Bravely Default Series

Ninja is better. You may have to add the job to everybody for it to work, but you can get a guarantee BP refund for each hit, as opposed to Rampart, which will drain BP like a leaky faucet.

edited 4th Jun '16 3:21:47 AM by Ekimmak

But if you give your Templar Restore BP, and have your Salve-maker use elemental weakness mixes on the Templar each turn that Rampart needs to go back up, everyone else can use whatever job you want.

Artemia isn't annoying. She's the cutest.

So, dedicate two people to a single defensive wall for an entire battle, or assign everybody ninjitsu side class and sacrifice the first turn.

It's really down to preference. There are times where I like to use Rampart, but when trying to beat bosses that are much stronger than me, I'd rather have the Ninja's speed to have the best chance of getting the shield. And then there's that I have to constantly squander several BP to refresh a single shield, versus the Ninjitsu Dodge costing 1 BP to refresh.

Of course, that means giving everyone Ninjutsu, which makes a fair number of builds impossible. It comes down to what you want to do, I suppose.

I managed to breeze through most of Bravely Default with a Salvemaker and a shitload of Beast Livers and Dragon's Fangs. Doubling maximum HP turns even the most frail classes into absurdly resilient tanks.

Stillness is life.

Screw the Bloodrose Legion. If I ignore all the optional chapter 8 bosses, can I still go back to them later?

Calm is nowhere near as strong, but it's still an integral part of my BS strategy.

Try fighting the Black Blades.

Bravely Second sure has an unfortunate acronym.

nah, thats bullshit

Well, it was certainly fun punching the Evil One's face in. Been wanting to do that for a long time.

edited 7th Jun '16 10:49:33 AM by Sterok

Been a while since I've wanted to kill a villain that much.

Well, beat Bravely Default. Battle and Job systems were fun, that's for sure. Story was meh, then really stupid. Not sure why they kept going along with Airy long after they knew she was evil. Lategame padding was irritating enough for me to just want the game to end though. Overall, good game. Not sure if I'll want to get Second though.

The "thematic" explanation everyone always gives is that they had to Default 4 times before they could Brave, but narratively it was just pure stupid. Unless you rewrite the story to come up with your own personal excuse for it, as some have.

Second is much better paced.

edited 7th Jun '16 3:09:05 PM by Clarste

That same thematic reasoning would still work if the Evil One revealed themselves in Chapter 5.

I go with the idea that as long as new universes kept appearing, they had to complete their journey no matter what- that as long as worlds needed them they'd be there.

and that the story (the latter half anyway) was about their determination to help anyone that needed them.

granted, the last four chapters still recycle dialogue like crazy and don't get their point across very well, but still.

What gets me is that they never use their knowledge of previous events except in the cases of Kikyo and Praline, and that drives me nuts. They could avoid so much conflict but choose not to... just because. They could even include the boss fights like Second does and than resolve things peacefully after the fact.

Yeah, Second was so much better about that. Hell, even the first time through, they were already getting Genre Savvy about it. "Pick whoever you want, but just remember we're probably gonna have to fight the other one."

It's a big ol' plot hole.

Which makes it hilarious that Second casually does things with the story that could've made default not have a big plot hole. Oh well.

Frankly, I don't care how much the game improved by tearing out the plot holes, I've had zero interest in bravely second since they announced that they'd be making mutually exclusive job asterisks.

All I can say is, it is possible to get all of the asterisks in a single playthrough.

edited 8th Jun '16 2:55:12 PM by MJTrooper

Yeah.

And I didn't even get them all , and still have a team I consider near perfect.

They've also nerfed a lot of the older asterisks, particularly the magic using ones, to be much less versatile than they were, so it's not a huge loss not to have them. White and Black Magick aren't all that great when you have an extremely versatile magic class from the word go and a decent healer not much after that.