss of that level, an enemy version of each story Knight, one per level in order to get a “code” item requisite to bind each colour swatch. Vellgander in single player takes an hour per level to clear, on average… if you’re lucky. And you only get one code per time you clear each boss, if even because it’s considered a rare drop, so it has a less than 10% chance of it showing up in the post-level loot. Each colour requires AT LEAST one code to bind. There are 20 colours. Do the math.

Level-5 hates you.

It got so bad that there were whole lobbies online dedicated to “code hunts” wherein people would band together to clear certain sections of Vellgander over and over again just on the off chance that maybe one of them would get a Wizel/Larvayne/Luthia/Dinivas/Adolmaea Code.

It was depressing to see in action.


But here’s what it looks like when you hack the shit out of the game and break the demonic hold it has over your life. Boom, you can freely pick whatever colour you want to colour your Knight as, like you should have been able to had Level-5 not been run by incompetent dickheads.


Some colours work better than others, though there are a lot of colours that just look like shit together.


You can also see a little arrow there on the right side of the grid. If you tap the R1 shoulder button it takes you to a second smaller grid reserved for DLC Knight colours, which are slightly bolder and more standard colours. The only upside to this is that is that these colour swatches are downloaded as full sets, and are unlimited use non-consumable items.

The downside of course is that each pallet is $1 and there are like ten of them in total, each sold separately.


Oh yeah, it also costs you money to change your Knight’s colours. Because “fuck you”, love Level-5.

It costs 5,000G per colour (finishes mercifully are free). So if you completely altered the Knight’s colour scheme, that’s 20,000G out of your pocket.


You’re essentially seeing more combinations of Arc Knight features than over 80% of the people who ever played White Knight Chronicles II did.

..Wait. What the hell is that?

Cisna: GODSDAMMIT, FRAMBOISE! What part of TOP SECRET do you not fucking get?!


So now we’re going to explore each individual set of Knight armour that in theory are available for you to bind and equip on the Arc Knight.

This set is technically three sets. The Rex, Regina and default armour sets. All three have the same look, the only difference is the helmet on the default set. The Ark Incorruptus we fought to get the Arc Knight sported the Rex armour set.

The DLC variant of this armour set is called the Spina set.


Here’s the default armour set. This is how the Arc Knight looks when you strip everything off it. You can see the helmet looks more like a traditional medieval knight’s helmet.


This set is the Elder set. It has higher magical stats than the Rex/Regina/Spina/Default set. This comes in handy for Knight weapons that have built in spells on their move sets.

The Elder set is also the only armour set you can acquire for free. Each of the rifts that appear around the world has a piece of the armour hidden in a chest on the centre platform where we fought the Ark Incorruptus. The other rifts hold the three Elder weapons, the Elder Sword, Elder Spear, and Elder Hammer, which are visually identical stat swaps of the Steel Sword/Spear/Hammer weapons.

It also has a clone set called the Altar set.

The DLC variant of the Elder set is the Cucullus set.


The next set is the Gallia armour set. It’s a beefed up version of the default armour set. It has a stat-swapped clone armour set called the Gallius set.

The DLC version of this set is the Elementum set.


This set is the Draco/Drega set. It’s another one of those “two sets, one model” armour sets.

The DLC version of this one is the Fulguris set. The LP Arc Knight uses the Fulguris Armour chest piece on its build.


This set is the Imperator set, another beefed up version of the Rex/Regina/Default armour set.

As you can see most armour sets have one “simple” armour type and one “batshit crazy anime” armour type with wild accoutrements out the ass to it.

The DLC version of this armour is the Acutus set.


This set is the Arcana set, the beefed up version of the Elder set. It’s the ultimate spear/magic attack-based armour set.

The DLC version of this armour is the Velmun set. The LP Arc Knight sports the Velmun helm.


This set is the Zexen set, the ultimate sword armour and is a beefed up version of the Gallia armour set.

The DLC version of this armour is the Cornutus set.


This set here is the Draga set, a beefed up version of the Draco/Drega set (you can see how confusing this gets sometimes), and is the ultimate hammer Knight armour set.

