To be honest, I had to look up strategies for a couple of those subquest battles near the end. I was too stubborn to NOT beat every single last one. I'm glad I did tho, they reveal a ton about all the characters, goofy bits and all.

Well I think I may be in trouble. I'm at the Airy fight and getting leveled by the second form. There doesn't seem to be any way to get off the ship and level up though, and I've only been using one save slot with auto-save so I can't go back to before this point.

Am I just screwed here? I hate when RPGs lock you into a boss battle. I think it might be next to impossible at the level I am at. Ug.

/EDIT Nevermind, just remembered there is a dungeon in the ship. I guess I can level up there?

I'm sort of not looking forward to the end. Everything I'm reading makes it sound like 10 times harder than everything else in the game. Am I going to have to do a LOT of leveling up? Ug.

RPGs where the end boss is so much more powerful than anything before it that it requires a ton more leveling up than you have ever done yet are a huge pet peeve of mine. Who wants the momentum to slow down so much when they are right at the end?! I just want to finish a game at that point.

@Zero

There's an area near Florem that you can easily level up if you want to go that route.

Yeah but I'm stuck on the ship right now I think? I mean, the only way I know to get off the ship is to go to the deck, but that starts the Airy boss battle.

I've been trying to level up in the ship dungeon but man... it's slow there. No high level enemies.

@Zero

Are you on the easiest difficulty setting? If not, you can change it at any time.

Yep!

BLAH.

Though really maybe the second form of Airy isn't too bad. I only tried it once. I should probably have been proactively healing with 1-2 of my characters but I went a turn without healing and all of my characters went from full health to dead after 2 attacks in a row.

@Zero

I was max level and by the end of the game I was spamming heal constantly and only made it through by the skin of my teeth. You just have to be better at the game than me if you want to avoid that sort of situation.

Which shouldn't be too hard because I'm not good at manipulating RPG systems.

That's probably why I wasn't a big fan of Bravely default. I play RPGs for the story so as long as the story is good and the combat is serviceable, I'm happy. But if the combat is bad or requires the clever manipulation of systems, and I don't like the story, there isn't much for me here. I'd take a good story with simple gameplay over a basic story with a complex combat any day. With that in mind, I imagine this is a great sandbox for the kind of people who like diving into the intricacies and tricks of the battle system.

This game really confuses me. I was consistently getting about 3000 (2000 + 1000 bonus) for defeating these groups of 3 skeletons on a single turn.

Now I get 2500 (2000 + 500) for doing the same exact thing.

WHAT HAPPENED?!

I guess the plus side in this game is that leveling up doesn't take super long. I got from 73 to 80 without too much trouble. (Though I did it in a few sessions and wasn't keeping track of time so maybe it took longer than I realize.)

I also set my characters up a bit better for the Airy fight, for instance set them all up with something that nullifies the STOP thing and made sure I have two solid healers. Should be in better shape to take it on now.

LET'S DO IT.

BTW the story here is really confusing me. We already knew like 8 boss fights ago that Airy was suspicious and probably evil yet we decide to just keep doing what we're doing, and then end up shocked when things go poorly?! WHY?

@Zero Casting Stillness and healing your party should help. I was level 99 by this point (I had reached it waaay before even getting to the final chapters) so I didn't have a problem. I played on Normal difficulty.

There are abilities/gear that help you gain more exp/jp as well, which you probably already use.

@Zero There is an alternate ending if you do something differently than what you've been doing.

@Mop it up You mean break a crystal? The weird thing is the game clearly wants you to try that, there is some huge hint about not listening to Airy, and the crystals are the only part where you're actively listening to Airy yet from what I read it is a false ending?

But yeah the story makes no sense. And it makes even less sense now that I've pushed further, because there is this dramatic part where your main character is convincing one of the girls that none of this was your fault and you couldn't have known it would happen and I'm like seriously?! It was pretty much spelled out a long time ago and the characters kept pushing forward... why exactly?!

