Bravely Default - Or, Square Enix still loves stupid names

Seeing a feed of your victorious mug pasted into space after beating the final boss was a silly bit of fun and complemented the linked worlds plot device well.

the vampire sidequest

FUCK ELEMENTAL DRAGONS.

Title slightly misleading as I haven't seen the true ending...

So I am in chapter 6, and did the "fake" ending because I was both curious and also very impatient. I don't know if any of you have done the fake one but essentially you keep pressing X after Airy tells you to stop. I did it when Ringabel said to Airy "what would happen if Agnes didn't stop?" and Airy essentially goes "ehhh... you know... the world would be doomed!". So I destroyed the crystal and Airy shows her sluggy form, and then you fight her at the Dark Aurora and then her true form and then you destroy that and she talks about how she failed Lord Ourosobsdofubsdfs and then Yulyana and DeRosso congratulate you for saving the world and then you go back to your respective worlds and the credits roll. It's very anticlimactic. Then it asks you if you want to save and tells you that if you do it'll go to the point before you broke the crystal so that you can continue as normal and see the true ending.

And I like that. I like that it teases you with a pretty rubbish ending and then lets you continue on in the game with Airy telling you to awaken the crystals with you, the player, knowing full well that she's a liar (I liked the change of "Where the Fairy Flies" to "Airy Lies" on the title screen). What I didn't like is that fact that I tried to finish the game early because I was just kind of bored of it. What I find particularly annoying is the fact that most of the rematches in chapters 5 onwards give you JP and no EXP or PG - but I've mastered about 4 classes for each of my 4 characters so I really just want to level them up, and I can't level them up and expand on the backstory by learning more about the boss characters at the same time. Why? That's really stupid!

I know fronk said that he thought you had to be around level 99 for the final boss - is that true? Because I'm at level 78/79 with my team right now, and while grinding is made much easier with the growth egg and the auto function, it's a pain in the arse that it's SUCH a timesink. As I said before, I'd much rather be gaining EXP fighting bosses and, you know, real characters, rather than grinding mindlessly. Bravely Default's second half is an interesting approach to the traditional RPG but I think it's executed pretty badly.

Agreed, I really liked the alternate ending, and it was that which made me change my mind in the second half. I also liked how the game nudges you towards it with each "round" you pass in the game's cycle of worlds.

I would recommend level 99 indeed, I found the alternate ending to be a lot easier than the true ending, and as a word of warning, once you trigger the true ending it's possible to get stuck forever if you're not prepared (there's a save point, but it's in somewhere where you can't go back or exit, and auto-save probably ruins the chance of avoiding this), but the boss you face shouldn't cause you much trouble if you found the alternate ending fine.

But yes, I found the final run of bosses quite difficult at level 99, with the classes I was using maximised. It may have been down to the classes I was using, though, but I was really struggling when the bosses were using an attack to make me weak to elements, then a very strong elemental attack. I also wouldn't have beaten the final boss (I think) on the last stretch had I not resorted to summoning friends, which took away some of the satisfaction of winning. Retaining my pride and not using the summons (someone had power 999,999 or something ridiculous) would have cost me more time had I lost, though.

From what I remember, chapters 5 and 6 pretty much have identical sidequests (so don't bother with those), I think chapter 7 gives you the key that lets you open those chests you couldn't, so essentially if you really need the items within the chests (some good armour and healing items) you'll have to backtrack through every non-town location, but sidequests in chapters 7 and 8 are different and more interesting, so it might be worth giving some of them a shot.

You get the key for unlocking the blue chests at the beginning of Chapter 6, so I went and found a bunch of them - but some of the items aren't even as good as some of the ones you can buy from the trader, which is pretty disappointing. The sidequests in Chapter 6 seem to be, so far, essentially the same as those in Chapter 5 - although there is one marked at Yulyana's which wasn't there before so I'll have a look at that before I do all the temples. And I'll have another go at the vampire sidequest, but the dragons' "weak" spell is really irritating - though when I fought the boss of the alternate ending, it used a weakening spell all the time but my team never got KOed. So maybe I can cope with the dragons this time - though it might mean learning how to time my spiritmasters' spells better...

I dunno, Bravely Default is compelling, but it would be so much more fun if it didn't force you to level up so much. I mean, you can get by pretty easily in the first four chapters, but then you hit chapter 5, there's no obvious, linear path with progressively stronger enemies, and... you grind. You grind for ages, do a few temples, and then you're on the next chapter, and you do it again. I'm glad chapter 7 mixes things up a bit, but I will be annoyed if any of the fights only award JP, because my team have all reached level 14 in their jobs and it means that I get absolutely nothing out of the fight apart from perhaps a Turbo Ether or an X-Potion. I know I'm repeating myself but it is so, so stupid.

And like I said before: I don't think it's actually much fun. I can't quite wrap my head around the wealth of high review scores it got, for sure.