The DLC version of this armour is the Antiquus armour set. The LP Arc Knight sports the Antiquus Fists, Tassets, and Greaves on its built.


These next four armours aren’t available to players regularly. They’re a set of free on-disc DLC pieces that are available in Japan, but were never localized by D3, who just threw up their hands and said “fuck it, we’re out” after taking a bath on localizing the game once they got the 1.01 patch out the door.

This set is the Angela armour set, one of two explicitly feminine armour sets for the Arc Knight. So technically, if D3 had bothered to push the button and released the free DLC for it, you could very well have a female Knight for a male Avatar if you wanted to.

As it stands, however, the Angela set and the other three DLC sets are only accessible through a Game Genie or other such program. You need to trick the game into converting a Relic Arts item into each piece of the armour. So with four armour sets comprised of five pieces each, you’d need to buy 20 Relic Arts to get all four complete sets.

Just like with the other Arc Knight armours, the Angela set also has a paid DLC variant, though its available only in Japan. There’s no readily available translation of its name, and Google Translate refers it as the Jiburito set, and I have no idea what exactly that would romanize out to, which is weird because its written in Katakana too. The unreleased English version of the DLC set is called the Aquila set.


This set is the Gouten armour set. It’s modeled after old feudal samurai armour, because Japan.

It’s also the only set of Knight armour that has a fur lining around its collar like the White Knight has.

The DLC version of this armour is referred to as the Kongou set in the Japanese version and the Adamas set in the unreleased English version.

The Gouten armor is the game’s way of salvaging the dummied out God of War Knight. The God of War, you’ll recall, would have been the game’s seventh Incorruptus after the Arc Knight and would have been used by Scardigne, the actual male Prototype Scardigne, or, failing that by Kara post-resurrection. But it was cut from the game because, Level-5, that’s why. Leaving cool ideas behind in the dust in favor of shit is their specialty.


This set is the Khshathra set. It’s a more bestial version of the Gallia set.

The DLC version of this armour is called the Saruvua set in the Japanese version, and the Divinus set in the unreleased English version.

One of the Knights glimpsed in the Avatar Story uses the Khshathra armour set.


And lastly, this is the Armato set. This is the second feminine armour set for the Arc Knight, as you can tell by its cleavage right there in the middle of its chest. It also has the best helmet of all the Knight sets, in my opinion. You can also spot elements of the Rex/Regina/Default armour sets in there.

The DLC version of this set is called the Toramato set in the Japanese version and the Solaris set in the unreleased English version.

Another Knight glimpse in the Avatar Story uses the Armato set as well.

And that’s it for Knight armour sets, so now let’s at a look at the various weapons for each Knight, like I’ve been promising to do forever now.


Because this update is all about the Arc Knight, let’s start with its hammer options.

First up in the base weapon for the hammer line, the Steel Hammer. This is also the Elder Hammer too. The Steel Hammer can be bound in the Incorruptus Workshop as soon as you get the Arc Knight, while the Elder Hammer is found in one of the rifts out there.

Each weapon needs to be bound at the Incorruptus Workshop. Once again, these weapons are locked down by Guild Rank level and material availability. Each new weapon upgrade cannibalizes the current weapon, so you can’t really afford to be married to each weapon because you’re just going to end up sacrificing it to move forward and getting the parts to replace it is nigh impossible.

The key components for Knight weapon binding are called Ark Drives, and there are six in total, Type S for spears, Type H for hammers, and Type B for swords (and their second tier equivalents, S2, H2, and B2’s). These can only be farmed from Ark Incorrupti found in rifts, or, in the case of the second tier variants, from quests either as drops from defeating an Incorruptus or as end-of-quest loot.

And guess what their drop percentage is according to the White Knight Chronicles wiki? 1%. Holy fuck, mate. I mentioned this earlier in the LP, but Level-5 drop rates were so stingy for this game that they actually sold DLC tickets that would boost rare item drop rates by a couple of percentage points for a period of 30 days.

Thanks, Level-5. You’re helping.

Just goes to show you that there might not have been any game design geniuses in Level-5’s offices at the time of White Knight Chronicles’s development, but there sure was some on-point shitfuck economics major on staff, because they found a way to actually monetize their shitty gameplay features post-facto.


