I now get the people that told me that Halo was boring because it took an eternity to kill anything. Some enemies take like TEN strikes to kill in the early game, and your troops move like TWO tiles per turn, so every combat takes FOREVER.

Also, this games has some of the worse communication I’ve seen in a game. Sometimes you hit an enemy and that enemy moves, sometimes you do extra damage when he’s against a wall, sometimes when he’s trapped between several characters from your team they also get like a shot at him, but the game doesn’t explain why this happen, or when. It looks like it has these cool intricate systems but it refuses to present them to the player. And no amount of interesting classes or fun team compositions or complex scenarios can save such a flawed experience.

The story is fine, I guess, I mean, they are trying at least.

It also looks ugly. I don’t get how this looks worse than both previous versions. The characters portraits are fire tho.

Final Fantasy IX is slow, and I don't just mean in terms of combat. Everything about this game is slow; moving around towns and the overworld, the story, just how long this thing takes to get going and how much time it feels like is spent between major story beats. I know modern rereleases speed things up, but I played the original PS1 version because I adore its aesthetic and the rereleases look gross to me (late era PS1 > high end mobile game aesthetic, always).

The story also isn't a whole lot to write home about. Most of the cast is mostly unlikable sans Vivi. Zidane especially is a real creep towards women and never feels like he gets better over the course of the game.

This also just feels like an overcorrection to FF8; that game was packed full of systems like junctioning, drawing, and Guardian Force collecting. Not all of it worked; to about 60% of the playerbase it was probably impenetrable, 25% probably found ways to easily exploit it, and then the remaining 15% probably played it sorta close to "correctly". But the way these systems interacted with each other was really ambitious and fun to figure out.

FF9 pulls things far back, and is the least mechanically involved game in the series since 4. All that's really there are abilities you can learn from equipment, which doesn't take a whole lot of thought and is pretty automated. I liked how basic FF4 was, but mostly because it had excellent pacing and fun combat and story which this game lacks. The abilities system is something you'll have to consider at the very end of the game; the final boss has an attack called Grand Cross which can inflict basically every status move on you, and you'll need to have at least some abilities equipped in order to negate this effect to not have the fight be damn near impossible. This is a cool way to force the player to consider abilities, but I think the fact that it only comes up once at the very end of the game is not very good game design.

Despite this, I like the game (I operate at thee stars being "good," so I have more room to consider how good games are since I don't play a lot of bad games). But why is that? Well, it's all about that atmosphere, baby. This game feels like a chill breeze on a Sunday morning. The audiovisual world it creates is tremendous. The slow combat is something you can ease yourself into and just kind of sit back and enjoy. Prior to picking it back up a couple times in the last year or two to finally finish it, I played over half of this game during 2022 trips and vacations; on a car trip to see my sister graduate college, at an AirBNB by the beach, on a train to visit a friend. I think it'll always intrinsically be linked to those experiences to me, and it's the perfect trip game. Something you can play passively and enjoy the sights and sounds while having conversations with others with you in your vicinity.

It's also a pretty solid and competently designed. Like, aside from maybe the final boss everything felt fairly fair and balanced.

From what I've seen, it appears that people think this is one of the better games in the series as a whole, and I sincerely hope that's not true. This game is hardly much of an improvement on the second game, making strides in combat through the job system, but not really improving anywhere else. There's still hardly any bosses (I think I fought 8, with 4 of them being at the end of the game). There's still hardly much for story. A lot of the game is spent just traveling around collecting specific items that you're just supposed to find. I feel like it would be real dumb without a walkthrough, mostly later on once you get a ship and have basically no direction since you can go almost anywhere. Towards the end some of the enemies got kinda annoying, then they got much better, and then they sprinkled some real shitheads at the very end. One enemy has a strong spell that hits the whole party, while also being able to revive other enemies. You can encounter a team of 4 of them at once. As far as the jobs go, it was kinda cool I guess? You can't even switch jobs until you reach level 20, which is likely about halfway through the game. Even then, the casters still learn spells until like level 41-43, so switching them early just means you don't get the best spells on them. Biggest complaint has to go to the lack of any real characters. The hero is silent, but so is the party since they're all characters you recruit/create. It makes the story pretty bland, which sucks because there are actual cool events in the story.

