In a world where games try to differentiate themselves and advertise what sets them apart, one game dares to blend in with the rest. It is boldly ordinary! It is courageously average! IT IS…

Yes, after 93 in-game hours and 124 Activity Log hours, I finally beat this game (and I thought Project X Zone’s 88 Activity Log hours was long!).

Also, my joke at the beginning isn’t entirely inaccurate, because this isn’t much more than your traditional RPG: battles are strictly turn based (order is determined by everyone’s speed stat, except for moves that ignore it) and are triggered randomly after a set time walking on the map (this can be toggled in the options menu, which is handy if your battery is running low and you need to save). Furthermore, there isn’t much to do on the overworld except speak to NPCs, open chests, or push the switch that opens the way forward (not a puzzle), so game-play is almost entirely focused on the battles, just like countless other RPGs.

To be fair, there are a couple things about the core game-play that the game does differently. The first is Brave Points. Basically, everyone usually starts battles with zero BP, everyone gets 1 BP after each turn, and every move costs at least 1 BP. If your BP is negative at the start of the turn, the character essentially loses that turn, but if BP is positive, the character can use more of it without losing a turn. Although some moves cost more BP than others (with the amount of extra BP they cost being listed to the side where MP cost would be), all characters have the option to “brave,” which lets the character move multiple times on the same turn, thus costing the character more BP (characters can brave a max of 3 times for a total of 4 moves each turn). Also, all characters have the option to “default,” which is basically this game’s version of guarding, except it costs 0 BP, letting you start with an extra BP next turn (characters can have a max of 3 BP at a time, except Templars, who can have 4 BP max).

The second is what the game calls “Bravely Second” (the first game wasn’t even out and they were already planning the sequel!), which lets one of your party members move without anyone else moving, including enemies. When Bravely Second is activated, you spend SP instead of BP, so you don’t need to worry about losing turns. There are two ways to gain SP: the first is to leave the game in sleep mode (8 hours = 1 SP), and the second is micro-transactions.

Yes, micro-transactions.

In a retail game.

Just…why?

At least it’s never necessary to use Bravely Second, even on Hard mode.

Anyway, because of the game-play’s focus on battles, I played the entire game on Hard mode since I didn’t want the game to devolve into another “tap A to win everything” RPG…but it basically did that anyway. You see, although normal bosses provide a decent challenge, there are bosses that, when you beat them, unlock a new job for you to use (essentially the game’s class system). However, since these bosses can only use moves that their job lets you use (with one notable exception), they end up having very predictable patters and end up being laughably easy (the only exception are the first few, but that’s only because, at the time, you simply aren’t able to do much). Even the last job-boss, the Conjurer, can practically be stun-locked if you keep using Dispel on him. Seriously, I had random encounters in this same game that were harder than most of the job bosses!

Furthermore, the game doesn’t balance all of the jobs throughout the game, which is my second major complaint. Yes, I know that each job is supposed to have its own advantages and disadvantages (and are even expected to be combined with other jobs), but some of the job’s advantages are only useful for a small part of the game, while others are too useful. For example, by the time you can purchase level 5 black magic, all bosses already have magic defense high enough that it only results in 1 damage, thus wasting all of that MP and making the Black Mage job all but useless. However, the Knight job has a move called “Stomp” that is learned shortly after using the job, and it does 1.25 times the damage of a normal attack, with the only downside being that defense drops to 75% for two turns; combine that with “two-handed,” which doubles a weapon’s physical attack, and you have no reason to switch to another offensive job for the majority of the game (the drop in defense isn’t that big a deal since, on Hard mode, enemies kill you in 2-3 hits anyway). Note that both Black Mage and Knight are jobs you learn very early in the game, with Knight being the only job that lets you wield a sword or axe with decent aptitude at the time aside from Freelancer (and by the time you get another one, the Stomp+two-handed strategy has already made itself evident).