This is the Crimson Hammer, a pallet swap of the Steel/Elder Hammer and the beginning point for the first of the two hammer development lines.


This is the Gigantic Hammer, the weapon of choice for the LP Arc Knight and the starting point of the second hammer evolution line.


This is the Grand Hammer, it’s bound from the Gigantic Hammer.


This is the Ber’Glaga, which is bound from the Crimson Hammer.


This is the Granliga, which is bound from the Grand Hammer.


This is the Geoflare, which is bound from the Ber’Glaga. It’s a pallet swap of the Gigantic Hammer.


This is the Drega, a big fuck off rectangular cube on a stick. It’s bound from the Granliga.


This is the Galiana, a massive mace weapon. It’s bound from the Geoflare and is the ultimate weapon of the Crimson Hammer line.


And this is the Albaran, the ultimate weapon of the Gigantic Hammer line. It’s bound from the Drega.


Now let’s move on to swords, modeled here by the rarely seen title entity of White Knight Chronicles, the White Knight.

First up is Whitesteel, the White Knight’s default weapon. This is the weapon it comes equipped with when you first obtain it at the start of the first game. It’s automatically replaced with Talion at Thaumus Rock.

Because it’s a plot weapon, only the White Knight can equip it. Sorry Orren.


Next up is the Sword of Malice, another White Knight-only weapon. This is the lone discoverable weapon for the White Knight in the game. It’s down in Greede’s Underbelly in a chest somewhere.

Just like Whitesteel it cannot be equipped by the Arc Knight.


Next up is Not-Really-Knight-Slaying-Sword #1, Talion. You get Talion automatically at the Thaumus Rock event near the end of the first game.

Talion also cannot be equipped by the Arc Knight, however, there is a free DLC clone of it available called the Saintblade which CAN be wielded by the Arc Knight if you choose so.


And then there’s Not-Really-Knight-Slaying-Sword #2, Falcyos. AKA the fastest-dropped plot point ever.

Once again, it can’t be wielded by the Arc Knight and there is no clone of it available so it’s a White Knight-only dealio.


This here is the Steel/Elder Sword. It’s a pallet swap of Whitesteel. Just like the Steel/Elder Hammers, the Steel Sword comes equipped on the Arc Knight by default and is also bindable right out of the gate once you get it, while the Elder Sword can be found in a chest inside a rift.

All the swords from here on out can be equipped by both the Arc and White Knights.


First up is the Valdart sword, the starting point for the first sword binding line. It’s a pallet swap clone of the Sword of Malice.


This sword is the Ignition Sword, the start of the second sword binding line.


This is the Astral Sword, bound from the Valdart Sword.


This is the Lombard, bound from the Ignition Sword. As you can see, it looks similar to the hammer Ber'Glaga. Each of the three weapon types has one of these spikey steel weapons in it.


This one is Obelius, bound from the Astral Sword.


This is the Argarach, a katana-looking sword, because, again, Japan, which is bound from the Lombard. This one was pretty much tailor made to be wielded with the Gouten armour, so of course we get the sword but not the armour that goes with it.


This is the Eberlehen, aka the banana sword. It’s bound from Obelius.


This sword is Granhades, and with a name like that you know that Level-5 has officially given the fuck up. This is the ultimate sword of the Ignition Sword line. Though it looks more cudgel than sword, honestly.


And then we have the Arkadia, which tells me someone at Level-5 is a Captain Harlock fan. It is the ultimate weapon of the Valdart line, and shares a similar appearance to the Albaran hammer.



And now we get into DLC weapons. First up is the Black Knight’s Darkblade, modelled here by a special guest appearance from the Black Knight.

See, you can buy DLC versions of the White, Dragon and Black Knight’s armours, as well as the Sun King’s too, allowing you to essentially recreate the four male Knights with the Arc Knight. The only one that’s really worth it is the Black Knight’s DLC because it’s the only one of the four that’s actually intact.

The White Knight DLC doesn’t have Wizel’s cape, the Dragon Knight doesn’t have Larvayne’s wings, and the Sun King doesn’t have Adolmaea’s tassels or that big fuck off back piece/cape either. Only the Black Knight looks identical to its in-game counterpart.

