Bravely Second - 10 seconds of boldness, 100 hours of bad math

[Dracos]

So, flaws and all, I am a pretty big fan of Bravely default.  I thought they were fairly clever, and was looking forward to the sequel, despite my eyes being a bit blind to flaws with it.  ANd yeah, there were many.  It was hopeful that the second time around they'd do better.

The short of it is...  they didn't really.  Perhaps the same could be said, but this isn't a significant step up, especially as one of their major new mechanics was already used in the first one.  It reflected the most critical problems that the bravely series has.

The first...is an egregious reuse of content. 

Fully 60+ percent of the terrain space used in Bravely Second is from Bravely Default.  Some used multiple times.  Bravely Default had already worn out the welcome of many of these areas by having them show up 3-4 times in the original game.  Even when it requires stretching plausibility of the landscape they keep it up, such as Hartford's civil war defensive line still sitting there unchanged.  A good percentage of the villain cast of the original also shows up again, almost all with rather absurd new takes on life (and the ability to beat them up to get their classes).

Scenery gets reused, the postgame boss is the same, dozens of bosses are the same, half the main cast is the same...  There's maybe about 2 dozen non-boss enemy sprites in the game, reused sometimes as many as 4-5 times each.  Many of these could potentially be waved off, but in both games, this is used extensively to extend the hours you spend with the game and poorly done.  It's like they recognized they had a small budget on both, decided to be clever about it ... but failed at being reasonable with their cleverness and just outstay its welcome.  Discussing it with others, I've found in hindsight they did it enough that many people just didn't get all the way through the repeats of Bravely Default, much less even start the repeats of Bravely Second.


The second...is generally poor mathematical balancing.  The second and third classes you get in the game are basically the ultimate classes, and while more options to slightly improve on that do open up, pretty much everything is numerically inferior to Wizard and Bishop, so having 27 other classes show up after that pretty much doesn't give them any chance to shine.  Weapon combat significantly advantages dex based weapons, which tend to hit harder, more often, and crit better, but this time around, Spirit Magic (Costing almost nothing) basically renders physical combat a far background element.  It also renders most magic that follows it ridiculously underwhelming when combined with spellcraft (an enormously powerful early game ability).  None of the returning classes have been significantly rebalanced in magic or stats, though minor resquencing of abilities has happened.  The end result being that the return classes (Making up more than half of the available classes) are generally numerically inferior across the board and with their actions to the new classes.  White mage or Red Mage vs Bishop is fairly egregious, with both of them costing vastly more mp for significantly weaker effects at every level of their spellcasting.  I don't think I even gave black mage a chance, as it was obvious just looking at its spells that it would be losing dramatically to spirit magic.

Which again, basically cost nothing to use.  So why use any of the much more expensive magic?  Have a ridiculously long mp bar alongside tons of power.  But class balance isn't alone in the problems.  JP is a resource that is so constrained (by a tiny max cap on it), that even pretending to go after maxing classes will easily see you at level 99 with plenty of money to buy their outrageous amount of unnecessary money sinks ("Here is 29 identical unique weapons, 200k a piece.  Want costumes? 14 million, with money cap being 10 mill).  In bravely second, blitzing mobs is even more heavily rewarded, since you get multipliers for doing so... which also have the side effect that older single turnable groups are often vastly more profitable then moving forward.  Discouragement against progression in a game where progression is often repetition?  Dangerous.

In the first game, magic was a joke and physical attacks were mathematically confusing, generally having rules that many players didn't quite figure out, making certain combinations that looked statistically similar end up being dramatically different in effectiveness.  With all the information they did give, they had plenty of it they decided just wasn't important despite it being enormously so.  I can rant on with other things... but the basic important thing is that both of them had bad backing math, which for a turn based game just can be devastating.

So yeah... what good they do gets buried, in both games, under that.

Is there good?  I beat both of them, so I'd have to say so, but they're a bit hard to recommend in hindsight given those major problems.  Both games have an intriguing passive town building/social element, allowing for trading attacks to help others and getting items...  and in both it is fairly easy to max, but enjoyable to do so and gives an enjoyable side effect of playing it over a while between work.

