5/5 ★ – Luggo's review of Bravely Second: End Layer.

Absolutely incredible sequel. It fixes a lot of problems with Bravely Default such as the horrible padding near the end and refines the gameplay and job system to make it more fun then ever. The new jobs they add in are all really fun and give you so many abilities to mess around with. Not to mention while there are only 10 levels for each job (11 after a certain point) unlike in Bravely Default where there were 14, that’s mainly because a good chunk of abilities you’d get from job level ups were situational. Plus now you can actually see all the abilities each job, which encouraged me to experiment a lot more to unlock more fun skills. Also while they did remove some jobs I don’t really mind it that much. Conjurer got merged with Summoner which I think was a great decision. I never liked either of those jobs in BD, but here I loved using Summoner. I literally spent so much time on my second playthrough grinding, not because I had to, but because I wanted to. Speaking of which they even made grinding fun by giving you increased EXP if you’re able to defeat a group of enemies in one turn and keep up that streak, meaning there’s even some strategy outside of the bosses. There are plenty of other aspects that I think are improved in this game as well. I personally didn’t think the main cast in Bravely Default was that great, but the cast in Bravely Second is really solid. They all have fun interactions with each other, and really made me like Tiz and Edea more than I used to. You can debate about which soundtrack is better, but I personally like them about equally, though I listen to Bravely Second’s more. However the dungeon themes in BD are definitely better than in BS. There are very few flaws that I can think of here. The endgame villain could’ve definitely been better, the Catmancer is a poor replacement for the Vampire, and the soundtrack isn’t a direct upgrade, but I don’t really mind all of these that much. The gameplay is spectacular and one of the few games where I had even more fun replaying it than I did on my first playthrough, which is extremely surprising considering that I already loved it the first time through. My favorite game of all time for certain. If you were burned by the first game for its terrible padding but still liked certain aspects about it then I highly recommend you give Bravely Second a shot. It’s truly one of a kind