A few weeks ago I said I would give Bravely Default 10 more hours to get its act together before dropping it. I had played about 10 hours back then, now my save file reads 22:33, so I think I’ve been more than fair to it. And it has been more than fair to me, to give credit where credit is due. I don’t want to praise it too highly too soon because I tend to ‘jinx’ games that way, but yeah, I’m having a good time now.

It all started from the Florheim arc, when sidequests started popping up all over the place. I’m a sucker for sidequests, and I’ve always liked fighting optional bosses, so it was win-win all around. I’m playing on Easy (the new wave of the future) so I can’t say the bosses were challenging or anything, but at least they gave good EXP and JP.

Even better, the quests add a bit of story that wraps up what’s going on in the whole region so you aren’t just moving on and leaving them to solve their own problems. Sometimes that was a good thing. Some of the quests let me dispose of some very not-nice-at-all people who were doing all kinds of not-good-at-all things who really needed to be stopped. On the other hand, some of the quests sadly left a bad taste in my mouth. I really didn’t want to commit regicide if I could have helped it, for one thing. And two minor characters were killed in another quest, but they wouldn’t have died if I hadn’t taken that quest in the first place, so it’s kind of my fault. Bad times.

Thanks to all that murder and assassination I now have a ton of job asterisks at my disposal, so I’ve been experimenting a bit with jobs. It helps a lot that I’m around level 43 now and the enemies are giving 35-75 JP per battle once Unscathed Ace kicks in. That makes it pretty easy to get every job up to level 8 so I can see what they have to offer. It would take too long to list all the jobs everyone has been through but so far I’m really liking Valkyrie for Edea, Ranger for Tiz, Red Mage for Agnes and Thief for Ringabel. Those classes just fit their personalities somehow. I’ve set those as sub-jobs while they spend time job-hopping.

The story unfortunately hasn’t made the same progress as the rest of the game. If anything it has gotten worse because no one is explaining anything to anyone else. If the crystal-hating faction has a good reason for wanting the crystals gone, it sure would be nice if they would just come out and say so. All those vague dark hints they’re making about the world being in danger don’t sound very convincing when they’re poisoning people, enslaving orphans and killing innocent women in the process.

At the same time I’m not under any delusions that we’ll just go around recharging all the crystals and that will be the end of that, so I know things can’t be as simple as they seem. I just hope Bravely Default won’t be one of those games where the big reveal makes me go “You know, if you’d just told me all this 40 hours ago we could have avoided all this trouble.” I have a bad feeling about this one.

Okay, back to business! I’m looking for an SRPG to fill the hole left by Lord of Magna, so I’ll probably start Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume soon. Apart from that all the other games continue as usual. Aluta continua!