3ka-kun

disclaimer: this review focuses on the gameplay of BD2, not music, visuals or anything of that sort. if you loved the gameplay of the first two BD games, do NOT buy this game, you will be disappointed this game takes everything that made the previous titles fun to play and throws it out the window. remember how you could plan out your entire turn before acting in the previous two titles? well, forget about that because the combat is now entirely "speed-based"/an ATB system. that is to say, there is a little bar under each party member that slowly fills with each action happening in combat (full bar = that party member gets their turn). mind you, you never really know how many actions it takes for the bar to fill, so forget planning ahead. need to heal up an ally? well, let's hope your healer's action bar fills up in time. what makes this even worse is 1. there is nothing like a "turn order time-line" or something that accurately depicts which party member/enemy moves before another. therefore, the order in which party members and enemies act might as well be random 2. there is now a weight system, i.e. every piece of equipment has a weight stat. this also affects the turn order, but the game never clarifies how the weight stat ties into the speed stat/overall turn order, making this already unintuitive combat system even more messy to make this unenjoyable combat system even worse, pretty much every boss now has counter attacks. the trigger for these attacks vary from boss to boss, but ultimately they basically get a cheap shot in on you for using actions such as healing, using items, offensive skills/spells and so on. can you play around these things if you put your mind to it? yea probably, but that doesn't change that it's a bad mechanic. not only is this "feature" slapped onto pretty much every boss, which adds no flavor to the battle and only serves to make the fight more obnoxious, you have ZERO way of knowing a boss' counter triggers beforehand. want to heal a party member that's almost dedge? well, the boss counter attacked your healer for doing their healing job and now your healer is dedge and your strategy is falling apart. having fun yet? the concept of counter attacks as a whole isn't even necessarily bad, but their excessive use, volatility and at times seemingly arbitrary nature makes the already poorly-designed combat system all the more frustrating they also removed the encounter rate slider. many people defend this design choice, saying it's not needed since BD2 has overworld encouters instead of random ones, but I believe that's an asinine excuse. the encounter rate slider enabled the player to tailor their experience to their very own wishes; wanna focus on story without being interrupted by encounters? turn down the encounter rate. wanna farm class exp to help a new class get going? pump up the encounter rate. and now, with this "great" change to overworld encounters, how do you level up your characters? by going through the trouble to run into every singular monster, while they actively run away from you. wow, such great QoL. wanna get lots of exp/class exp fast? well, have fun spending 10min on trying to scare as many enemies as possible into one corner of the map in order to chain-encounter them. some people might not consider this to be a big deal, but to me, it's an absolutely miserable, needlessly tedious experience and a massive downgrade compared to the previous titles. if a component of your game series goes from "absolute ease" to "obnoxious chore", then you 100% f'd up big time sometime along the development cycle. these are some of my main gripes with the game, but there are more problems with it the deeper you look. in all honesty, despite these flaws, the game has its good sides, the class design (both visually and gameplay-wise) in particular comes to mind. however, *even though* I want to mess around with the classes, because I genuinely do find them (mostly) well-designed, I simply can't bring myself to engage with such an unenjoyable and fundamentally flawed gameplay system. gameplay is the main factor from which I personally derive fun or enjoyment when playing a game, but sadly, Bravely Default 2 is an utter failure on this front. if you enjoy the combat system of the original Bravely Default series, *please* do not buy this game!

story: painfully slow, doesn't get going until about chapter 10 (20 chapters total). interesting story bits are few and far between and get swiftly interrupted by so-called "main cases", which don't progress the story at all and seemingly only exist to increase playtime gameplay: divided into solving cases and battling solving cases: incredibly repetitive fetch-style quests ranging from "talk to one or more npcs" to "enter dungeon, defeat one digimon". all cases ultimately boil down to "go there, now go there, then go there". occasionally interesting side stories, that one however likely can't be bothered to read, given how many damn textboxes the main story alone throws your way. overall, cases are generally an uninteresting slog solely existing to increase playtime, but fortunately, most are entirely optional battling: combat system is laughably shallow; somehow less intricate than mainline Pokemon. combat basically devolves into using a skill that doubles the damage of your next attack (if your digimon has even learned that skill) and then unleashing your strongest attack. rinse and repeat. there are various other skills, including buffing skills, but most of them are so poorly balanced (read as: weak) that there's hardly ever a point in using them. some boss enemies have so overtuned defense stats that you basically NEED specific digimon with defense-bypassing attacks if you don't wanna slowly grind away at a singular enemy for more than 10 minutes. I personally had more fun grinding out digimon and getting good skills for them than I had interacting with the main story, or even the main gameplay loop. I don't understand how anyone could, in good faith, rate this game higher than an 8, for every aspect of it is either lackluster, not fun or blatant playtime padding. if you want an RPG with a satisfying/engaging/entertaining/interesting/deep combat system, I strongly advise looking elsewhere