Anyway, finished the Airy fight, which was actually super easy once I realized that I could use the move that makes all of your characters immune to elemental attacks and basically make my characters immune to 90% of the attacks. In fact, except for a few random single attacks here and there, nothing could touch me. I don't think I even had to heal in the second part of it (and only did in the first part because I kept attacking during the spike thingy which makes the boss counter...)

I'm at about level 83? now, trying to decide if I should even attempt the end or just focusing on leveling up for now...

So, is there any way to get the Conjurer class if I'm at the end? Yulyana won't fight me anymore so... not sure if I can still get it?! Trying to look it up online but everything is pointing me to the way to do it in earlier chapters.

@Zero I wouldn't call it a fake ending, but it is not the "good" ending either. I guess the reason some might call it a false ending is because you can go back and continue your game before you made that choice, so you don't have to start over. If I remember rightly, the reasons why the main ending is the better option did make some sense to me after seeing both endings, but I can't really talk about that yet.

@Zero I don't think it's possible to earn any jobs in the final chapter.

It is! I found him, he was in the vampire castle. So now I have two new jobs.

Obliterate is awesome. I've gone up 3 levels (87 right now) in 15 minutes. At this rate I could be at 99 in an hour or two. At work right now but I have a long commute home...

@Zero Hooray! I guess it is possible to still collect them. Or maybe you're not where I thought you were...

As far as I know the only required thing I have left is to go fight the end boss? Based on FAQs I've been reading I'm in the final chapter of the "true" path and the whole chapter is basically the boss area and boss, so there isn't much further I could be outside of finished right?

Welp it is done. End boss was surprisingly easy, albeit I had all of my characters at level 99 with level 14 jobs (something I have never done in an RPG before, max out characters), but still... piece of cake. Only form that was even remotely challenging was the last one with that move that stops you from being able to do anything, but it didn't matter too much because I had two healers and only once or twice did both get hit with it at the same time.

68 hours total, uggggggggg. I mean, I don't mind long RPGs, but a large portion of that was just grinding.

I have some very conflicted thoughts about this game. I'm more conflicted on it than most anything else I can think of in recent memory. It does so many things very well (graphics / sound, loved the job system, how easy it is to keep track of quests, being able to adjust / turn off enemy encounters, etc.), but has so many huge annoyances too. The main one being how UTTERLY REPETITIVE things get near the end. Fighting the same bosses over and over and over and over. So dumb.

But it's done. I doubt I'll play the sequel. If the game were half as long, maybe, but it took a lot out of me. One was enough.

@Zero

If you're so conflicted why, did you give the game an 8.1?

I'm not trying to be an asshole here; I'm genuinely curious.

Well, if you recall from Double Dash 7.9 is the worst score ever so...

Ok that's half a joke, but honestly anything below an 8 I rarely finish, I get sick of it and give up. For better or for worse I wanted to stick with this game because it did have a bunch of compelling parts. It's conflicted for me in that I think it has some REALLY GOOD stuff (like, stuff I'd score a 9 or higher) and some really mediocre / annoying stuff (stuff I'd score a 7 or lower) so I guess that averages out to about a 8. The main annoying thing, repeating all of the boss fights over and over and over, became less annoying once I realized that they weren't getting significantly harder every time so I could just burn through them all without having to waste a whole lot of time leveling up (thank god for being able to turn off random enemy encounters.) Though they do get somewhat harder, and I still DID spend a lot of during that stuff, but not as much as it originally seemed like it was going to be, and in part it was because I was still seeking out new jobs I didn't have yet and such, which helped break up the monotony a bit.

Also scores are kind of relative. An 8 for me is getting into near mediocre territory. (Mediocre doesn't mean bad, just... not particularly standout.) I rarely hand out below an 8. I've only scored about a page of games in our database below an 8, out of the 15+ pages of games I have scored. And you'll notice that I didn't even finish most of those games.

I suppose what I meant by conflicted is that the things I like and don't like about this game are on pretty extreme ends of like and don't like. Versus some other games I have scored around an 8 that were just kind of "ok" on most every level.

So yeah, 8.1 feels about right. A decent game that could have been an amazing game if they fixed a few key annoyances. I'd still recommend it to people, they just have to know what they're getting into.