The more you know…


And we also have the Sun King’s Lawblade, modelled by the gimped excuse for a Sun King that is the Adolmaea DLC armour. However, it doesn’t play as the Sun King does with it, even though it’s a dual-bladed model. The White/Arc Knight just swings it like a normal sword and never splits it in two or anything because that would require creative coding on Level-5’s part and we don’t have enough money left in the budget to push the button any more.


And now we move on to shields. Shields are equipable by both the White Knight and Arc Knight. Throughout the previous series of images, the White Knight was modeling the Argent Shield, which you get a the Sand Maze Ruins… Where Princess Cisna gets re-kidnapped and Lena gets murdered through inaction and Leonard’s incompetence as a character unfurls in full detail for the player for the first real time in the game.

A generic free DLC version of the Argent Shield called Wizel Shield can be bound and wielded by either the Arc Knight or the White Knight, but the Argent Shield itself is a White Knight-only item.

This red shield which looks like an Argent Shield knock off is the Elder Aegis, and it too is finable in a chest in a rift somewhere out there, after which it becomes bindable in the Incorruptus Workshop.


This is the Sacred Guard. From here, each shield is bindable from the shield that proceeds it in a liner path up to the ultimate shield.


This is the Radiant Guard.


This is the Terror Shield.


This is the Regalia Shield.


And finally, this is the Astral Shield, the ultimate bindable shield.


And now we transition to the shortest section of Knight weapons, the bows for the Moon Maiden. Like I said earlier, the Moon Maiden is the only Knight that can equip a bow and arrow weapon and there are only two of them because you get the Moon Maiden so late in the duology and Level-5 just didn’t give a shit about adding a fourth class of Knight weaponry to the Arc Knight’s arsenal.

First up is the El’Liet, the Moon Maiden’s default weapon. You get this one when you get the Moon Maiden herself in the Van Haven Waste.


The second and final bow for the Moon Maiden is the Arslese. The Arslese is found in a chest on Redhorn Isle, so we’re technically looking into the future by seeing this bow right now.

Arslese has a single stabbing attack and four elemental magic attacks, one for each element. It’s probably the most magically-inclined Knight weapon of the bunch.


And now we’re going to move on to the final stretch of this post, spears. We’re going to start off with the Dragon Knight’s default weapon, Larvaint. This spear is equipped by default when you first get the Dragon Knight and is a Dragon Knight-exclusive weapon.


Next up is the Fiendslayer, the spear found in Van Haven’s Navel in the Van Haven Waste near the end of game two, or during the Moon Maiden quest in the sequel.

It’s also a Dragon Knight-exclusive weapon.


This spear is the Lagus-Guine. It’s the best story-mode spear for the Dragon Knight, and just like Arslese it’s also found on Redhorn Isle, so we’re getting another peek into the future here.

While the Lagus-Guine is a Dragon Knight-exclusive spear, it does have a DLC clone weapon called the Dragonfang which the Arc Knight is able to equip.


This spear is the Steel Spear/Elder Spear. It’s a generic clone of Larvaint equipable by both the Dragon and Arc Knights. The Steel Spear is bindable from when you get the Arc Knight on, while the Elder Spear is found in a chest in a rift.


And now we begin the final round of bindable Knight weaponry. This is the Grand Spear, a pallet swap of the Fiendslayer and the start of the first spear line.


This is the Ignition Spear, the start of the second spear line and a pallet swap of the plot weapon Wyrmbuke, which we saw in Chapter VII.


This is the Valeuse Spear, another very Japanese looking weapon which would also go well with the Gouten armour set. It is bound from the Grand Spear.


This is the Valdart Spear, no relation to the Valdart Sword, mind you. It’s the third and final member of the “spikey steel weapon” trio of Knight weapons. It is bound from the Ignition spear.


This is Yrgane, bound from the Valeuse Spear. This spear is wielded by one of the Knights that appears in the Avatar Story DLC.


This is Lakshana, and is bound from the Valdart Spear.


This is the Ishtaris, and is bound from Yrgane. It’s the second of the two Wyrmbuke pallet swaps that we can make in the game.


