I've reached a very strange part in my life where Shadow the Hedgehog resonates with me more than it should.
Not the hilarious over the top edginess (though I must admit Obliterating Everything That's Not Your Friend sounds more appealing every day), but the actual themes of accepting all the different parts of yourself as being important to who you are. I worry sometimes that as I grow older and more cynical I lose touch with the dumb kid inside me that thought Shadow The Hedgehog saying Damn was the sickest shit imaginable, and it makes me sad that that part of myself might be gone forever and I might be worse for it; but then I listen to a good dose of Crush 40 and that part of me lights up again, and I realize that dumb kid forms the foundation of who I am today, and I continue to strive every day to be the person I want to be. Just like Shadow is Good and Evil in equal measure, there's no reason to be ashamed of who we once were, and no reason to be worried about who we might become. We Are All, We Are All, We Are.

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This game fucking sucks, don't play it.

The actual pinnacle of TP Tales game design. The core combat is faster and more combo oriented than ever before, the characters are all mechanically unique and fun to play in different ways, and an in-depth skill progression system means you always have new tools to play with and new goals to work towards. Outside of battle, the story and characters are great with some absolutely wild twists and turns, and QOL features make it one of the easiest Tales games to complete. Mostly straight but has some strong undertones

Bravely Default 2 is quite possibly one of the worst, and definitely the most insulting, games I have ever played in my entire life. Literally every single aspect is worse than the first game, which came out 9 years earlier and $20 cheaper. Do not play if you value your time, your money, and your sanity.

In-battle gameplay loses most of the menuing improvements of Bravely Second and replaces the round turn system (i.e. speed determines order but everyone gets 1 Turn Per Turn) with a poor attempt at Active Time Battle, where slow classes are regularly lapped by enemies getting 2-3 turns before you can get 1. Compounding the speed problem is a new and completely unecessary weight system for equipment, which serves no purpose other than to make slow classes even slower, and create some extreme headaches when switching equipment between classes.
As for the classes themselves, Bravely Default 2 builds off of Bravely Second's incredibly unique and borderline wacky class additions by making most of its classes extremely typical and boring; abilities from the first two games are swapped between classes seemingly for no reason, leading to a lot of the classes with unique identities from the first games blending together and feeling samey; when BD2 does try to have a class standout with unique mechanics, they tend to make a class that doesn't even synergize with itself. One notable example is Spiritmaster, which when maxed out passively removes all of your buffs, including the one unique to that class. There is no way to turn this off once that character has mastered that class other than to just not have it equipped, turning what would be a great support class into a straight up trap.
Baffling gameplay decisions aren't just limited to your side of the aisle; new to Bravely Default 2 is the Counter system; previously a unique (and well thought out) feature of One Guy from the previous games is now haphazardly slapped onto Every Single Enemy In The Game. If you hit a specific trigger (which is unique for every enemy type) (which there is no way to learn beforehand, or to keep track of afterwards, other than triggering it) (which are not guaranteed to happen, meaning you can try to learn a trigger and get fooled into thinking it doesn't exist until it then proceeds to kill you), the enemy gets a free action in retaliation. These go from Annoying at the start of the game (Buff yourself with the last class you got and have the next boss automatically steal your buffs) to Ridiculous later on (Try to use an item and get hit with a free party-wide ballslap). There are eventually ways to counteract some of these counters (that are borderline mandatory to have on everyone by the end), helping the problem a little bit... until the endgame introduces Counter Any Ability, which punishes you for having the audacity to Do Anything by giving bosses free BP with which to spam turns at you while you struggle to keep up (remember all that speed nonsense from earlier). What should be the highlight of the game, fun and uniquely challenging bossfights, becomes a repeated exercise in frustration as all of them devolve into the boss simply overwhelming you for free.
Outside of battling, the overworld replaces invisible random encounters with enemies on the map, which means you no longer have the ability to adjust your random encounter rate to 0% or 200% at any time, making both grinding and traversal more tedious. The traversal problem is also not helped by BD2 getting rid of the 3DS games' minimap, making it very easy to get lost in the game's bland and mazelike dungeons. There are also the sidequests; previously very clearly marked and always providing a new job or something else of equal importance, now hidden in places you have no reason to be in, hard to keep track of, and never worth the effort to do.

The saving grace of many an RPG with bad gameplay, The Story, is treated like an afterthought in BD2 to an embarrassing degree. The well thought out world and fun story with twists and turns of BD1 is followed up by a generic, cookie cutter fantasyland with plot points checked off an Early FF Homage shopping list and barely given any thought, with no cohesion between chapters as you're shipped off to the next series of grating scenes and boss fights. The party's main defining trait is being more boring than the party of BD1; noone has much of a character arc or an especially notable personality (the main character Seth being the worst, perhaps one of the blandest protagoni in gaming history). Most of the bosses are even worse; where BD took the time to explore and develop its bosses as much as it could (perhaps to its own detriment), most of BD2's bosses are thrown at you out of nowhere and die without leaving any impression. The only exception to this is the first two bosses in the game, who actually do have a nice development arc throughout the game... that can only be seen through well out of the way sidequests. Good luck with those.

Despite the benefit of being on a more powerful system, BD2 manages to somehow look worse than the 3DS games. The game may be much sharper at its higher resolution, but it loses out on the fuzziness that complimented the first game's art style, and it doesn't try to make up for it in other ways; the still chibi characters with the now modeled (instead of textured) faces puts the game firmly into the uncanny valley, especially when the cutscenes love to give you closeups that are much less flattering than the directors thought they were. They also try to make use of more dynamic camera angles in battle, which generally just makes what's actually happening a lot harder to follow (not helped by bosses loving to flash moves or buffs at incredibly high speeds).
And unfortunately, while they did get REVO back to do the soundtrack, they also squandered the opportunity by mostly having him do remixes of previous tracks instead of new motifs (which would be more appropriate for a game that is very explicit about having nothing to do with previous games). The soundtrack ranges from good (the main battle theme and about 2 of the 5 various boss themes) to bad (the character themes lacking the energy of BD1; the best thing you can say about them is that you can tell which one is which) to actively headache inducing. By the time of the third chapter, the absolutely atrocious town theme, combined with the increasingly nonsense boss mechanics and absolutely inane writing combined to give me an actual splitting migraine. I cannot name another game off the top of my head bad enough to actually cause me physical agony, but BD2 is just that kind of special.

Bravely Default 2 is so bad that for a time it sent me into an actual depression. It stripped me of my optimism and threw it back in my face for daring to think that a sequel would improve, in any way, off of the games that I love. My only hope is that Square Enix reevaluates themselves after this game and Octopath Traveler (another stinker) and manages to make the Bravely sequel we actually deserve.

tl;dr wish I could give it a 0