Topic: Bravely Default II (Nintendo Switch)

I guess you could say Bravely Default II is the Dark Souls of Bravely Default game demos.

Is there any way to buy Phoenix Downs in the first town?

...I'm going to need them.

There's a new stat named weight. Apparently if you exceed the weight limit (by equipping), you will have some sort of penalty. Don't know what kind of penalties though, because I haven't risked trying because of focusing on gaining job abilities. The good news is that the weight limit increases every few level ups.

lol Twenty minutes of power-leveling my job levels and suddenly the wolves that bum-rushed me every time I got within a screen of them are now running in terror and staring at the wall as I systematically eliminate them one by one.

Oh, how the tables have turned.

I am downloading the Demo version right now.
Man.... It took very long time to download the Demo.

Demo is fun. Hopefully a proper means feedback will open soon.

-I wish they tone down some visual effects. The flashing effects in the intro segment really hurts my eyes, and other flashing effects on some costumes (specifically jewelry on the female characters) makes the screen hard to look at. I have a mild visual impairment, but this is something I rarely have issue with in games, so I can't imagine how it must be with someone who has it worse than me.

-On the other hand, other visual effects looks greet. I love how lustrous the armor looks, as well as other costume material like cloth. Town artwork is great, I love the extra layer of depth added to them compared to the 3DS games. I also like the battle intro animations for the enemies.

-Difficulty is hard like they said it would be. A lot of player's first instinct is to simply grind, but the intent is to work with the equipment/skills/jobs to make optimized builds. There's a lot to play with and making various builds even with the limited number of jobs is fun. That said, some enemies are a bit more brutal than they should be.

-Combat is still great though. Unless I can kill all the enemies in a single turn, simply spamming attack as a play style is punished. I feel like I'm using support skills here more than other JRPGs.

-I have concerns with the writing, but given this demo is a standalone story I understand it wouldn't be given the same attention as the full game. That said, I didn't feel like Bravely Second's demo was written awkwardly.

Overall a positive experience and I'm optimistic for the full game. But I do want to voice my concerns if this is demo is truly meant for feedback like they said. Especially regarding the first point above.

Personally not a fan of the style, but I think I can get through it like I did with Setsuna and Fire Emblem games where people have stumps for legs with no explanation lol. The battle system is cool, as always, and I've always enjoyed the job system in my rpgs.

I don't know. Maybe I'm just burned out on rpgs lately. It's great that we're getting flooded with all this stuff right now: FF sale, Trials demo, Default demo, just coming out of DQXI, Xenoblade stuff... but I think all these games have proven to me that I'm not truly an rpg gamer, just a once or twice a year rpg gamer lol

Not impressed.

• Dungeon design still sucks.
• Seeing enemies on the map is a step back from BD's full customization of random encounters.
• Random battles seem wildly unbalanced within a given area. I'm either destroying everything or getting crushed.
• The visual style is ugly. An overly aggressive DoF effect makes towns look fairly blurry, and something rubs me the wrong way about the... shininess of enemies in this game. It's hard to describe, but the effect is grotesque.
• I was excited when I heard Revo was back to do the music, but nothing in the demo stood out. Massive downgrade musically from the first game's excellent OST.
• The change from inputting commands all at once on your round to having enemies and allies acting individually based on speed really ruins the 'default' command, especially for slower characters. The battle system in the first game was almost perfect.
• If they're going to make this change, they should have added a turn order indicator. They did not.
• Equipment weight was added for whatever reason. Why add this when the first game played fine without this element?
• I don't like the characters. Granted, BD games aren't famed for their beloved casts, but this group of people seems generic and forgettable. The only one I remember is Elvis, and that's only because he's an offensively bad stereotype of a Scotsman.

I'm open to S-E improving this game, but it'll need a LOT of work, so I'm not hopeful.

I always felt like Bravely Default was so POLISHED. But this demo just seems... off.

I don’t know if it’s just because it’s still in production, but the presentation doesn’t blend well for me. The characters look so out of place, with the shiny armour and stuff looking too “realistic” compared to the stylised characters of the 3DS games.