This is Albarase, a pallet swap of Lagus-Guine/Dragonfang, and is the ultimate weapon of the Ignition Spear line.


And lastly this is Aelyxied, bearing a strong resemblance to Arkadia and Albaran, it is the ultimate weapon of the Grand Spear line.

That's all the parts and pieces you have to work with, but one question remains, however...

What does it take to actually MAKE the LP Arc Knight?

Well, come with me as I walk you down the garden path that is the insane Arc Knight-related post-game binding requirements. Here you will learn the various soul-destroying ways the game expects you to work your ass off binding just these nine items to obtain the LP Arc Knight: Arcana Helm, Draco Armour, Draga Fists, Draga Tassets, Draga Greaves, Gigantic Hammer, one Leaf (Duo) colour swatch, one Brass (Duo) colour swatch, and the Glass finish type. A similar path can easily be extrapolated for any other potential Arc Knight configuration beyond the base Knight you're handed at the end of the Knight Moves side quests, so this little "trip report" can be taken as a universal experience, if necessary.

Let’s begin with the biggest, most ubiquitous and hardest-to-clear obstacle standing in your way: Guild Rank level. Every fucking thing in this game is locked down by GR, as it’s known in shorthand: what you bind, what you can buy, what quests you can do, how much you can build your GeoRama up, even eventually how far you can level up.

The highest GR-locked item we have to bind is the Brass (Duo) colour for the armour highlights on the Arc Knight. (Here’s a link to the WCK Wiki on Knight Colours that backs up what I’m ranting about, by the way) The Brass colour pallet is locked away behind the GR 26 lock. That means you need to grind you Guild Rank level all the way up to level 26 before you can use this colour swatch on your Knight.

So, how long does that take? Well, let’s consult the Guild Rank point requirement table. As was pointed out earlier in the thread, all point totals are non-cumulative. Ergo, when you see that the GR 26 threshold is 6 million points, and the GR 25 threshold behind it is 5 million points, that does not mean you only need to grind 1 million points to get to the next level—no, that means you need to grind another 6 million points because the counter resets to zero when you clear each GR level.

That means then that to get all the way up to GR 26, you will need to earn a grand cumulative total of 31,426,000 GR points. That is thirty-one million four hundred twenty-six thousand points even, if you wanted it expressed in word format. For an average time-per-points breakdown to see how long it would take to grind away all those points in single player (because GeoNet is now offline), we need to look at the game’s go-to GR grinding quest Demithor In Peril.

Demithor in Peril has you running around Greede’s Underbelly killing Gigases. It’s unlocked at GR 14, and takes anywhere between 30 to 15 minutes to complete depending on your level, which if you’re playing even as far into the game as we are now is still trending around the 20 minute mark because Online Quests are fucking HARD.

DIP, as it’s known for short gives you on average about 30,000 GR points. So who knows how you grinded your way up to GR 14, that still leaves you with 30,700,000 points to grind off to get to GR 26. If you were going to do nothing but re-run Demithor In Peril over and over again until you did so, you would need to do it approximately 1023 times to earn the requisite number of GR points needed to get to GR 26 and be able to bind and equip everything for the LP Arc Knight. And at 20 minutes per run, that averages out to a total runtime of 20,406 minutes or 341 hours (or 14 fucking days straight of non-stop playing White Knight Chronicles II—just five and a half days short of the total running time of the entire unabridged Wheel of Time series audiobook playlist, for the curious).

But, I digress. We’re just getting started.

So let’s say you’ve managed to get your Guild Rank up all the way to Level 26, good for you, you poor broken bastard. Now, let’s go farming the items needed to bind each part for the Arc Knight.

Let’s start with our paint choices. We need a Leaf (Duo), and a Brass (Duo) to get the look of my Arc Knight down. We don’t need to worry about the other two colours because the Arc Knight comes with them naturally equipped when you first get it, so there’s no need to waste any time or effort changing them. Colour swatches are bound at a Binding Post under the Materials Tab.

You can see the entire colour spectrum of Knight Colours here, as well as their material requirements. This should also make choosing colours for the DESIGN A KNIGHT CONTEST a little easier, and I’m kind of kicking myself for not linking it earlier.