Both of them do some fairly clever things with player expectation.  Bravely Default corrupts the standard good guys chasing the crystals to save the world story, and really has a phenomenial finale on it.  Undertale got a lot of credit for its last boss interactions..  but actually it looks like Bravely Second did something very similar a full six months earlier, even though it arrived stateside later.  It's not as impressive as its predecessor there, but it definitely makes a lot of use of the scene...and some terrible fourth wall breaking with it.

Bravely Second...shys away from having villains, and I think is a lesser game for it.  Bravely default played with this setup as well, but it did have bad guys.  People that did wrong for their own greed, their own wickedness, or their own sociopathic reasons.  Here the game twists itself into knots to the point that they're really left with only the alien fairy being genuinely bad.

And you know what?  That undermines their entire worldsetting.  Seriously, both games rely on the world being generally rotten before and sometimes during the heroes adventure...but in a world where every major world changing force is actually a pretty reasonable fellow, it begs the question: How did things get to such an atrocious situation?  At this point we're basically left with extreme carelessness and a willingness to sacrifice everyone as the only reason that the big plagues and wars broke out at all.  Everyone is reasonable.  nobody is at their throats.  The bad guys this time around just want to edit history, and they all have 'sympathetic' reasons for being dupes of the 'Real Villain'.  Bravely default got mocked for being a game where it was entirely persisted upon bad communication: We can't say that the villain is there, that setting the crystals wild is bad, or even just not want to fight, just talk but at least there were real problems.

Bravely Second is basically "Peace is at hand, but our history sucks so fuck it" which is hard to buy in a world where everyone generally is helpful.  "So wait, we're recovering from a worldwide epidemic, and within 15 years we were razing towns to the ground and such...but nobody was really bad there?  Nobody was 'at fault'?  Bullshit."

It's neat to show the other side, have them be reasonable...  But they need to actually have valid setups.  You don't get a land of huggy huggy hippies within one generation of ku klux klan members.  It doesn't happen and a lot of their gripes are basically "Your parents were monsters" which just doesn't ring as coherent.  There has to be things that are actually wrong or broken with the world Today to believe that they were a complete mess yesterday, but Bravely Second doesn't do that.  It's so timid about actually having people be bad, that the guy who is going around in a suit covered in blood, killing and restoring people to make them feel pain is... a Holy Man legendary for his kindness and 'actually a really good guy, an upstanding father and easily able to switch sides, recount his madness, and be a good guy!'  We can't have the guy just need to be put down, lost in his grief and rage and madness...  we can redeem everyone.

Bravely Default had wars going on, and had painted that they were just coming out of a massive worldwide war, and in part acted like it.  Bravely second basically rips up the foundation for Bravely Defaults worldsetting, and does the same to its own.  If all human bad guys are just dupes and the reason for their suffering basically being a giant game of idiot ball, that for some reason nobody plays anymore...  well, it's just hard to buy into.

Well, I rant a bit much.

It was nice seeing snarky Edea again and there were moments when the writing would take point nicely.  The monster journals showed a lot of tender care, but basically were also a request to grind in every single area in order to encounter enemies enough to fill their stories up.  It lacked a journal of the last one, so there was less of a subtle storytelling reward.  The available details was just mostly background rather than an active participant as it was last time.

The ba'al fights were generally amusing and accessible much earlier than I felt it happened in the first one, but the explanation of them becomes basically "The writing staff thought Madoka was an awesome anime".  Which is unfortunate.

Mmm, guess I'm out of practice writing these, a lot more criticism then balanced discussion, but perhaps that's more a reflection of my disappointment really with the course of events.  Both games with better math, and more ample use of the cutting room floor would really be a lot more impressive then they ended up.

[Kaldrak]

Well, I rant a bit much.

YOU rant a bit much? You?? I am the king of long winded video game rants.

Mmm, guess I'm out of practice writing these, a lot more criticism then balanced discussion, but perhaps that's more a reflection of my disappointment really with the course of events.  Both games with better math, and more ample use of the cutting room floor would really be a lot more impressive then they ended up.

I sounds to me like you were really looking forward to the sequel and for a variety of reasons, it disappointed you, but you still like it and enjoyed playing it. I can relate. It's just a basic desire for something to be better than it is. A lot of the games I play fall into this category, sadly.

[Dracos]

Yeah, but I also had a lot of friends get caught up in the math, so basically also disappointed that I can't say that it got any better.