The only reason I switched my Knights to the Templar job is because, when you first get the Templar’s HP to zero, he yells his favorite Lord of the Rings quote and uses Recover, which gives him all of his HP back (this also happens the second time you get his HP to zero). Guess what? The Templar job doesn’t let you learn Recover (in fact, that move only exists in this part of the game; no other enemy uses it, and no job lets you learn it), but what it does have is a move called “Desperation,” which is like Stomp except more powerful and the defense drop only lasts until the next turn. Because my Templars were always slower than whatever bosses I encountered (presumably because I was on Hard mode), this effectively nullified Desperation’s only downside, making it the second-most broken move in the entire game.

Despite the job discrepancies above, the worst offender would have to be the Salve-Maker job. You see, as powerful as Stomp and Desperation are, you’d still need strategy with the way you heal your party, as they can be defeated quickly if you’re not careful. However, if you level up the Salve-Maker job to the max, you get a move called Resurrect, which revives all fallen allies to half their health and has no downside. Before this, the only way to revive fallen allies is to use Raise (18 MP) or a Phoenix Down, both of which only affect one ally (unless you use the Salve-Maker’s Widen Area move on a Phoenix Down, but that costs 1 BP extra on top of using the Phoenix Down, making it a genuinely balanced move). This is the most broken move in the game since, no matter how badly you get your butt kicked, you can just use Resurrect and you’re back in the game.

Also, each party member can use moves from one other job, so naturally, I gave my Salve-Maker the White Mage job’s moves so I could just use Resurrect+Cura and my party was basically at full health again. This move (combined with the fact that bosses’ magic defense was getting so high that even 40 MP summon magic dealt less than 200 damage) made me switch my Summoner to the Salve-Maker job as well. Now, with my team of two Templars and two Salve-Makers, I never lost another battle (except when I forgot to equip certain status immunity items for specific bosses, or one time I forgot to use Dispel on the Conjurer); seriously, even the final boss, The Evil One, gave me no trouble.

On top of that, the Salve-Maker job lets you use Compounding from the start, which lets you combine items to form attack items. It’s not as broken as Ressurect, but it’s why I switched my Monk to this job in the first place. You see, throughout the game, I had gotten a bunch of items that could only be used by compounding, and as much as I liked having a character that would almost always go first, attack items were quite powerful at the time (and even continued to be useful for quite some time after).

My third major complaint has to do with the parts where you have to fight the same bosses again. Four of the bosses (the only ones you have to fight again to progress) are just earlier bosses with their stats boosted to account for the player’s increase in level; no change in AI or anything. That in and of itself isn’t good game design, but at this part of the game, you have the option to re-fight the bosses that gave you jobs. This could have been really clever since the bosses never use all of their job’s attacks the first time you fight them, so they could have used different moves during the later battles. However, the closest the game ever gets to this is, the third time you fight the Knight, he uses Protect Ally (a passive move). For everyone else, it’s just the same bosses with increased stats again; the only other thing that’s different is the cut-scene that plays before and after the battle (except, after the second time, sometimes that isn’t even different!). In fact, when you fight the Templar after the first time, he doesn’t even use Recover again; it literally only exists in that one part of the game. This is easily the worst part of the game since not only are you fighting what you’ve already beaten, but you’re doing it with more powerful moves (see above), making the battles even easier and more boring. Jeez, no wonder Airy made me promise to “stay until the very end” at the beginning; a decent part of the game’s length (I’d say around 10-20 in-game hours) is from lazy re-use of bosses!

And yes, the fairy’s name is literally just the word “fairy” without the “f.” I’ll let the laziness speak for itself (she’s not even an airhead, so you can’t argue that it’s a pun).

I was also going to talk about how the game has what I call a “reverse difficulty curve,” but after reading the above, it’s easy to see why it exists in this game. Put simply: I beat the Black Mage (the second boss battle) with only one of my party members left alive, and I was relieved to win at last. Later, when I had to re-fight the bosses, I beat one with two of my party members dead, and I started over because I knew I could win with everyone alive (they only fell because I tried something different, and it just happened to be when the boss was low on HP).

