Chido
2021
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
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
More of what makes Bravely Default good, none of what made Bravely Default bad, but just a bit less of what made Bravely Default special.
Gameplay wise BS is a straight improvement; subtle changes make battles smoother and faster, and the new battle chaining system encourages you to put more thought into how you go about random encounters instead of quad-Braving your way through them. The newly added classes are varying levels of absolutely bonkers, and even though they rebalanced returning classes to get rid of old cheese methods, there are plenty of new wacky interactions to take advantage of to whatever degree of broken you desire.
The story, by unfortunate necessity of being a sequel, is not quite as fresh and exciting as the first game's. It doesn't go as wild places, and it spends just a bit too much time on its various romance subplots. But it is good; the new characters are all fun, the story works well to keep you invested the whole way through, and most importantly, it does not make the first game's fatal third act structural mistake. It stays consistent the whole way through; one way or the other, it is much easier to get all the way through this game than BD1. And the soundtrack, while not quite as stellar or diverse as the first game (RYO really likes his electric guitars), still has a good amount of slappers, the best of which you're blessed with as soon as you hit Start.
And for the record, if you hear anyone complain about sidequest localization, they're literally just wrong; ignore them.
All in all Bravely Second is a great followup to Bravely Default, and absolutely worth playing if you want more of that magic.
Gameplay wise BS is a straight improvement; subtle changes make battles smoother and faster, and the new battle chaining system encourages you to put more thought into how you go about random encounters instead of quad-Braving your way through them. The newly added classes are varying levels of absolutely bonkers, and even though they rebalanced returning classes to get rid of old cheese methods, there are plenty of new wacky interactions to take advantage of to whatever degree of broken you desire.
The story, by unfortunate necessity of being a sequel, is not quite as fresh and exciting as the first game's. It doesn't go as wild places, and it spends just a bit too much time on its various romance subplots. But it is good; the new characters are all fun, the story works well to keep you invested the whole way through, and most importantly, it does not make the first game's fatal third act structural mistake. It stays consistent the whole way through; one way or the other, it is much easier to get all the way through this game than BD1. And the soundtrack, while not quite as stellar or diverse as the first game (RYO really likes his electric guitars), still has a good amount of slappers, the best of which you're blessed with as soon as you hit Start.
And for the record, if you hear anyone complain about sidequest localization, they're literally just wrong; ignore them.
All in all Bravely Second is a great followup to Bravely Default, and absolutely worth playing if you want more of that magic.
2013
Heroically Neutral is the best Final Fantasy game ever made. A gold standard for what a traditional RPG should strive to be, classic ideas with new twists and modern polish and quality.
The titular main systems, "Courage" and "Standard", take the most basic aspect of a Turn Based RPG (i.e. Turns) andturns transforms them into a resource to be used and abused, making even simple actions like attacking (Put yourself into Turn Debt to spam attacks but leave yourself a sitting duck) or defending (amass spare BP to pay off the Turn Loan Sharks when you really need it) feel fresh. The wide variety of classes and the high degree of class customization gives you an incredible amount of freedom with how you want to play; you can tailor your party to make whatever class you think is coolest (cough Dark Knight) viable, and the equally large variety of bosses and challenges later on in the game encourages experimentation with different solutions (or you could break the game balance over your knee with a small loan of a million BP to become part of the Turn 1%). Outside of battles a surprisingly convenient set of QOL options lets you freely control the difficulty and random encounter rates at any time, whether you want to put it at 0% to speed through a dungeon for items or 200% and Easy to grind out a new job (you can even change the rate you acquire gold, experience, and job experience - individually, so you can keep yourself from getting overlevelled if becoming too huge is against your prerogative).
The presentation is probably some of the best the 3DS ever had. The chibi character models and soft textures somehow perfectly utilize the fuzziness of the 3DS' low resolution to blend in with the beautiful handpainted backgrounds; every location and every character in the game is unique and memorable. The soundtrack by Revo is similarly bangertastic, with the memorability and slappability of the main character themes even being used as a core game mechanic. And the english dub cast knocks it out of the park, giving some of the most spirited performances the 3DS' tinny speakers can provide.
