Bravely Second Follow-Up

I doubt anyone is going to have any interest in this, but I do want to record my thoughts right now. A little over a month ago, I wrote about the Nintendo 3DS game, Bravely Second - End Layer. It's a Japanese RPG sequel to Bravely Default, and is similar to Final Fantasy, and in fact, Bravely Default was first planned to be the sequel to Final Fantasy: The Four Heroes of Light (2009). I currently have 200 hours in the game, and I'm both close to finishing it, and 3 weeks from reaching the end.

This is going to take a bit of set up first. Both Bravely Default (BD) and Bravely Second (BS) are turn-based combat games. You have four characters in your party, and each one can either attack (with a weapon or magic), defend (in the game, called "Default"), use an item, call a "friend" (either an avatar of someone else that has a copy of the game you've played against, or an NPC character), or try to run away. There is also a "BP" (battle point) system, where you start the battle at 0 BP. If you Default, your defense increases for that turn, and you gain 1 BP (for a normal total of 3 max at any one time). If you use the Brave option, you can perform up to 4 actions in one turn, but then it will take one turn to recover 1 BP for every point you've gone negative.

For example, say you start the battle with 0 BP on one character, and you Default on the first turn. On the next turn, you will be at 1 BP. If you select Brave 3 times, you will have 4 actions for the turn, but you'll be going to -3 BP (-1 just for doing a normal action rather than defending, -3 for Braving, and +1 for having started the turn a +1). If you want, you can choose to attack 4 times, or whatever mix of actions you like. If you defeat all of the enemy, no problem. Otherwise, you'll gain one BP for the start of the next round, leaving you at -2 BP, and unable to do anything with that character for 2 more turns. Braving is great if you think you can end the battle fast, but if you don't, you're a sitting duck while you're at negative BP. Hence, the "brave" part.

Something that's new with BS is "spiritual power" (SP, or "soul power"). You gain 1 SP (for a max of 3 SP) every 8 hours that the 3DS is turned on but the cover is closed. Normally, there is a cap of 9,999 HP on the amount of damage one character can deliver in one attack. This is very silly, since there are a lot of weapons and skills that can raise your Atk stat up close to the 999 cap. What's the point of super-charging a fighter to 999 Atk if you can't do more than 9,999 HP damage, especially if you're facing an enemy with 200,000 HP? That's what SP is for. If you press the Start button (Select on the Japanese version), you go into a special "Bravely Second" battle screen. This lets you take one free action from the battle menu, even if you haven't started the round yet, or if your character is minus BP. It also removes the 9,999 cap on damage. So far, using SP, I have been able to deliver a maximum of almost 600,000 damage on one enemy at one time. This is a good thing.

One last piece of explanation. Like BD, BS has a "village" that needs repairing during the game. In BS, one of your party members arrives on a rocket from the moon, and wrecks the ship. You get one worker to do the repairs, which gives you various benefits for the game, such as special items you can buy from the save point in the dungeons (healing potions, MP recovery items, attack and defense items, etc.) You can also unlock special attacks for each of the weapon types (swords, axes, daggers, magic wands, etc.), and "parts" for the special attacks (attack with fire or water elements, pluses to sleep or blind the enemy, or pluses for HP or MP recovery). The thing is, each "repair" you make takes a lot of real time. You can have the 3DS case closed and the power on, but it's still going to take real time based on what you're repairing. For example, simply to access the ship takes 1 hour for fixing a bridge. Adding fire element to the special attack is 2 more hours, unlocking the first special attack (Piercing Bolt, for magic wands) is 2 more hours, and so on. Each new thing you unlock for a given part of the rocket base takes longer than the thing before it. The most powerful special attacks take 72 to 99 hours each to unlock. You can speed the repair up a lot by getting extra workers by battling your friends that have the game, or by logging into the Nintendo website. Unfortunately, Nintendo took the Bravely Second site down in Japan, and I don't know anyone with the game. So, I'm stuck with just the one worker.