I’m gonna keep my eye on this though. I loved the originals so much

I quite enjoyed the demo. I wish it was a little longer. I don't overly care for the art style, but graphics is a minor thing in my books.

Is it just me, or is this game blurry and fuzzy in handheld mode? The zoomed-out camera, when you're walking around the world, doesn't help either. Reminds me of Xenoblade 2, but at least this has a stable frame rate.

@MsJubilee I never played it on handheld.

@Ralizah I agree with all of that to be honest, aside from the equipment weight thing, could be an interesting new factor.

"The visual style is ugly." Ok you got or attention.And you need eye doctor urgently.

@Mince Standalone.

So I had 2 big issues with the Bravely games on the 3DS.

1. The lack of exploration. All of the towns looked incredible, but they turned out to be so tissue-thin. You could go in maybe 2 houses in each town, and there wasn't much to find by exploring them.

2. The very generic characters. All of the characters are just silly JRPG tropes brought to life. No real character believable character development.

So far it looks like they've done a good job dealing with issue 1, as you can go in most of the houses in the main town, and there are quite a few hidden items to find in them.
Issue 2 is less clear though. They seem fairly similar in terms of being just simplistic tropey characters. Maybe they'll develop better through the main game though.

In both of those cases, you can play them out of order.

@Mince Only Trails 3 is really an issue in that regard. Bravely 2 should be a standalone title, and while there are connections between Xenoblade 1 and 2, they're not anything that will make playing the latter game first less enjoyable.

This demo is an unbalanced mess, lmao. I know the developers will fix this at launch(I hope).

Well I maxed all 5 jobs now and beat the two optional bosses. I am quite happy with this and will definitively buy it once it comes out. If anyone is trying to figure out how to farm money, I suggest stealing from the bees. You can get a staff of life which sells for a decent bit of cash.

@Mince Trails of Cold Steel 3 is the only one being ported because NIS owns the publishing rights for it, while Xseed owns the publishing rights for the prior localized games.

But as others has said, that's the only one that's an issue if you play it first. Bravely Default 2 is set in a different world than the first two games.

Beat the demo this morning. Bravely Second and Octopath Traveler had fantastic demos so I was kind of hyping myself up. I wouldn't say it's bad per say but it's pretty rough.

The demo warns you about the difficulty. They made it intentionally harder. Probably to encourage character customization and increasing length. I think it succeeded in both. I had fun buying equipment and setting jobs and skills. And I never buy equipment in RPGs because most of the time there's literally no point if you just want to beat the game. Every RPG has so much loot that you never need to buy weapons yourself.

Anyway, I died 2 or 3 times in the 3 hours I played. Once against the first group of enemies. I encountered 3 bunnies and 2 pigs(?) and didn't expect them to hit quite that hard. I was one or two hits away from winning when my party was wiped out. I also died once against the boss. I'm not sure if I died somewhere else or not. I didn't grind per say but I only ran once from battle. The amount of enemy spawns is really high. Probably something they've also increased for the demo.

The visuals are lacking as well. Bravely Default on 3DS looked beautiful for the system and had one of the best uses of 3D. The towns looked really nice. I can't say the same for the new game. The town looks pretty good but far from perfect. The overworld and dungeon are just plain ugly. The main hero models bother me a bit as well though it may just be the lack of animation. Enemy models look better. I spent all my time in handheld mode so I don't know if the game looks any better on TV.

I'm also with Ralizah in that the music doesn't stand out so far. I like the music but it's not on the level I expected it to be. Bit of a shame since Bravely Default introduced me into Revo's music and I love all the other stuff he's done with his bands. I'm sure there will be bangers too but I'm bit afraid at the moment. I also feel the need to share the Bravely Default live concert any time I talk about BD's music. If you've never seen it, listen to the town music at the very least (second video). They've added lyrics to the songs which in my opinion just makes them even more awesome as the singers are all very talented.

Still excited for the game but I won't be surprised if they decide to push it back to 2021. That's honestly what I expected them to do even before playing the demo.