Well I'll be damned, after booting up old 1.02, it does appear it had a new game plus feature (I'll blame it on the booze making some memories fuzzy). Looks like it just gives the amount of experience to level up to what the previous champ had and the equipped items. There might be more but I only had a character that I just power-leveled by grinding corrupted driders at level 10 (fuck-ton of experience saved up but didn't interact with many characters on that run).