Bravely Default II topic

PrivateBiscuit1 posted...

I've been meaning to play the first one. I own it but never actually played it.

Still hold up?

I just started the original game about a week ago. There's too much backtracking, but the annoyance is at least drastically reduced by the fact that you can turn off random battles whenever you want. I just finished chapter 3.

If I had one complaint about the design, it's that a lot of the regular mobs are way more dangerous than the bosses, as most of the bosses follow a set and easily exploitable pattern that means you just sit there cycling the same turns over and over again until you outlast them. There are areas where you can have 3 characters being crippled by a debilitating status you can't reliably block on the first turn of the battle, before anyone even moves. This can get especially bad if the enemy gets a first strike, and some of them just do absurd damage for the areas you find them.

The only boss to actually give me trouble was DeRosa - I had to go out of my way to learn Abate Lightning (Which is super easy to get - level 2 summoner). Once I had that, I was able to set up a pattern of 10+ 2-handed attacks at once --> everyone reequips shields and defaults twice to tank his counterattacks ---> everyone heals up to full on the next turn when he can't move --> repeat until dead. This roughly sums up most of the bosses so far. His charm attack was a nuisance, but it wasn't gamebreaking.

Also, I don't trust Airy at all~

It's a pretty good game that so far hasn't pulled many punches with storyline elements, with RPG mechanics that are both innovative and lacking at the same time. They honestly work better for random encounters than they do for boss fights, as the former tend to require more active amounts of strategy. Most boss fights so far have been 20+ minute slogs where I'm just waiting for them to die already. It doesn't take particularly long to figure out their patterns.