Bravely Second - Beaten. Final boss was a boring, plotless, generic evil god figure who had absolutely no connection to the party or meaningful emotional impact, replacing a cast of villains who (at least potentially) did. Y'know, like the first game. Stop doing this, RPGs. Not a very exciting fight either, though I died twice due to not understanding a gimmick in the first form. Oh well.
Game took me something like 68 hours, and I was Level 70 (exactly where the game says you should be). I did the whole yokai sidequest and those bosses were a lot of fun but part of me now wonders why I did because there isn't enough game left for the rewards to be meaningful.
Gameplaywise it's Bravely Default but generally better? Randoms being faster makes them more interesting, the "a second round of enemies are lurking" is good, there are even more jobs to play with, Spellcraft is legit cool, a bunch of polish improvements were made (particularly the ability to easily repeat commands 2 to 4 times), battle design is generally better (if an asterisk wouldn't translate to a solo boss like Pirate, etc., in BD then they at least get some meaningful support to make the fight more interesting, although "deal with that first" is the obvious tactic each time), and you don't have to refight the crystal guardians four times to get the best ending. Hooray! Anyway I already liked BD for being a good job system game with an already pretty high level of polish so I was happy to come back for more.
Plotwise it is a disappointment, there are some good ideas in there but they are ruined by bad pacing and terrible tone shifts, plus the characters seeming 700% more interested in talking about food than their experiences. I really want to like some of the work they did with Denys and Yoko and Geist but the game does make it hard because every time it has something good going it either forgets about it for 20 hours or shoots itself in the foot. Character-wise, Tiz is still boring, Edea lost much of what made her good and feels like a weak flanderisation of her BD self, Magnolia is kinda stylish but her struggles just aren't interesting, Agnes is damselfied for too much of the game. Yew is pretty endearing, at least.
Class notes:
Not going to go into the BD jobs in detail, they're basically similar, with some rebalances here and there. The most notable are that swordmaster's stances now draw enemy fire so they are much better, and Summoner got improved both by getting more useful spells (powerful MT healing, debuffing) but more importantly by how well "powerful MT spell" synergises with Spellcraft. Black Magic, meanwhile, feels overshadowed (I raged midgame about how bad magic was but that was mostly black(/red) magic's fault), White Mage lost a key tool in Dispel but is still good, Ninja feels better because of synergy with Triple/Quad Wield and the faster enemies, Dark Knight is somewhat worse due to there being less dark resistance and no drain spellblade but it's still great.
Wizard: The new black mage. Its spells are very cheap (which is nice in BD's system), and scale up well due to factoring INT into their power, though magic is behind physicals for raw damage output in most situations. Thier real tool is Spellcraft, which lets you spend an extra BP to modify a spell in various ways, such as "making it MT", or "attacking all enemies of the same species for 1.5x power" or "cast with initiative at 1.5x power" or "cast at the end of every round, MT, for three rounds" (Mana Khemia-style, kinda). If the spell is MT at base it gets its power doubled before its targetting is overwritten, which is part of why black magic gets let out in the cold. Anyway this has plenty of nice options for offensive magic, but also for various defensive and support spells. Great stuff. Not necessarily the most overtly powerful new job, but a good one, and the most fun.
Charioteer: Strange physical job. Their thing is equpping extra weapons in your head/body slots, sacrificing defence for even more offence. Late in the game you can use these 3-4 attacks allowed by this to break well past the 9999 damage limit. They also have a version of Throw which doesn't use up the weapon permanently which is a great change but sadly it's too weak. They're kinda weak as a carrier due to C ranks in all weapons, even though they have the ability to boost this in battle.
Bishop: The new healer class, their healing is notable for ignoring stats (just a % of the target's HP), and also they get full revival quite a bit before white mage. Otherwise they're generally weaker at raw MT healing (though better if you don't have good mind) but lower-costed. They also have a couple passives which are more useful for offensive magic, so the game really encourages you to combine this with Wizard or another offensive class.
Fencer: Another physical job. They're fine enough early, their thing is stances which offer stat boosts (independent of normal BD stat boosts). They also have decent enough stats for the time but this aspect of them gets outclassed later. I ultimately didn't use them too much.
