weirdly kind of ends up being a condemnation of AI, though not intentionally. when looking at games in the “fuse stuff together” genre popularized in the flash game days (little alchemy, doodle god, etc), those games were finite, but they were sensible, whereas this game is ‘infinite’ but only in the sense that it makes ai generated slurry after a certain point. “wow you combined rainbow dinosaur and steam train dragon to make rainbow steam dinosaur train” just utter drivel. go play little alchemy

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.