This isn't a terrible BD entry, but a mediocre game in the general gameplay department in a class-based game

On the equipment weight, I can see what they were trying to do, create a little game w/ equipment w/ cost/benefits. But it ended not messing well w/ the battle system at all. I felt like I was playing I was playing FF5 w/ bad atb system & more information presented, but worse class design which is my next point.

This class design in this game is very just janky slapped together. Why am I learning tier 1 magic at different levels? Why is this passive not even useful in its own class? Why is this passive saying roughly/maybe? Are y'all not confident in what you made? Why am I more rewarded for spamming a busted skill than anything else? Forget the counter system, these bosses don't even get to interact after a certain.

But I can say the story is a bit campy which I like, The art is straight, and music good.

A solid entry into a solid series. The already incredible job system is made even better by adding things like a second class speciality at level 12, and weapons that grant all passives for a job (albeit unlocked very late). The changes to mages is a little weird though, no longer are spells set into a "pack" where you gain access to more of those packs when you level up, but each individual spell takes up a level-up slot. This effectively makes Black Mage much shallower than before, but it also means the Red Mage gets to stand completely on its own and not just a Black Mage and White Mage combo.

The game does unfortunately drop some features that were included in Bravely Second, or even stuff that's been here from the start. The ability to set job load outs is gone, which is a huge pain in the ass because these games are made so that you want different set-ups for grinding, farming and bosses. Now if you don't want to fight bosses with a weak farming set, or don't want to waste JP by using your maxed job set, you have to constantly swap all your equipment and abilities back and forth before and after every boss. Luckily bosses are pretty well telegraphed, but some come out of nowhere, and sometimes you'll see a save point in a dungeon and assume a boss is coming, only for it to be a half way point.

They also removed dungeon maps completely for some reason. That just makes no sense when the overworld still has one.

Some changes I do like - enemies are no longer random encounters, and each one shows up on the overworld. You now get chain battles by setting off an enemy when multiple are nearby, or when using special lure items.

Other changes I'm neutral one. Special moves have been simplified greatly, with each class having their own specific one which is charged by using that classes speciality X amount of times.

A lot of this game is similar to the last 2. You still get a colourful cast of characters for each asterisk, but the main heroes, and the final villains do feel like the ones from the first game copy and pasted in some ways.

While the graphics still kind of keep the simplified almost chibi look for characters, monsters look a lot better with the upgrade to Switch. Cities likewise still look beautiful, but admittedly they ironically suffer from not being on 3DS now as it's no longer "Wow it looks so good for the hardware!"

Music is still great with the same team behind it.

Overall this game is similar in quality to the ones before it, which is to say very good. It improves some aspects like the job system a lot. But I think straight up removing features, including those that were there from the start, made it just a tiny step down, especially as the upgrade in hardware set a higher standard.

I love original Bravely Default and Bravely Second and i wanted to love this one as well. Unfortunately there are several things that made me dislike the game in the end.

First the positives. Soundtrack by Revo is excellent. I liked Elvis and Adelle. Job system is, like always, just pure fun. Combat is great as there were not many changes from original.

And now the negatives. The progression system is fucked. Instead of leveling the jobs along the way, you have to grind first and then progress with all the job points along the way getting wasted. Thats due to several things but most important of them is the change to JP scaling. Also, you unlock great new abilities in the endgame but once you are powerful enough to beat the bosses guarding them, there is absolutely nothing to actually use them on.

Other than that it's fine. Story is mid at best but that's the case for every Bravely game and not the reason to play them.

Originally, I had this game on the Switch, until my copy stopped working because of...reasons, and so here we are now. This game, in my opinion, is one of those "it's pretty meh but gets better plotwise in the second half" kind of RPGs. The first few chapters honestly don't feel very interesting and I didn't get too invested until the sequence at the end of Chapter 3. I'll be honest, I wasn't too big on the characters in this game and still heavily prefer the Bravely Default 1 cast, and in some cases, the Bravely Second cast, but maybe that's because Tiz and Edea are returning characters.

The main antagonist (before the real one we get no real info on until over halfway through the game), honestly was really weak. He clearly went to the Walhart School of "solve conflict with even more conflict" and failed his class. Backstory on this guy was hidden behind a sidequest and told to us by another character instead of getting the information organically. I feel like Gloria specifically suffers the same fate, having most of her main development locked behind sidequests. Speaking of sidequests, why was there no quest log in this game? On top of that, you can only set markers for 3 sidequests at a time? Why? These were honestly some pretty dumb design choices.

This game having zero relation to the past two games I think hurts it a bit. Making the Asterisks more important to the overall story instead of just being an excuse for the job system was nice, but what baffles me is why only two are optional when almost all the others are given via the story. The story was passable. None of that "fight 4 bosses 4 additional times for the true ending" nonsense from Default or "press Start in the first fight unprompted" from Second, but it's way of guiding you to the true ending was a step in a better direction, even if I was a bit iffy about it.