I tried once the PS2 version and I gave up for being so boring the story and the battle system is boring.
This year gave another try with the remastered version and I enjoyed more, the skill system got so much better.
The battle system is still poor to me, once you get the good combinations of settings, you barely need to interfere.
The story for me is still boring, I don't really care about the characters, with the most horrible main character of the entire series. It gets even worse towards the end. Nothing more boring than the narrator telling us the story, what's happening. One of the weakest titles of the series.

yes i know this is an essay and a half and i am sorry
i finally took the time to finish the sequel to 2 of my favorite rpgs ever and i have… thoughts.

bravely default 2 is the definition of if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. every single deviation from the formula created by default and second ends up being for the worse.
the first thing i noticed when starting the game is all the accessbility and ui functions from the first 2 games that have been removed. you can no longer turn off random encounters, in favor of overworld encounters that can only be toggled by items. secondarily, auto battle has been completely neutered and UI features like creating favorites of your class compositions are gone entirely. there is also a new weight system where equipment has a weight and if you go a single point over your character’s capacity they lose dozens of stats. it isn’t an AWFUL idea but in practice it means new equipment has to be introduced at a trickle and the micromanagement is unfun and has such minor gains instead of the usually bump in power when reaching a new area. these things in a vacuum could be fine and a way to engage the player more (besides the removal of ui features there’s no excuse for that) but they also made the new overworld encounters as cumbersome as possible.

almost every random encounter from start to finish contains 4-6 enemies which QUICKLY becomes exhausting. most of my time was spent running from enemies because fighting such large groups was just unenjoyable and made grinding both unfun and annoyingly slow when grinding was one of my favorite activities in the first 2 games. they also removed basically all the exp multipliers and consistent battle chaining meaning by the late game bosses grinding levels is slow, arduous, and absolutely no fun. this could also be excused as a balance thing, and for most of the game it is, but the final few fights increase in power exponentially and grinding either exp, new class compositions, or both becomes practically necessary.

alongside the tedium of the gameplay changes, the story was just as tedious. the core cast just is not as compelling as any of the characters from the first games and the side characters do little to add to that. seth, the main character, is a played-straight self insert with barely any personality or plot significance to speak of, gloria is a princess of a forgotten kingdom with all the charisma of a sad clown, and elvis is scottish. the one bright spot in the core cast is adelle, who is the only one of our 4 playable characters with depth, personality and story significance. unfortunately, the side characters do the game no favors either. the villains are rotated through in minutes with little fanfare and the lucky few that get sidequests expanding on them still don’t reach the heights of the bosses in the first 2 games.

on that point, the sidequest system is also just spectacularly awful. there are about 100 sidequests scattered throughout the world that pop up with no warning and mostly amount to busy work fetch quests that really demonstrate the game’s lacking fast travel and methods of map traversal. there’s also no quest log which feels asinine when the quests are numbered and give no indication of when and where they’ll pop up. i did basically all the sidequests i could find for the first few chapters and then ignored all but the most obviously story relevant for the rest of the game, but as someone with that completionist itch, nothing about this game’s quest system felt like they were designed with people actually DOING them in mind.

as should be obvious with the 100 fetch quests, the name of the game here is PADDING. the game is easily the longest bravely game start to finish but i would also easily say it has the LEAST content. the dungeons are all lazy mazes that grow exponentially larger past the halfway point, combat feels sluggish, the environments are mostly flat plains that your party slowly runs across (unlike most rpgs, there are no boats, airships, bikes, or chocobos, it’s just you and your feet the entire journey), and there are actually LESS jobs than bravely second, going from 30 to 24, and yet the balancing of the jobs is also worse than ever.

