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Finally got around to playing and beating this game. What a great successor to a great game.
The story and characters where fun, and didn't do any disservice to the original. I was glad to see it wasn't just another cash-grab sequel that craps on its predecessor with the shallowest bit of effort. The story was decent, the flow of it was certainly less repetitive than BD, and still had a number of clever/interesting tricks to smile about. The dual-ending sidequest gimmick was interesting at times, having some choices being pretty clear cut, to muddled and grey, to just plain indifferent. At first, I was going with what I figured was the "best" choice regardless of which asterisk I actually wanted, but towards the end, I really wanted some jobs more than others and made what I considered "lesser" choices to that end. One thing that stood out to me was how it felt like different party members where "the" main character of the story. Yew's the obvious consideration for main character since he's the starting character and he's always there, but with all the moon stuff going on, Magnolia often felt like it too. And during all the side-quests Edea always felt like "the" main character, which was really cool. Tiz was just kinda there. He had BD. If I had to criticize this part of the game, it'd be that Yew and Tiz are a bit too similar.
The music was decent, but a lot more generic and less memorable than than BD. I was rather dissapointed by this since BD had so many great, memorable tracks that really stood out in uniqueness, quality, and quite frankly, were very catchy. The music used during each characters' special moves was the most notably let down, as they all sounded roughly the same. So yeah, not bad, maybe even good at times, but not great like BD. Fortunately, there's quite a bit of BD's original music sprinkled throughout the game, so those were nice. I miss dat world map music a lot too...
The game mechanics were fantastic, easily the highlight of this game. Definitely as good as BD, if not better. The new jobs, the old jobs, and all the tweaks to the system made for a really fun experience all the way through. They also added a lot of features to really streamline a lot of the menial tasks involved in preparing battle setups, like consecutive battle multipliers to gain JP faster, setting up repeating job commands to deal with scrubs, and setting up "favorites" to easily switch between different job/equipment/ability setups to suit the situation (which I used like crazy towards the end).
The visuals were pretty much as good as BD. Although seeing the opening sequence at the start of every chapter was a little annoying.
For some reason, the Voice Acting really stood out to me this time as being of good quality. I recall a few particularly good, emotional lines from Agnes from BD, but in this game, it was a lot of the subtle things I noticed being good, like sighs and other non-dialogue parts of the characters' conversations. Also the moon-speak French was hilarious and fun. I found myself very much enjoying figuring out what Magnolia was saying based on context, tone, and similarities to English and Spanish terms.
random spoilery things Kaiser being Denys was pretty easy to see coming. I knew something was up with Yoko, but I certainly didn't see that particular scenario coming. It was really interesting to see her story unfold along with a lot of the other new asterisk users revolving around the plague.
The use of End Layer in the title was pretty cool, whether it be the 1st world's apocalypse, the transformation to Send Player (calling back to BD's "airy lies"), or the rediculous use of it as SP in the final battle. That final battle 4th-wall breaking thing was really fun. I didn't believe for a second that it was actually deleting my save file, but holy crap I could see a younger me freaking out and just turning my game off. I love it when the devs screw around with use players like that.
So, there's definitely going to be a Bravely Third, I can only wonder if/how that will be incorporated into the game mechanics since so far, brave, default, and bravely second have been core game mechanics. I was glad to see Ringabell back, if only for a while, but I know we'll be seeing him again soon enough. Seeing Tiz and Anges get together at the end was nice, I imagine they won't be playable going forward. I really want to see Norende Village as a place I can actually go to!
So yeah, overall, I'd say it was a great game. I like BD a bit better, but that's probably the first-time nostalgia embeded in my head at this point.
For those curious, I played on hard, my team ended at lv 99 each mastering around 11 classes and legendarying about two each.
My Set up (How Edea kills all the things)
My scrub-killing training team was just to have each characters' primary job as whatever I was training at the time, and secondary ability as a Yokai tossing -aja spells left and right to kill everything and prompt another chain battle. Everyone had the Kaiser's Centurion ability so their MP/HP reset after each battle chain.