Despite the game’s reverse difficulty curve, there are a few bosses that go too far overboard trying to counter it, namely the dragons guarding the keys to Vampire Castle (an optional side-quest, but still). All of the dragons have a move that makes your entire party weak to their element (with no way to undo or guard from it aside from dying; it doesn’t even wear off), as well as a physical move that attacks everyone with said element; combine the first move with the second and it usually kills your entire party with one attack (and those who survive are often inflicted with a status effect). Admittedly, there are ways to counter physical attacks (I used the Templar’s Rampart move, which cost 2 BP extra and puts a shield in front of everyone that prevents damage from one physical attack), but the ice dragon’s status effect is Stop, which there’s also no way to undo, and the only way to prevent it is if you have the Time Mage job at level 7. Needless to say, I continued with the main story some more before I fought the dragons.

Also, the only other enemies in the entire game that can use stop are the Time Mage (so, before you even had the chance to prevent it) and The Evil One…’s first form (not even its second form), thus giving more credence to my claim that some of the jobs have very limited use.

Plus, after the dragons, the fight against the Vampire is a joke, although it still gave me more trouble than The Evil One.

Another thing about the game I’d like to bring up is that it has “tutorial quests.” Basically, as you play through the game, you’ll get a notification that says something along the lines of “Hey, did you know you can do [action]? Try it out! Reward: [item].” These appear throughout the game; even when I got the Vampire job near the end of the game, another one popped up and told me that the Vampire job’s Genome Ability could be used to learn enemies’ moves. I bring it up for two reasons: 1) many of them appear well after I figured out I could do it, or well after it would have been useful. For example, two or three bosses after I braved to use an Ether (restores MP) and magic on the same turn, a tutorial quest popped up and told me that I could brave to use an Ether and magic on the same turn. And no, it wasn’t immediately completed; I had to do it again to complete the quest. Also, I don’t remember when it happened, but one of them told me that I could push left on the control stick to view enemy stats after using Examine, but the only time I would have gotten use out of that was the first time I fought the Black Mage, as he kept using Drain, which healed him more than I could damage him (I won by blindly braving to the max, and luckily, it paid off). 2) The game never tells you that you can speed up battle animations (push right on the D-pad during battle animations), even though it had a perfectly good way to do it! I only discovered this by accident when I was re-fighting one of the bosses, and had I known this from the start, it would’ve shaved a few hours from my play time.

One more thing I’d like to bring up: at the beginning of the game, the protagonist’s home town gets destroyed (remember this is trying to be like every RPG ever). However, not too far into the game, you get to rebuild the town. This part essentially acts as an idle game, where you set villagers to work on building different buildings or clearing the way to build more buildings. Each activity takes a certain amount of time to complete (which decreases as the number of people working on it is increased), so you’ll be playing the main game and suddenly get a notification that a building was complete. This is actually a pretty clever part of the game since it ties in with the game’s story without really interrupting the main game (you just bring it up like the pause menu; you can’t actually go to the town in-game).

Lastly, the game also has Street Pass functionality. First, you can send and receive moves, as well as use “abilink” which lets your character use moves from jobs that the received character knows. I only used this once to get the tutorial quest item. Also, each time you Street Pass someone who also played Bravely Default, the population of the rebuilt town increases by one (even if it’s someone who already increased your town’s population via a previous Street Pass).

Overall, this isn’t a bad game (and it even does a few new and clever things despite its title), but it has a lot of the same problems that the majority of turn-based RPGs have, which really make the game drag on, especially when you have to fight the same bosses with the same AI over again (just because the game isn’t a “Strategy” RPG or a “Tacics” RPG doesn’t mean half the bosses shouldn’t require strategy or tactics!). I only recommend this game for RPG fans; if you just play RPGs for the story, get a visual novel instead.

P.S. Some of the dialogue makes it seem like this was meant to be targeted towards children despite the T rating. First, on the back of the box, it says “BASIC READING ABILITY IS NEEDED TO FULLY ENJOY THIS GAME.” Like, is there some widespread systemic problem in the U.S. resulting in countless illiterate teens? If so, how did I never hear about it? And how do you expect them to heed the warning if it’s in PRINT? As another example, during the side-quest to get the Ninja job, an NPC is killed (off-screen), and one of the party members says “[She] is dead. She was not breathing and had no pulse.” Yes, game, I know what being dead means. Also, that’s probably not the best way to explain death anyway. Oh, and don’t even get me started on the “foreshadowing” about who The Evil One is…