Now, a Leaf (Duo) is not locked down by GR—thank god—and requires 1 Ignis Wyvern Eye, 2 Wyvern Hearts, and one Toad Oil Drop. So how do we get those?

The Toad Oil Drop is the easiest to obtain. It’s purchased in the Adventurer’s Guild Dahlia Exchange for 30D. Not that big of a problem, since by the time you make it to GR 26, you’ll be swimming in Dahlia like you’re Scrooge McDuck anyway. According to the WKC forums, you earn on average 1 Dahlia for every 10,000 GR points you earn from completing a quest, meaning you’ll be sitting at around 3 million-some Dahlia by the time you’re finished auto-piloting your way through two straight weeks of Demithor in Peril.

According to the WKC wiki, the both the Ignis Wyvern Eye and Wyvern Heart can be farmed from a tier-3 Ignis Wyvern, which means nothing to you, but to me it means that this fucker only turns up in certain quests, and will never appear out in the wild. They only appear in the quests Dragon the Line and Feeding Time. And what are the drop rates for these particular items? Well, the Heart is more common with a 5% drop rate, while the Eye is the least common drop and only has a 2% chance of showing up as loot. Meaning that the Random Number Generator is about to replace your chosen deity as the higher power you pray to most often these days.

So already you’re looking at dismal odds of trying to get even one item of MANY items already just to bind a fucking BASIC COLOUR ITEM!

Look at me with a straight face and try to tell me that this is a good game. I fucking dare you to.

But let’s move on from that, shall we.

Getting the Brass (Duo) colour requires an Aged Demon-god Eye, 2 Aged Demon-god Hearts, and a Toad Oil+ Drop.

Once again, the Toad Oil+ Drop is technically the easiest to obtain, being purchasable for 180D at an Adventurer’s Guild Dahlia Exchange.

The Aged Demon-god bits are obtained from a tier-4 Lamia Comitis, aka the big green dragon-like Gigas that Fake-Cisna turned into at Thaumus Rock. These things only show up in the 8th and 10th sections of Vellgander (on the upper levels of each sections), or in the quests Rival Survival II, and Ruins: Free Monster Quest. The Eye and Heart have a 1% and 2% drop rate, respectively.

And, of course, I’d be remiss to point out that it is very rare that you get more than one item per giant enemy felled, so you’ll probably have to go back and kill numerous Lamia Comitises and Ignis Wyverns and other like enemies until you get the items you need. Items with single-digit drop rates… Pack a lunch. You’re going to be at this a while.

But okay then, let’s say you’ve got the colours you need and your Arc Knight now shares the colour scheme mine does. Well, now we need to get the right finish for it. The LP Arc Knight uses (or will use eventually once I get it myself for this save file) the Glass finish, which is the same finish the three party Knights also use.

To get the Glass finish, you need to clear the first 6 sections of the post-game dungeon Vellgander. And how hard is Vellgander to clear in single player? Even with the best equipment and a maxed out party, clearing even the third second of Vellgander is nigh on impossible because the dungeon is scaled to a party of six such human players, not one human and two paste-eating AI doorknobs. Rest assured, when I tackle Vellgander in the Post-Script, it’s going to be with a party artificially scaled beyond the game’s limits to give me even a fighting chance of making it up to the dungeon Apex.

Hyperkin should be paying me residuals, because from here on out this LP is about to become one giant advertisement for the PS3 Game Genie.

But that’s neither here nor there, so let’s move on even further into the mire.

So, we’ve got our Arc Knight painted, our chosen finish in place, and our Guild Rank up to the level where we can actually equip everything we bind for it now. Let’s start by binding armour parts.

We’ll go from the top down, with the Arcana Helm. The helmet requires you to be GR 21 to equip it, and needs 10 Black Stone Halves, 1 Ark Type S2, and 1 Demon-god Eye. It also costs 2000G to bind.

Again, Black Stone Halves and the Ark Type S2 can be farmed off the same enemy, a tier 3 spear-wielding Ark Incorruptus which appears in certain rifts or in the quest Graveyard Rift. The Black Stone Half has a drop rate of 10%, while the Ark Type S2 has a rate of 5%—better odds that we’ve been having so far, but that’s like saying getting kicked in the stomach is better than being punched in the balls.