For my primary "real fight" boss-killing team, I use the following:
Edea Primary: Hawkeye (for its A-rank with Axes & Armor, it's ability to turn normal attacks into amped elemental attacks (Warhead) and pierce (Harpoon), and MOST importantly its Eagle Eye specialty to effectively guarantee my hits) Secondary: Fencer's Swordlplay (specifically for the swordplay command "bloody wolf" which maxed her P & M.Atk to 225%) Abilities: -Multitask (chance to follow up conventional attack with another conventional attack) -Frenetic Fighting (increase max hit count of conventional attacks from 16 to 32) -Quad Wield (replace helmet and armor with an additional weapon with its own separate attack during conventional attacks) -P.Attack 20% Up (moar power) *oddly enough, the "dual wield" ability to keep all the axes at full strength is kind of a waste of space. So I didn't use it. Equipment: 4 axes and Hermes Shoes for extra agility (agility adds to hit count, not to be confused with speed, which only increases turn priority)
Tiz Primary: Hawkeye (same reasons as Edea) Secondary: Performer's Singing (for Stat Buffs and throwing extra BP to other characters when needed. Also Zero Sum's whenever enemies increase their BP) Abilities: -Multitask (chance to follow up conventional attack with another conventional attack) -Frenetic Fighting (increase max hit count of conventional attacks from 16 to 32) -Triple Wield (replace helmet with an additional weapon with its own separate attack during conventional attacks) -P.Attack 20% Up (moar power) -Protect Ally (takes single-attack damage for other characters when their HP's bellow 20%) Equipment: 3 axes, plain high-P.Def armor, Hermes Shoes for agility
Magnolia Primary: White Mage (For high M.Def and healing the crap out of everything. Also the Angelic Ward specialty to cut damage sometimes helps) Secondary: Performer's Singing (same as Tiz, stat buffs, BP giving, and Zero Sum) Abilities: -Group-Cast Master (so all the healing stays potent) -Spellcraft (typically for Curaga Mist, Curaga Wall, Raise All Mist, and various other uses in specific situations) -Limit Breaker (raising the usual stat caps by 50% for the entire party, so max hit-count buff becomes 250%, max Speed, P & M.Atk, P & M.Def becomes 200%, etc...) Equipment: Rod, Staff, hat, robes with extra Mnd, and Life Ring (+1000 HP)
Yew Primary: Astrologian (For Elemental Boon increasing elemental attacks (particularly, Edea's and Tiz's Warhead-enabled conventional attacks), Elemental Barrier nullifying enemy elemental attacks, Status Barrier preventing ALL status ailments, the occasional buff to other stats when needed, and its Prescience specialty making his support moves always go before everyone else) Secondary: Time Mage's Time magic (For Quickaga increasing conventional attacks' hit counts, haste increasing speed, the occasional meteor attack, and most importantly, Reraise to automatically bring anyone back to life if they die) Abilities: -Group-Cast All (to change all my favorite buffing spells to affect my whole team at once) -Prolong Support (doubles stat-buff duration) -Time Slip (resets the battle 1 time in case I screw up) -M.Def 20% Up (moar Magic Defense) Equipment: 2 rods, Gold Hairpin to reduce MP costs by 25%, Robes with extra Int, and Life Ring (+1000 HP)
Usual Tactics: Yew keeps Reraise and status barrier up at all times, and also buffs Tiz & Edea's hitcount and elemental attacks once I'm ready to attack. Magnolia puts up a Curaga mist and either buffs M & P.Def or tosses her BP to whoever needs it Tiz plays the versitile role of lesser-attacker, Def buffer, and BP tosser, and Physical Damage taker/protector. Edea kills all the things. Usually over the course of two turns after I set her up with all the buffs. Here's how: -Due to Harpoon piercing defense, it didn't matter which enemy I was facing, the damage remained the same. High. -Warhead added an element AND added base damage to her physical attacks, based on her M.Atk (base 20, x1.5). Yew's Elemental Boon increased it even further (x1.5) -Bloody Wolf stance automatically takes her P.Atk and M.Atk to 225% (25% more than Limit Breaker allows). And the M.Atk still adds to physical attacks due to Warhead. -"P.Attack 20% up" buffs her base stats before the battle buffs take place. -Frenetic Fighting effectively doubles her potential conventional attack output. One Quickaga from Yew, her equipped Hermes shoes, and here Eagle Eye's Aim buff are enough to guarantee that each axe hits 32 time. -Quad Wield, by far, is the greatest source of damage output for Edea. Since conventional attacks count each weapon as a separate attack, every conventional attack becomes 4 separate attacks. -Multitask gives every one of my conventional attacks a 33% chance to repeat itself as an extra action. Though there's no way to increase those chances (Lucky Day doesn't work on it), it honestly felt more like 50-75%, because it happened a LOT. Maybe I'm just lucky.
Without using Bravely Second (which I typically only use defensively), the natural damage cap for any single action is 9999. It only takes 2 or 3 of the above in-battle buffs on Edea or Tiz for them to reach that cap during their axe-strikes. So after tossing Edea some BP from Magnolia or Tiz, I can have her primed for a 4-action assault within a turn or two. So she'll use 4 consecutive conventional attacks, with 4 hits of 9999 each, plus any multitask activation hits, resulting in 160K - 320K. If I manage to get Tiz primed to make all his attacks at the same time (capable of 3/4 of that damage due to 1 less axe), it'll kill most late-game bosses even of hard mode. I used this setup on pretty much all of the bosses after the Yokai, including the final boss, the post-game trap bosses, and the secret boss.
So, I checked to see what would happen if I did this in Bravely Second mode (where everything crits and the single damage is capped at 999999). I added the Special Axe attack to buff Edea's P.Atk even further past the limit to 275%, and since it's Bravely Second, I could do all the setup in a single turn before the enemy could act, and activate it. Each axe strike averaged about 70k damage. So with the above 4x4 assault, and multitask chance taken into account, that means she could output 1120K - 2240K damage, well beyond anything in the game, including Lv90+ Ba'als. I frigg'n love this game.
^ tl;dr, Edea can strike an enemy 1024 times in an instant before they can attack. And they won't.
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