Bravely Default

[Kaiser Infinity]

This game's pretty solid. I don't think I've enjoyed a handheld RPG like this since Golden Sun. It may as well be a traditional Final Fantasy game with a twist on the turn-based paradigm. I only wish I could turn the voices off and enjoy it more like I did those older entries in the series. Maddox is right; games should really stop trying to be like movies or TV: http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=game_stories_suck

That being said, I love that this game is so much like a classic RPG. I prefer it to the highly vaunted Xenoblade and other MMO-like RPGs. Not only does it inject a brilliantly subtle innovation into the combat system with Brave and Default--where Brave let's you take extra turns in advance and Default let's you store up Brave Points while you guard--it also weaves in StreetPass and other trendy mobile-social conventions, like town-building and microtransactions, in the most unobtrusive and graceful way. It is a solid single-player experience first, and everything else is secondary and in the service of the first. It's a well-balanced game you can buy at a store.

[Kaiser Infinity]

Played up to a little more than halfway. My opinion of the game's unchanged until you get to Chapter 5. Spoilers below:

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Chapter 5 is where the game's plot takes a page from Groundhog Day and, in the service of the plot, has you redo all or only the four essential dungeons and boss fights with stronger enemies. Chapters 6, 7 and 8 are the same, with some variations like boss teamups and other happenings in 8, and with the characters remaining cognizant of it all; the original version of this game released in Japan didn't come with most of the handy functionalities like Bravely Second and manually adjusting the game difficulty, or the bonus vampire castle in the last chapter. This second half of the game is where you get hints that something may be wrong with your course of action, and you have two choices: either break the cycle and get the "good" ending, or keep blindly slogging forward and let your characters figure out the plot in order to get the "true ending". This seems backwards, but the internal logic of the game seems to justify it.

The point of these redundant chapters, besides the storytelling, is to let you master more job classes before facing off against the big bad, and the story itself seems like a subversion of the original Final Fantasy. Regardless, I felt tired and insulted at realizing what I had to do to continue, so I decided to stop and just look up the ending. The twist isn't so much clever as it is devious and evil, almost like it's straight out of a horror game. Maybe it would be a worthy payoff for someone who had the time and patience to dedicate to regrinding and refighting the same bosses and dungeons 3 times over, but for my patience, the payoff wasn't worth the effort. You can probably get a good handful of philosophical takeaways from the complete story, which did get interesting by the end of Chapter 4, but I work full time and I've got crap to do, so it's not for me. I felt like I was being dicked around.

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Oh, and the game's not without some localization changes. Everyone's been aged up by 3 years, so age them back to get a better feel for the characters if yoy want to play. Some of the costumes were made a little less revealing for no other reason than to emphasize that, whether they're 14 or 17 years old, their chibi character models still look like children, so there should be a little more fabric on the bravo bikini and bunny suit. I can promise you the first four chapters are worth playing, unless you want to finish the game. Otherwise, I'd recommend just playing the old Final Fantasy RPGs or any other series on the Nintendo or SEGA consoles.

[Magi_Hero]

Irony is they give you all that crap to grind with, but the game is still hard at Lv 99.

[Kaiser Infinity]

That should be a good thing, but it's like running a marathon in several loops instead of one. I'll more likely bow out on the first course than on the second, which gives me something new to see.

I started the game over before Chapter 3 once in order to reroll my character's jobs and grind my way up proper on Hard Mode and +100% encounter rate, resolving to stick to one class at a time and master it before moving to the next one. That felt great, and with the ability to speed up the combat animations and set my battle commands to auto-loop, it made grinding more of a breeze. All that still isn't worth the thing punch that is realizing you're supposed to grind through everything all over again. It's one thing if I have an option to grind that isn't just recycling boss fights. It's another thing if I have to do it to advance the story.