The Demon-god Eye is dropped off a tier-4 Gigas found in one of the following quests: Vellgander Section 1, Support the Troops, Just Deserts II, or Artifex Cometh. It has a 1% drop rate, though if you manage to score a break chance on its head (a very rare happening), then there’s a 10% chance that you’ll score one there mid-fight.

Now that we’ve got a helmet bound, let’s bind the Draco piece of chest armour, because it’s the cheaper and easier to bind of the two identical pieces of armour. The Draco armour has a GR requirement of 19, and needs 5 Black Stone Halves, 1 Ark Type B2, and 1 Coronastone. It also costs 500G to bind.

We know where to get Black Stone Halves from, and it should be easy to infer that an Ark Type B2 is gained from a sword-wielding Ark Incorruptus… Why they picked B for its letter code, I don’t know. They couldn’t use S again because they used that for the spear one, but why now W then? Hell, at least it’s in the word Sword. Just like last time the B2 has a drop percentage rate of 5%.

The Coronastone is obtainable in three ways: first as a drop or end-of-quest loot item from a tier-3 Cerberus in the quests Ring Leader III, Nocturnal Commission II ( ew, thanks a fuckton for that one, Level-5), or in the Plains: Free Monster Quest. You can also buy it from a General Store in a Georama with a 60 Beast stat to it (I swear I’ll cover the GeoRama eventually) for 300,000G. And lastly, you can farm one in the wild by returning to Redhorn Isle after you clear it because there will be a tier-3 Cerberus there now right near the start of the dungeon. The Coronastone has a 2% drop rate.

So now we have a helmet and a chest armour piece. Let’s get some arms.

The Draga Fists require 10 Black Stone Halves, 10 Phantom Butterflies, and a Blue Moss Ball, as well as a GR 23 requirement. They also costs 6000G to bind.

Phantom Butterlies are a “minable” item, and can be obtained by digging around various points in quests that have little glittering prompts surrounding them. You can find the Phantom Butter in spawn points in the quests House Money II, Seasonal Travel II, and Feeding Time II, though the wiki doesn’t say what your chances of getting one per harvest are.

Blue Moss, meanwhile, is dropped by a tier-4 Stone Guardian golem, which can be found in the quests Vellgander Sections 4 and 5, Desert: Free Monster Quest, and Artifex Cometh II. It has a 1% natural drop rate, though if you break the moss surrounding its head off that shoots up to a near 25% chance of a drop.

The Draga Tassets for the Knight’s waist require another 10 Black Stone Halves, 10 Wardflowers, and 1 Silver Clay Lump, as well as a GR of 23. They also costs 6000G to bind.

Wardflowers are found in the quests Feeding Time II and Seasonal Travel II in flower spawn points, while the Silver Clay Lump drops from a tier-4 Golem and is found in Vellgander Section 3, Artifex Cometh II, and Desert: Free Monster Quest. It has a 1% drop rate, bumped up to 25% if you break the Golem’s head.

And then the Draga Greaves have a GR requirement of GR 23, and need another 10 Black Stone Halves, as well as 10 Aged Dragon Fossils and 1 Waterspider Gland. They also costs 6000G to bind.

Aged Dragon Fossils can be mined from spawn points in Feeding Time II, Just Deserts II, or Support the Troops II, or can be purchased from a GeoRama with a 60 Fossil score for 132,000G each. The Waterspider Gland can be obtained from a tier-4 Dire Waterspider in Vellgander Sections 4 or 7, and has a drop percentage of, you guessed it, 1%.

Now, let’s move on to Knight Weapons, the last stop on our journey.

To get the Gigantic Hammer, we don’t need to bind up through any other Knight Weaponry, thankfully. All we need to do is be GR 18, and farm 10 White Stone Fragments, 1 Ark Drive Type H2, and 1 Malletman Emblem. The Gigantic Hammer also costs 1000G to bind.

