I’m fifty-two hours into my first play-through of Bravely Default: Where the Fairy Flies. All four of my characters are level 99, each has all 24 of the game’s jobs mastered. I’ve not maxed-out levels and jobs in a Final Fantasy game in… ever.
Recently Jason Schreier wrote about a column by BuzzFeed’s Rachel Sanders called “I Was a Final Fantasy Addict“, in which the author talks about how Bravely Default didn’t scratch that old school Japanese role-playing game itch for her. I guess I had the complete opposite reaction — Bravely Default brought together everything I loved about older Japanese role-playing games into one tiny package, while incorporating new elements which, as Jason suggests, no modern day JRPG should do without.
That meter made all the difference. Having this amount of control over random encounters empowered me to play the game as I pleased.
It just so happens that “as I pleased” meant maxing out the encounter rate, equipping the Growth Egg (ends money gain, doubles experience and job points), changing one character to a Ranger with the Undead Slayer ability and running about the continent of Eisenberg after fourth chapter, where everything is undead and wants to give you all the job points.
I had Auto Battle turned on, so maybe the dozens of grinding hours I put in weren’t so much “playing” as they were “running around in circles”, but it made me happy and kept me occupied. This, at a time in my life where, between work and kids, I shouldn’t have time to play 50+ hours of anything.
Bravely Default: Where the Fairy Flies just gets me. You like to grind? Really? Well then, here you go. In fact, we’ve tailored the entire latter half of the game (spoilers) towards folks that don’t mind repetition. Oh baby, you know what I like. Don’t tell anyone, but you’re one of my favourite Final Fantasy games ever.
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3 responses to “It Takes A Special Game To Make Me This Obsessive, Bravely Default…”
Ranger with the Undead Slayer ability and running about the continent of Eisenberg after fourth chapter, where everything is undead and wants to give you all the job points
Swap the undead slayer for Conjurer + Obliterate, remove all that nasty button pressing business
Once you’ve setup your auto-battle… it really matters little anyway.
All I did was have a single white mage with the cure buffs from both the Alchemist and Spiritualist target all enemies with Cura while running around Grandship. Since it was a one shot wonder most of the time, I got a lot of bonuses as well.
I like Bravely Default, but I can’t really find it in me to agree that it’s really as revolutionary as everyone says. I’m currently playing through 4 Heroes of Light again and enjoying it more. Maybe it’s because I feel like the slider was introduced purely to make up for the poorly designed second half, or it could be the second half was originally there (in the original JP release) because there wasn’t a slider but they couldn’t take it out for the updated version.
people keep on complaining about the “second half” yet it’s actually more like the last 20% if you want to do everything and more like the last 5% if you choose to just follow the main story to the end. The level you would be at in Chapter 5, the number of jobs you have either maxed or close to maxed, the equipment you would have by then, Ch 5 + will not take you the same amount of time as Ch 1 – 4
I really don’t see what the big deal is. It makes sense from a story point of view and you get a lot of extra dialogue that gives you more insight into the motivations, personalities etc of the supporting cast/bosses. And if you want to, you can skip all the optional stuff and the mandatory stuff can be done in roughly 1 hour.