But one of the main draws of games like this and Final Fantasy V or X-2 is the job system. Part of the fun is finding ways to shatter the kneecaps of your various foes by abusing the system to your advantage, and in a way, this game does allow that sort of freedom. Some of the earlygame classes have things in them that can help smash the difficulty, like Thief's Godspeed Strike or Beastmaster's second specialty, which can lead to insane stat boosting if you're proactive on capturing monsters. I feel like White Mage did get a bit of a nerf, especially with the massive nerfing Spiritmaster got compared to Default where it served to amplify White Mage's abilities. Black Mage is still bleh and there's no Spell Fencer equivalent this time to use. I also wasn't too big on how certain useful passives, like Pierce Default or Angelic Ward are locked to being specialties instead of just being passives you can equip like in the old games.

That brings me to the one thing that grinded my gears the most about this game, and that's counters. This system is objectively the single worst part of the game. First, only enemies can do it. Second, you won't know what they counter until it's too late and you're already getting smacked for performing certain actions, or the enemy gets free BP to set up their moves. Worse, every Asterisk holder starting from the second boss on and regular enemies included, have counters. Don't equip Counter-Savvy and waste one of your precious passive slots? Too bad, time to taste constant pain. The final boss was a major offender of "counter borderline any action" and it was awful.

Rematches with the Asterisk holders literally allowed them to get free BP as a counter to ANY action sometimes, which could lead to a certain Arcanist blowing your party to hell with high powered magic that not even two heavily boosted Beastmasters could endure.

Now, I don't want to say this is a bad game. It's...alright, but earlygame can be pretty grindy if you want those JP Up passives to make life easier in the future, and there's the matter of raising up jobs. I would honestly say play it if you really, really like games with a job system or are a fan of Default and Second.

Les + :

- Le système de combat basé sur la gestion de la quantité de tes actions où tu peux économiser, lancer plusieurs actions d’un seul coup. Ça ajoute un beaucoup de stratégie au combat, c’est toujours aussi cool.

- La chasse et la découverte des différentes classes que tu peux ensuite combiner créér différents build au sein de ton groupe

- Les musiques sont toujours jolies et toujours adaptées aux situations

Les - :

- Presque 10 ans entre le premier est celui-ci et pourtant c’est exactement les mêmes jeux tant au niveau du scénario et des personnages qui n’ont en plus rien de très original pour un jrpg.

- Le système de targeting est complètement raté même aujourd'hui la commu ne sait pas exactement comment il fonctionne et il faudrait data miner le jeu pour saisir tous les facteurs qui font qu’un perso se fera cibler plutôt qu’un autre. Par exemple je lance une compétence augmentant de 20% les chances de ciblage sur un perso 4 fois (donc je crame 4 tours en plus). Logiquement ça voudrait dire que le perso ciblé à mtn 80% de chance de se faire focus? Perdu, comme je disais il y a plein de facteurs à prendre en compte et 80% de ce que j’ai compris c’est que dalle donc les compétences pour augmenter l’aggro sont inutiles ce qui déséquilibre en plus la Trinité healer tank dps du jeu.

- Les dialogues sont vide, aucune substance ni originalité comme l’histoire. Les discussions de groupe sont osef et n’apportent pas grand chose à l’étoffe des personnages.

- Les quêtes secondaires olala c’est plus possible aujourd'hui de faire des quêtes FedEx où tu fais 3 aller retour pour rapporter le repas, la fourchette et la gourde à mec dans un donjon. Ou encore quand tu fais le pigeon voyageur pour deux personnes qui sont littéralement à 20m l’une de l’autre et juste prévenir que le diner est servi, littéralement.

- Les graphismes et la direction artistique n’ont pas évolué n’ont plus, les villes ont de jolies visuels mais le reste est fade, les donjons sont vide.

- Les personnages ne gagnent pas l'xp du combat s'ils meurent pdt celui-ci??? Du coup tu passes à coté de bonnes doses d'xp (surtout pour les combats de boss) que tu devras grind plus tard.

- Aujourd'hui y’a tellement mieux comme jrpg dans lesquels investir une centaine d’heures

I have not played either of the other games in the series. This is my first introduction to Bravely Default. Overall, I had a ton of fun playing this RPG. The story was fairly generic; evil being in the world needs to be defeated by a rag tag group of four. There were some very dark subjects that the story briefly touched. I was a bit surprised but nothing was shown, only spoke about.

The combat is fun! Super important in a long turn-based game. There are a total of 24 jobs and any character in your party can be any job. You can have multiple people with the same jobs. Any job can act as a sub job to create more unique combinations. It encourages you to mix and match.

The environments and city designs are beautiful. They have a fantasy storybook vibe that make it fun to explore. The downside for the city view is the camera. It's placed far away so you will constantly run into people, walls, and buildings. It can get annoying constantly bumping into something.

I had an issue with performance on my Switch for this game. It was slow, sometimes laggy when you started a dialogue or cutscenes. The fights seemed fine, but the game had to take a moment to bring up party chat. Odd considering I have played more complex games with no problem.

Throughout the story, I didn't have to go out of my way to grind until the end game. There was a difficulty spike that dragged out the game. it does give you content and options to grind. However, as I get older, maybe my patience has run out for grinding. I hate level grind for the sake of level grind. Just let me go through the story without spending hours on gaining levels. It's not fun for me.