Quick Look: Bravely Default 2

Umm....that's how autosaves have always worked tho.

some PC games have multiple Autosaves (Cyberpunk) but yes single Autosaves will overwrite your previous one

I like the Tilt Shift look of the game

i was like didnt this game come out like 8 years ago and i played it, im thinking of Bravely Second: End Layer keeping it consistent w the confusing naming schemes square, good on ya [RE:kingdom hearts]

"You saved my bacon there." The 8-4 touch?

That sucks about your save Jan, sorry!!! I actually turned off the auto-saving in this game (and in the newest Ys game as well) because it feels like heresy to me to have an auto-save in a JRPG. Pretty sure that is just a product of me playing games of this genre my whole life and the fact that you always had to find a save point, manually save on the world map, etc. I'm totally used to doing the save management for these types of games. And this game is pretty good about it, you can manually save basically anytime except for when you are in a dungeon and not at a save point.

Jan mentioned it, but I like how quickly this game throws you into it, it doesn't have the slow start a lot of JRPGs have, and a lot of the mechanics are available from the jump. You get a full party almost immediately and can start messing around with job swapping.

The narrative and stuff is pretty boilerplate, so I feel like you have to be into this game for the mechanics (which I think are pretty fun, a good battle system goes a long way for me), but I think all the voice acting is quite good (except for the player character). I've mainly had to do grinding because the boss battles in this game are HARD; you need to be leveled pretty well AND have a good strategy.

Sorry this comment is long! Jan, you did a good job showing off this game and explaining it :)

p.s. did the localization team purposefully name all your party members after famous musicians??? I just made that connection while watching this video, haha.

Side comment, this is Bravely Default 3 in the same way that Final Fantasy 15 was actually Final Fantasy 17 because Final Fantasy 13 had 13-2 and Lightning Returns.

So...

This is NOT a docked game I take it? Or was there an issue with the render of the video?

Is the game audio heavily desynced for anyone else? For me the animation noises in battle are way delayed from the action on screen.

Jan and Brad quick looks are frickin' GREAT! Awesome job!!

I wonder what kind of insane plot twist they pull off in this one.

Still watching so apologies if this is addressed later in the QL, but you can save at any time in towns or on the overworld like the first area they're in. When they go to the desert where there's a save point, you're restricted from saving unless you're at those points.

@fanaticalmilk: ya im getting audio sync issues too. sound of the game is almost a half to full second behind the visual action

@sildas: Is X-2 a joke to you?

A thing that really annoyed me in the first Bravely Default was how long it took to grind up classes I didn't like just to unlock a useful ability for a class I did like is that still the case here?

I'm into the first real chapter after the prologue and liking the game so far, though I'm struggling to see much major difference from the 3DS originals (at least from my hazy recollection). But given that those games had some of the best grinding and multi-job systems in any JRPG I've played in years, I'm not complaining. Looking forward to unlocking more classes, since I know that's where the game really opens up with fun combos.

The only real gripe I have after ~5-6 hours is that the opening Freelancer class has two different JP+ abilities that bump up your job leveling speed. So as an efficiency degenerate who is into this game for the leveling and playing around with the systems, that's basically meant I've been trying to grind up those classes to the max so I can double my job leveling speed for the rest of the game. I'm sure that's my fault, but it still seems like a weird choice to make maxing the starting class the best thing to do off the bat, given that everyone knows that you go for XP+ abilities first.

Also I hope the story does some crazy things like the first game, because holy crap Jan is right on the story. The opening hours some of the most painful stock-standard ass JRPG elemental crystal, hero of light crap that I've seen in approximately three dozen games. The characters have some charm and humor, and they have tried to dumptruck some backstory on each character to make them interesting, but the story is downright awful in an era where JRPG stories have gotten a lot better and more varied.

Edit: It's also very weird that for the prologue they give you the crutch AI character that basically makes fights unlosable since every turn he will heal/revive a character, and then toss several boss battles at you that would be virtually impossible without his abilities since the bosses will constantly murder you in a single series of bad hits. It's not a great introduction to the battle system to just be limping through on his heals.

Hm, are the weird, twitchy spasms the characters make before performing their attack animations a consequence of GB's capture equipment, or is that actually in-game?

EDIT: Ahh, I didn't realize Jan had the battle speed cranked up at the beginning of the video. Good to see there isn't animation-jank there after all!

If I get to the end of this QL without Jan and Brad saying this has the JRPG trope of "XP" I'll be surprised.