And that's the problem. I have found every secret treasure in the game, fought every boss at least once each, if not three times, beat the game twice, and maxed out all the characters at level 99. All that's left is to beat the toughest optional boss in the game (the Adventurer), and I've done that once already. But, I want to do this while using the strongest special attack possible, and that's going to take 2 more weeks real time to unlock via the repairs to the rocket. The special attack shop has 10 levels, and as I write this, I've unlocked level 6 (the top special attack for swords and wands), and it's 72 hours to get to level 7. Another 72 to get to level 8, 72 more for level 9, and finally 99 hours for the top special attack for great swords, bare knuckles and bows.

To recap, I just want to beat the Adventurer one more time, using the bare knuckle weapon special attack, but that's going to require 72 + 72 + 72 + 99 = 315 hours = 13.125 days of real time to unlock. Sigh.

In every dungeon, just before the rooms containing the stage bosses, will be the Adventurer in his long brown coat and floppy hat. He provides a Save point, as well as allowing you to restock on replenishment and attack items, rest up to recover HP and MP, and occasionally to watch short videos of party chats (conversations between the 4 party members that add to the storyline). However, at the far end of the largest and hardest optional dungeon in the game, you can find the Adventurer waiting to give you the hardest boss fight possible. The Adventurer has 500,000 HP, high defense and a series of devastating attacks. Additionally, he has a fox named Companion, who has 50,000 HP, can afflict the party with blind, and will gift the Adventurer with 3 BP (to allow him to cast Meteor against you). Both Adventurer and Companion can heal, and resurrect each other if one of them gets KO'd. This means you need to KO both of them in the same round (difficult given the 9,999 hit cap and only being able to use 4 SP in one battle (you can charge the game up to 3 SP, and go negative by one SP if you started the battle with more than 0 SP)). There is a usable strategy, but it's a tricky one to explain.

The main goal of the game is to collect job classes by defeating bosses that have "asterisks" for a given job (if you play the game multiple times, you can defeat the same boss more than once for their asterisk, but this doesn't have an effect if you already know that job). So, beat the Black Mage and you get the Black Mage asterisk (general attack magic). The White Mage asterisk lets you do healing and attack with Holy magic, and there's a whole group of fighter classes, from Fencer and Charioteer to Pirate and Monk, for a total of 30 different jobs. Defeating enemies gives you money (pg), level experience (exp) and job experience (jp). If you level your jobs up to 11, you can access the strongest, best, or most worthless skill for that job. For Thief, you get Steal Rare Items, and for Monk, it's Double Atk and Physical Defense if you're not equipped with anything. The Freelancer job gives you a boost of 1% to every stat for every job that's leveled to 10 or 11. If you level all 30 jobs, that's a very significant boost of 30% to all stats, but to get that far, you have to fight so many battles that everyone in the party will be at level 99 before maxing even 15 jobs, and you'll have more money than you'll ever be able to spend.

So, the way I beat the Adventurer and Companion the first time was to make the two male fighters (Yew and Tiis, who have the slightly better Atk stats) Monks, and made their secondary job class Guardians (Guardians can possess other party members, so their stats add together). I made the mistake of making one of the females (Magnolia) a Merchant, which made her useless in the battle. Then, I made the other female (Edea) a Thief, which has the highest Agility of the classes, with a support job of Kaiser (which lets you cast Winter Storm).

The Monk usually uses knuckle weapons, but if you strip them of weapons, armor, and accessories, their Brute Force skill causes their Atk and Physical Def to double. If you add the Freelancer Late Bloomer skill, you boost all of the stats by 30%. That can get you an Atk of 800+ (999 max). The Guardian's Possession skill lets one Monk possess the other, so all of their stats add together. The Monk's special attack is knuckle-based. I only had the level 3 special attack unlocked from the rocket base, which could put 300,000 hits on the Adventurer in one shot, if I used the SP function to remove the damage cap. (The Monk class has a regular Qigong Wave attack, which uses 12 MP, and if two monks are stacked and you use 1 SP, can deliver 60,000 hits, which is enough to defeat Companion.)