Without actually spoiling Defiantly Basic, suffice it to say the story is a great take on the classic formula, with a wide range of memorable and thoroughly developed characters, and an amazingly satisfying conclusion. It does, infamously, stumble near the end; a very significant blight on what could otherwise be a perfect game. It's impossible to downplay; it's tough to get through even for someone who loves the game. But if you can endure it, you're rewarded with one of the most spectacular endings out there. I sincerely pray that one day this game can get remade and its foibles improved, so that more people can experience the beauty of Valiantly Typical without the massive pitfall in the way - as the absolute classic it deserves to be.
Keep all of that in mind for Bravely Default 2 and be ready to be fucking disappointed
The titular main systems, "Courage" and "Standard", take the most basic aspect of a Turn Based RPG (i.e. Turns) and
The presentation is probably some of the best the 3DS ever had. The chibi character models and soft textures somehow perfectly utilize the fuzziness of the 3DS' low resolution to blend in with the beautiful handpainted backgrounds; every location and every character in the game is unique and memorable. The soundtrack by Revo is similarly bangertastic, with the memorability and slappability of the main character themes even being used as a core game mechanic. And the english dub cast knocks it out of the park, giving some of the most spirited performances the 3DS' tinny speakers can provide.
Without actually spoiling Defiantly Basic, suffice it to say the story is a great take on the classic formula, with a wide range of memorable and thoroughly developed characters, and an amazingly satisfying conclusion. It does, infamously, stumble near the end; a very significant blight on what could otherwise be a perfect game. It's impossible to downplay; it's tough to get through even for someone who loves the game. But if you can endure it, you're rewarded with one of the most spectacular endings out there. I sincerely pray that one day this game can get remade and its foibles improved, so that more people can experience the beauty of Valiantly Typical without the massive pitfall in the way - as the absolute classic it deserves to be.
Keep all of that in mind for Bravely Default 2 and be ready to be fucking disappointed
2016
More like Smellvet Blowe
2015
Unfortunately Mikleo's not the only thing in this game that sucks cock
2019
Makers of best Arena Shooters of all time make best Battle Royale of all time whoda thunk
2016
The game that was too good to survive. Even if you can't find a multiplayer match the single player is probably the best "Campaign in a MP Shooter" since Modern Warfare 2 (wonder why that is). If you can find a multiplayer match it's one of the most exhilarating experiences you can have in a game (if you're good). I'd sell at least one nut for a third game
2014
Lowkey better core gameplay than 2 but it doesn't have a grappling hook so nobody will believe you
2011
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
2010
One of the worst starts a JRPG's ever had wherein you spend several hours before it even lets you pretend to start playing it for real. Surprisingly short main story, a fairly standard issue plot with a few fun twists and turns, and a combat system with good ideas that unfortunately very quickly devolves into spamming super-effective moves; and yet, somehow, it's still the best modern CC Tales game. Formerly straightest game in the series
They should have had the courage to not turn this dream into reality
2005
Sandwiched between two more popular Tales games and probably better than at least one of them. Top-tier story and great cast with one of the best "Unlikable" Protagonists in fiction. Gameplay is good even if Free Run breaks it in half because they didn't know how to design fights around 3D movement yet. Surprisingly straight even after they try to trick you through the whole game
2003
Definitely The Tales Game of all time
Are your 2nd Mystic Artes worth the main character slowly turning into a surfer on drugs and a cringe-ass nae-nae pirate getting forcibly attached to you at the hip? The answer may surprise you
2008
A somewhat rough start belies one of the best Tales games ever made; arguably the turning point when the series shifted from Action RPG to Character Action with Numbers. Fantastic cast of characters and performances (in both languages), a great (though unfortunately quite unfocused) story, and beautiful visuals and music compliment a fun and in-depth combat system that keeps getting more complex almost all the way through the end of the game, with plenty of difficult side and endgame content to flex on once you've mastered it.
2nd Gayest game in the series after Zestiria
2nd Gayest game in the series after Zestiria