Bravely Second: End Layer

Two years ago, of this game's predecessor, I wrote:

Bravely Default had everything you could want in an old-fashioned JRPG and it seemed to do everything right, right up to a certain point. New spins that the game put on the genre allowed for features like "summon friends," where you could call on people you had tagged with to help you out in battle. (Thanks, Webber and B-Town!) You could raise or lower - even turn off entirely - the random encounter rate, depending on if you wanted to grind for experience or just complete a fetch quest quickly. A weapon-producing mini-game even made it a benefit to close your 3DS in sleep mode without pressing pause or going to the home screen. The story was generic as hell - four heroes need to reawaken four elemental crystals in order to save the world - but the characters were fleshed out and fully realized and the world was varied and interesting enough to overshadow the mundanities of the plot.

All of that applies here as well. And this game has also added some interesting features that made grinding into a low-risk high-reward gamble. ("How many consecutive battles can you win in one turn? Here are exponentially increasing experience multipliers.") I rarely buy new games at launch, especially for full price, but I was all over this one a week after it dropped. I'd just wrapped up a rough semester at school, and on my first day of "summer vacation" (working 9-5 again - "adulting," I think the kids call it) I settled down on the couch with this game, a pizza, and a six-pack of beer. I plowed through eight or nine hours, tacking on another six before the weekend was up. And in these fifteen hours, I knew I'd only barely scratched the surface of Bravely Second, a fifty-hour game with tons of side quests, and I didn't even care. I loved it. I was in my happy place. Marissa even asked me, somewhere around hour seven, "Is this really all you wanted to do all day? It just seems kind of like a waste of the first day of summer!" She wasn't wrong! But, you know, such is the life of a JRPG fan - even one as casual and lapsed as I am.

Anyway, this game was great. Somewhere around the thirtieth or fortieth hour, I lost patience (I always eventually do - who am I, Stevie?) and decided to just barrel through the rest of the way. I was substantially over-leveled and overpowered thanks to the grind-friendly tweaks this game made, and I can't look back and reflect on this one and think, "wow, that was an instant classic and an all time great game," but any and all fans of JRPGs - particularly the older Final Fantasy games and their ilk - should be encouraged to check this series out. They're long games, no question, but they just feel so effortless and pleasant to play.