For the Thief, I added accessories and daggers that boosted Agility, so that Edea would be more likely to act before the Adventurer could. Then, I'd cast the Kaiser's Winter Storm, which prevents all healing and recovery for 3 turns. Once Companion is KO'd, the Adventurer would try to revive him, and Winter Storm would block that, giving me more time to attack Adventurer with Qigong Wave twice per turn for 9,999 hits each. Every time I'd tried fighting the Adventurer before, I'd get my butt kicked. With the strategy described here, I had to cast Winter Storm 6-7 times, but I did succeed in KO'ing both Companion and Adventurer. The problem is that they automatically revive the first time you defeat them, and you have to repeat the process all over again. If Tiis possessed Yew the first battle and used Yew's special attack, then in the second battle, the roles have to be reversed. And this means that you need to burn 4 SP to remove the damage cap 4 times. If you fail to beat Adventurer and Companion twice consecutively, you have to reset the game, but now you're out the SP you used. Defeat them both twice, and it still takes 32 hours real time with the 3DS case closed to replenish back to 3 SP to try doing this all over again.

The level 3 special attack for knuckle weapons is the Ascendant Palm, which hits one enemy 16 times at 0.35 power. This is effectively the same as saying it's one attack with a 5.6 multiplier, but with the Adventurer's evasion stat, not all of the hits are expected to land. The level 4 special is Thunder Burst, which is base power times 6, in one hit on one enemy. Hopefully, the Adventurer won't evade that one hit.

As mentioned above, the rocket base store for special attacks has been repaired to level 6. It will take 72 hours real time to repair to level 7, another 72 hours to level 8, another 72 hours to level 9, and then 99 hours to get to Thunder Burst at level 10. I'm testing the other special attacks as I get them to see how they compare to two stacked monks using Ascendant Palm, but so far they're all really pathetic (somewhere around 100,000 hits, or less, in one shot). Since the Adventurer has 530,000 HP, the ideal would be for Thunder Burst to at least get me to 400,000, but I'm expecting to be disappointed. If I use my current monk stack on dragons, which have 200,000 HP and some kind of elemental weakness, and I tailor the special attack to use that element, I can deliver up to 600,000. But, the Adventurer doesn't have weaknesses. There may be a chance of using something like the Patissier class to inflict a 25% decrease to physical defense, but generally, the Adventurer is immune to status inflictions, so maybe it's just easier if I make Magnolia another monk, and have her spam the Adventurer with 9,999 hit Qigong Wave attacks, while Edea keeps activating Winter Storm every three rounds.

Anyway, what do you get for defeating Adventurer and Companion? The strongest sword and shield in the game. Are you kidding me? They don't even have specials on them (like absorbing elemental attacks, or inflicting status ailments). The strongest Spears, Axes and Great Swords are better than the strongest sword, and the Monk is the strongest job class in the game, but only if you don't have weapons, shields or accessories equipped. Sigh.

I've said before that Bravely Second is horribly unbalanced. Nothing is stronger than a monk, most attack items (bomb fragments, insect shells) aren't necessary to win battles, level 11 monks don't need to use the weapons or equipment you find in the dungeons, you reach level 99 long before you max out all of the job classes at 11, and there's nothing in the Japanese game to spend excess money on (in the U.S. release, there are novelty skins for the characters, like bunny girl suits and loin cloths, that you can buy for 200,000 to 999,999 pg each, but in the Japanese version those were only available as promotional codes from game magazines via the Nintendo website, which is no longer running). I have beaten every boss (except Adventurer and Companion) at least twice, and I have completely cleaned out the entire game of every treasure and secret item available (most of which I never used). All that's left is to unlock Thunder Burst, which won't be for 13 days as I write this. And then, face off against Adventurer again for a, hopefully, shorter battle that I want to finish in under 5 minutes. There are a whole bunch of shops and things that could still be unlocked in the rocket base, but none of them contribute to the game, and that still represents well over 600 hours of real time to pass. My last Nintendo 3DS burned out while I was repairing Norende village in Bravely Default. I'm not interested in spending another $100 to buy a third 3DS, so I'm not running the risk of burning out my current 3DS just so I can unlock the ability to buy insect wings I don't need from the shops.

So close, and yet so far.