Astrologian: Probably the strongest new job in terms of pure usefulness, they are the buff specialist, largely an intersection of Performer and Spiritmaster from BD (though Performer is still around). Their passive makes buff spells have initiative (can't stress enough how useful this is in randoms) and they can buff pretty much any stat. As time goes on they also gain elemental halving/immunity/reflection, elemental boosting (1.5x damage, like BD's Fairy Aid without the BP cost), etc., and even status nulling though that one was too late to matter since the final two villains don't use status. They get passives which make buffs even better, like letting them last 8 turns instead of 4 and letting them stack to 200% instead of 100% which gets silly. Other classes can make their buffs MT which makes them very silly indeed. The final boss literally uses dispel every single turn (yes, it does other things too) and this job was still useful even there, which is all you need to know about how effective it is the rest of the time.
Catmancer: Blue Mage, gained relatively early in the game this time! Unfortunately their skills require items, so I ended up not using them much anyway. :\ They're a good physical carrier though, with early S in two useful weapon types and good strength/speed. Plus, they let you talk to cats.
Hawkeye: The gun-user class, it also inherits spellblade from the now defunct Spell Fencer. Drain Spellblade is gone, as are the status moves, but in place it gets alternate buffs which can ignore either the target's defence or default, both of which are certainly useful options. Definitely a neat physical skillset, and the job itself has decent enough stats and the "basic physicals ignore evade" passive it swipes from BD Ranger.
Pattisier: The new... salve-maker successor I guess? You mix two items to make tasty cake, the cake is a debuff of some sort. They now are almost the only way to inflict negative status effects and the earliest way to inflict stat hits on the enemy (I used them for one boss fight just for this). I didn't use them much because items and hey later you do get Pirate who can do damage at the same time.
Exorcist: Weirdo utility class, their trademark is reverting one target's HP, MP, etc., to a state it was earlier in the battle. The most basic, obvious use for this is reviving someone (although you get Resurrect before you even get this job). They also get the game's first dispel move, and a reasonably potent MP regen passive which is nice for upping the usability of magic skillsets, especially more expensive ones like Summon.
Guardian: Very strange class, a tank job at base but also can do physical damage based on "soul power" (increases with damage received, so it's basically a limit) or possess people to protect them (... yeah). And they have the Armour Lore passive. I was very happy with my Pirate/Swordmaster tank so I didn't use this one as much, but it's a neat option.
Kaiser: A very strange job based on around using field buffs which have effects on every combatant, e.g. reversing the turn order; buffing all offensive stats to 200%; increasing or decreasing the rate of BP gain, etc. I couldn't really be bothered to leverage these weird tools into something effective but I imagine that you could. A good carrier for what it's worth, too, with high stats and proficiencies across the board, though this late I generally wanted either a really good innate passive and/or two good skillsets, so I didn't end up using this one much.
Yokai: Feels like a bit of a super-class on paper but it's gained quite late, and getting its spells requires defeating various bosses who are close to the level of the final boss. Like Kaiser it has excellent stats and proficiencies, though, and it also has a great skillset if you can get it going. Remember how Airy had "MT dispel + makes target weak to all elements"? Yeah, they have that, and a bunch more things besides, including a set of powerful but costly -aja spells which are essentially super-summons, and some status attacks if you aren't just exploding all randoms at this point (spoilers: you are). Still, even while I wish this job were a bit earlier, it's neat and far more worthy of being a final job than BD Conjurer was.
Fun times, would play while skipping scenes again.
Wild Arms XF
Realised I haven't played this in years, so I'm going to do another Fiesta run through this. Drew Elementalist first this time. I had one reset on 1-3 (Poliasha map where you either sneak around the back with fantastica or defeat four Level 20 enemies, I did the latter). Not much else to say so far. Elementalist will make things pretty easy so maybe I'll actually only use four people this time. Still letting myself use Tony to get up to 4, though.
Blue Dragon Hard Mode
After about 5 resets I beat Heat-Wave Sai, after doing a bunch of setup monkey so that everyone could survive one Bomb Throw (~380 power physical is extremely high at this point, two people survived with fire resistance and the others needed high def/HP) and learning the ins and outs of the battle a lot (he has a bunch of mean tricks such as a called MT shot you absolutely must interrupt by using a fire attack on his arm, though he telegraphs it first by attacking someone for OHKO damage). Like most BD hard mode bosses he is durable enough, extremely damaging, and extremely fast; unlike most of the others so far I wasn't able to find any status holes to exploit. He's the third of five bosses in this dungeon; I entered with 60 phoenix talons and now I'm down to only 12, so I'm hoping that'll be enough for the last two.