jobs in this game are all over the place from their usefulness to even just the skills they learn. for some reason, all the magic classes now learn spells individually, meaning the level ups are wasted on individual spells like fire and thunder, making level ups on some classes just not feel all that impactful and making their final spell lists pretty lackluster. worse than that, there are some useless jobs like arcanist and gambler which require super specific set ups for minimal gains, temporarily overpowered jobs like thief that rip the midgame’s difficulty in half, and jobs like beastmaster that have uncapped permanent buffs that can make the entire game’s difficulty crumble.

speaking of difficulty and balance, the changes to the battle system and how the game creates challenge are also the main barrier to why i never played this game past chapter 1 until now. as mentioned, random encounters are all massive groups from the get go which makes them miserable to fight and makes combat feel like a punishment for not dodging rather than dodging being a last ditch effort when necessary. but the main villain here that casts a horrible shadow over the game from the first boss to the last is the counter system. new to bravely default 2 is the ability for bosses to counter and gain an extra action when you trigger some surprise condition. there are no ways in game to see what bosses have what counters beyond trial and error, and the counters can be excruciatingly specific. as an example, the first boss you’re likely to encounter, a wolf from an early sidequest, counter freelancer abilities with an extra attack that will 1 or 2 shot most of your party before you have even been tutorialized on what counters are. freelancer is the first job you get, and one of only THREE you will likely have at that point, and the game IMMEDIATELY punishes you for using it. the gamefeel this creates is just miserable and feels like punishing players for using the tools given to them. this problem is ALL over chapter 1. expect pretty much every boss in chapter 1 to counter the most recent job you’ve obtained, making it useless to try out the new classes you rightfully earned. it makes chapter 1 not only brutally difficult and frustrating, but just plain not fun. this first chapter is where my previous 3 playthroughs all ended, but this time when i powered through, i was gifted with a saving grace that also ruins the game’s difficulty.

in chapter 2, you unlock the ranger class which comes with a new passive ability, counter-savvy. counter-savvy singlehandedly brings the difficulty down from unforgiving to baby easy in seconds. it gives you a ONE HUNDRED percent chance to dodge all physical and status based counters (magic counters still land but they’re very few and far between) making the counter system immediately pointless for the next 75% of the game. the game created a problem and then hands you a one size fits all solution instead of just balancing things better.

at this point, the game became a cakewalk for a while. not a single boss between when you get ranger in chapter 2 and the middle of chapter 5 gave me ANY grief and most were easily felled by the sheer imbalance of some of these classes. unfortunately, around chapter 5+ the game starts to realize that it has made itself too easy and decides to heap on more bullshit. from this point on, every boss will generate bp (essentially bankable extra turns) from you using basically any ability in the game (and for end game bosses, LITERALLY any ability in the game) making cheese strats essentially required to fell the bosses’ massive HP pools before they fire off as many actions as they want all for free. the name of the game in both the beginning and end game is giving you tools and then smacking you for not using specific ones.

despite all this, i do want to include my few positives since i don’t want to pretend there were none. as mentioned, adelle is a real standout for the character writing, and there are some great side characters i didn’t mention like martha and lonsdale. i also actually surprisingly liked the implementation of turn meters instead of all actions occuring at the same time. finally, that stretch from chapters 2-5 where the game was super easy was also the most fun i had with the game. it was satisfying felling bosses, sometimes in a single turn, using the ridiculous tools the games gives you in the midgame, even if it felt a bit unearned and as such wasn’t very fulfilling.

just as a closing note on the negatives, the switch version of the game runs just embarassingly bad. some environments have hideous bloom that makes everything look horrendous, inputs sometimes drop for no reason, battles freeze for so long randomly that i fear a crash (for what it’s worth, i’ve only encountered 1 crash while playing and it was not during this playthrough), and cutscenes lag and load like crazy. i’ve heard good things about the PC port if your PC can run it (mine definitely cannot) so if you’re still interested in playing i would say skip the switch version for that.