:D

Loved the first Bravely Default, so a little sad to see that the reviews for this one aren't particularly enthusiastic. A big draw of the first one was the solid job system/combat, and at least it looks like that's more or less been retained.

Minus some sudden difficulty spikes that require a bit too much level and/or job grinding, I'm really enjoying this game so far, 20 hours in.

I'm about 10 hours in. I'm liking it a lot, but it feels weirdly unpolished.

The performance feels pretty bad, with the controls/menus being unresponsive at times. There are some weird delays when navigating menus and opening party chat.

There are also some incredibly weird design oversights. Like Jan pointed out, the game has a lot of side quests. However, there's no way to see which side quests you've completed, which means it's going to be a nightmare for anyone aiming for 100% side quest completion.

Minor gameplay spoilers ahead - Additionally, I just unlocked a beastmaster job, where you can catch monsters and then use them as special abilities. But the ease-of-use around this job is completely lacking. There's no way to see if you've captured a monster before while you're fighting it without going into your "Captured Monsters" menu and scrolling through your list. Pokemon solved this issue decades ago with a little icon next a monster if you have one. And the craziest oversight is that the game doesn't actually tell you what the monster abilities do. It tells you the name of the ability, but not what it does. You can kind of guess based on the name of the ability, and the ability is always one that the enemy uses on you, but I can see this mechanic getting very confusing 40+ hours later. It's especially baffling because the Bravely Second lore book for the Catmancer (a.k.a blue mage) was amazing. I was expecting an expansion to my bestiary, a new menu option, the little beast master girl to open a farm for me, or something.

So, I grinded up the starting job to max on all characters the second I got the first boss asterisks while filling out the bestiary for the dungeon (rare item drops are rare). I then proceeded to use just the starting job to wipe out, what I am guessing, the non-AOE super mobs for a beastmaster/blue mage kind of class to get abilities from. Since they respawn, and drop great gear the first time, I did that a couple more times. That added a couple hours to my playtime, but really teaches you the mechanics of the battle system pretty well. It also makes the next several bosses super laughable in that you just throw your weight around, quite literally, and they go down in a like 2-3 cycles when you were just doing 20 cycle bosses.

The first class is super-broken, and its probably going to Onion Knight/Mime later into the game if its anything like the first 2 games. If nothing else, you can find a super basic fight, leave one mob alive, and just use the starting class to forage for items to carry you through whatever hurdle you are having problems with.

@mechanism: The grinding is there, but I feel like there are slightly fewer passives this time around. It wasn't mentioned in the video, but there's a shop you unlock pretty early on that lets you set sail & explore (it's the online function, but you can also do it offline, but then it's slightly slower). You talk to the shopkeeper & put your switch to sleep mode (up to 12h)& the game rewards your expedition with items like job orbs & they can give you a looot of job points.

The carry weight also seems to rise with character & job lvls.

@topcyclist said:

Yeah, I've certainly played my share of bland stories with fun characters and world, but this still stands out with how bad it is. The world is also fairly boring to start, even if pretty. They start to build up the characters more, but even that is pretty clunky - you have one character just randomly interject with their backstory since I'm guessing they felt they needed to give you something on her in the first act.

It just feels like most JRPGs have figured out how to build in a good hook to the story or compelling intro to get you invested in the characters and the world, while this just drops you into generic fantasyland with generic heroes of light going on generic quest to find the crystals and a multi-hour prologue before the story even tries to get going. And even in the second area things don't get much better.

I've been enjoying this game quite a bit. Loved the first two games, and I'm VERY excited to see where the story goes based on where the story went in the last two games. Yes... A bland heroes of Light plotline... and nothing else.

I do miss the random battles a bit though, especially being able to turn Up or Down the encounter rate. And I liked the online-elements of the previous games more as well. But those are pretty minor though.

Since @brad was wondering why this game uses the Fire, Fira, Firaga etc... terminology, it bears reminding that Bravely Default is technically a Final Fantasy spinoff game as it began development as a sequel to Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light on the Nintendo DS. The original title's name references the Final Fantasy lineage in it's full title: Bravely Default Flying Fairy (BD FF).

Also, Claytechworks wasn't the developer for the previou two games. The first two games were developed by Silicon Studio whose primary focus is technology development so they passed the third game onto Claytechworks while SIlicon Studio was busy with their current technology development. Many of the original development team moved over to Claytechworks. Square Enix is in charge of greenlighting these games and only did so after the success of Octopath Traveller.

I love the meta-ness of this starting with a save game mistake.