Bravely Default without sauce.

So the first game looked to be a standard old-school jrpg at first, but then when actually going through the story they bring more twists to the standard story these kinds of games have. Like, they brought enough twists to make the generic FF1 story feel fresh, and did some pretty interesting things with it. The writing and excecution there was far from perfect, but the series had a lot of potential going forward.

So what do they do for their third game? Just turn it into a generic jrpg without all the twists that made the first game so interesting in the first place!!!!!!!!!!!!

I don't get how, while the first game in the series brought a lot of quality of life to the classic jrpg formula, this entry seems way behind in that regard in comparison to other modern turn based jrpgs.
Heck, it's even missing a lot of features from the original (Turning off encounters, turning off exp, etc).

At the very least I'm in the camp of really liking the combat in this one, the new jobs are fun as heck to play as, and personally had a lot of fun beating the game underleveled by cheesing fights with beastmaster.

The turn order thing and counter mechanic in the combat is honestly fine, the game would be way too easy without it, and made for some interesting strategic choices to be made for each boss fight, you could usually build your party around the mechanics most bosses had. It did get a bit boring around the end where basically everything got countered though, but even that could be circumvented at that point.

Honestly people that say that the battle mechanics are cheap and too hard haven't actually played a difficult jrpg before. I beat the true final boss at exactly level 40 without much effort at all, if I tried really hard I could've beat it way lower, but then I would've had to grind JP and monster captures while avoiding exp (Turning off exp gain would've been nice for this!!!!!!!!!!)
Still though, the combat could've been way more balanced, the game really should have been harder, and normal dungeon crawling was really basic and boring.
Maybe I'm too used to SMT or EO where the dungeon crawling is actually good but there was basically no sauce in the dungeon crawling at all, making only combat and the boss fights interesting.

All in all, only play this if you really liked the combat of the other games / the demo, and don't really care about anything else.

My favorite ending in any VN tbh.

The thing with the danganronpa series is that you don't need to get TOO invested into the actual plot itself. I'd rather it have a hilarious plot like it does than it become too serious.

Even with that said the characters are super likeable and great.