Bravely Second: End Layer

Proving time and time again that the Nintendo 3DS is the home to some of the best JRPGs available today, Bravely Second: End Layer is well refined, exhaustingly beautiful and incredibly smart game. It’s no wonder after the success of the original, Bravely Default, that the plunge has been taken to make this into a fully-fledged franchise. While the core battle mechanics are pretty much a carbon copy from the original and the story will hit some very familiar beats from the genre, that doesn’t take away too much from the fact that this is a solid and addictive experience that is very hard to put down once you get started.

The actual premise is a little bit weak, heading down a path of ‘saving the princess’ as Agnes has been kidnapped by some evildoers. It’s a very traditional setup so it’s advantageous that the rest of the game has been so well constructed which brings things to another level. As I said earlier, the combat remains largely unchanged, featuring the Brave/Default system, whereby you can choose to defend and do nothing on a turn, building up your BP. You can do this for three turns, which would then allow you to unleash four attacks in a row on an enemy. You can choose to use Brave in advance before you Default, but doing so leaves you vulnerable to attacks without defence if the foe survives. It’s a fantastic system, and it adds layers upon layers of strategy to battles, especially some of the bosses that definitely require tactical thinking.

The downside is that jobs need to be levelled up individually while you’re using them, which means some jobs that you acquire later on will guarantee that you need to do some grinding so that you can make the most out of their abilities. It would have been nice if this were streamlined in some other way, because it can be tedious and sometimes had me reverting to the jobs I got early as they were already more reliable and powerful by comparison.