The Ark Drive Type H2 is farmable from tier-3 hammer wielding Ark Incorrupti that tend to randomly turn up in rifts from time to time. It can also occasionally be found in the loot box for the Graveyard Rift, and it a rare drop from the recreation of the Sun King from the Rival Survival II quest. The H2 Drive has a 5% drop rate. The Malletman emblem, meanwhile, is probably the consistently hardest item in the game to get a drop of, having a LESS THAN 1% drop rate in the wild, and only rarely appearing the loot boxes for the quests Graveyard Rift and Rival Survival.

And that’s it, you’ve built the LP Arc Knight… Technically, anyway. The LP Arc Knight uses the “cheaper” DLC armour pieces, the Velmun Helm, Fulguris Armour, and Antiquus Fists, Tassets, and Greaves. So let’s take a look at what we need to bind each of those, while we’re at it.

The Velmun Helm needs a GR of 21, as well as 3 Mithril Ore and 3 Black Stone Halves and 2000G.

Mithril Ore can be mined in the quest In Search of Swallowtails II or bound from 3 Platinum Ore and a Toad Oil+ Drop at a Binding Post for 1300 apiece.

The Fulguris Armour needs only a GR of 19 to wear, 500G to purchase and 3 Platinum Ore and 3 Black Stone Halves to bind.

Platinum Ore can be mined in In Search of Swallowtails II as well, or bound from 3 Bloodsteel Ore and a Toad Oil+ Drop and 1200G at a Binding Post.

The Antiquus Fists need a GR of 23, 3000G and 3 Rough Diamonds and 3 Black Stone Halves.

Rough Diamonds can be mined from the cave in the Flandars in the quest House Money II or in the Miner Problem II quest (House Money II is the easier and more accessible choice—trust me!). They can also be bound at a Binding Post with 3 Rough Emeralds, a Toad Oil+ Drop and 1300G.

The Antiquus Tassets also need a GR 23, 3 Rough Diamonds and 3 Black Stone Halves.

And finally the Antiquus Greaves also need a GR 23, 3 Rough Diamonds and 3 Black Stone Halves.


So, let’s run the brass tacks total numbers for the LP Arc Knight then.

GUILD RANK
Total GR Needed: 26
Total GR Points Needed: 31,426,000GP
Total Number of Grinding Hours (Estimated): 341 (~14 days)

ITEMS
Hard Way
1x Leaf (Duo)
1x Brass (Duo)
1x Ignis Wyvern Eye (1%)
2x Wyvern Heart (5%)
1x Toad Oil Drop
1x Aged Demon-god Eye (1%)
2x Aged Demon-god Heart (5%)
1x Toad Oil+ Drop
45x Black Stone Half (10%)
10x White Stone Fragment (20%)
1x Ark Drive Type S2 (5%)
1x Demon-god Eye (1%)
1x Ark Drive Type B2 (5%)
1x Coronastone (2%)
10x Phantom Butterfly
1x Blue Moss Ball
10x Wardflower
1x Silver Clay Lump
10x Aged Dragon Fossil
1x Waterspider Gland (1%)
1x Ark Drive Type H2 (5%)
1x Malletman Emblem (>1%)

Easy Way
12x Black Stone Halves (10%)
3x Mithril Ore
3x Rough Diamond
3x Rough Emerald
3x Platinum Ore
10x White Stone Fragments (20%)
1x Ark Drive Type H2 (5%)
1x Malletman Emblem (>1%)

DAHLIA
210D

GUILDER (GOLD)
19,700G

QUESTS NEEDED TO COMPLETE
Demithor In Peril (numerous times) (20 min)
Graveyard Rift (30 min)
Dragon the Line (30 min)
Rival Survival (30 min)
Rival Survival II (50 min)
Support the Troops (30 min)
Feeding Time II (40 min)
Ring Leader III (40 min)
Artifex Cometh II (30 min)
Vellgander Section 1 (90 min)
Vellgander Section 2 (90 min)
Vellgander Section 3 (90 min)
Vellgander Section 4 (90 min)
Vellgander Section 5 (90 min)
Vellgander Section 6 (90 min)


Or, as it’s collectively known:

“Fuck you,”
-Love, Level-5



Also, here’s a bunch of renders and artwork pieces done by Level-5 showing off various configurations and colourings of Arc Knight parts, some of which you yourself could one day obtain if you too spend 6,000 hours of your life at it: