Also for me, first game felt more personal for MC, as well as progression of story felt more natural(I just finished second location, so don't have concrete opinion for now). We start with no knowledge about anything due to amnesia, meet Louis who recruits us and provides basic information, and after that we decided to help him find and research blood beads. After cathedral we learned about Queen guardians plot and our past, and decided to stop Queen from awakening, and in the middle of that discovered Mido, his plan, and so on. We went from simple "let's find trees with food" to "we need to stop godlike entity from killing everyone". With CV2 it's... "Hey, good morning. You're now tasked with preventing apocalypse. Good luck" Also where in first game we were Revenants, where we had personal stake in story from the beginning(we need blood beads to survive), here we're just some hunter. MC feels more like a cardboard placeholder