overall, bravely default 2 fails both as a sequel and as an rpg. for fans of the series, the balancing is worse, the grind is worse, the story is less compelling, and key features from past games are gone for no reason. for people just getting into the series, the early game is frustrating, the mid game is too easy, and the late game is bullshit. it’s a game only for the biggest of masochists and i recommend it to essentially no one even as someone whose favorite traditional jrpg of all time is bravely second.

i do enjoy experimentation in games. i swear i do! but i think having us follow eight different characters around was a bit more than the writers and the devs could handle.

as a result, every character's route feels more like a rushed summary, than an actual story that you can get emotional about. hikari's story is really very tragic! temenos's story could have been a great murder mystery! but we move around so fast, constantly swapping between characters, that it's difficult to get attached to anyone. the pacing is off, too. it's bad.

another thing: why are these characters all following each other? i mean, really. osvald was imprisoned for murdering his wife and child. one of his actions is mugging strangers. so why would relatively normal people like agnea or partitio even believe a thing he says? the group dynamics are so bland! bland, bland, bland! they accept each other without a single thought. they all come from different backgrounds, so why would they choose to travel together? fight for each other?

i think a game like dragon age origin does this better. these people all have a good reason for travelling together, but most of them can't stand each other. which is fun! i love seeing people bicker and argue just because they're petty! a manga i enjoy (dungeon meshi) does fun group dynamics really well, too. i like it when characters are weirded out by each other! it's even better if they don't bother to hide their discomfort!

all in all, my thoughts are: this is game is a mess, with some fun ideas. i would recommend it to others! the music is beautiful, the gameplay is fun, and if you're lucky, you might like one or two characters. but in the future, i hope the devs ignore the title OCTOPATH and let us follow... maybe four or five characters in total, with stronger, better written stories. that is my hope for octopath traveler 3.

Just not feeling it. I like the music. I can't form my opinion about the look? I just genuinely cannot. I'm not compelled to play but I can't really find too much negative to say. I mostly feel uncompelled and unconvinced as to this game's quality either way.

**EDIT:

Thought about it more and I'm feeling real negative after my initial time with the game. Started with Castti and the first thing I had to do was a classic dungeon dive to kill a boss which was OK but the dungeon design is like... sub FF4 level quality. The dungeons/paths I went down were just straight lines with branches for treasure chests. And the treasures weren't very exciting!

The battle system has some cool stuff but I was already getting tired of random encounters after 3 hours. That's not a good sign!

The systems outside of the battles, like the bribing people or selling stuff to people (I got Partitio and Hikari) are just sort of... game design? Like what's the point of this stuff? It just feels inserted into the game to have stuff in the game. It doesn't really serve a fluid purpose.

Also I have decided... I don't like the HD-2D. The name is dumb. And... it looks bad!

The music is amazing I will probably listen to the soundtrack but I can't imagine spending 10 hours in this game, lest the 80 required to do all the stuff.

I went out of this game feeling kinda unsatisfied by the end, not getting why I felt this way. But after a week, I can confidently say that this game could've been a lot more. The platforming of this game is embarrassingly easy and way too grind heavy. There's not much variety to said platforming and challenges in the game, with a lot of the character duels just being just getting a higher score or do a pretty easy platforming challenge. The game itself has a really solid foundation with how tight and fluid the player is with all the options in the world for mobility.

Combat is just straight up tedious and not great, and the game puts you in a lot more combat scenarios more than it should. There's no impact to landing hits and the game overwhelms you with cops after just completing tags in the overworld, which makes maneuvering around so annoying to do when you're trying to find the last tags. Bathroom stalls are also not that prevalent so it makes it annoying to get rid of cops. The only parts of combat that I liked was fighting against the turrets, helicopters, and the bosses since they actually incorporate the game's movement and tagging.

The presentation itself is pretty good but honestly nowhere near as bold and expressive as Jet Set Radio Future. The level design too doesn't really give me much in terms of challenge or even world building like Jet Set Radio Future. This game is just Jet Set Radio Future on the surface level, which is the game's biggest detriment but it also at least makes the game stand on its own with what it wants to do. Maybe a sequel or DLC expansion can fix a lot of the problems that I have with this game, there's a lot of good for this game.