« | Main | »

Bravely Second Hands-on Preview – TGS

By Janelle | September 18, 2014 at 8:34 pm

Bravely Second picks up some time after the first game, and though the original cast are all still alive and well, a new cast of characters takes their place in the demo (though Agnes takes Airy’s place of offering advice on the menu screen). The demo was quick to introduce the four new characters: three musketeers, Yuu, Jan and Nikolai, and the “Demon Buster” Magnolia. Agnes tasks the group with finding a child in a forest. The demo’s end featured a fight with a woman named Amy who holds an asterisk for a new job, the Tomahawk, which wields a new weapon type: the gun. Since large chunks of the menu, including the job select screen, were disabled, glimpses of new content and its effects was limited, but the demo still had some new content to show off.

First, the player was able to wander around the portions of the town of Instantal, and though it maintains the hand-drawn look and feel of the original, the town’s graphics have a lot more depth to them, even with the 3D slider turned off. The pieces of foreground and background scroll at different rates, and the town feels more spacious than any from the original.

The forest dungeon also had increased depth, and not just in graphical quality: there were raised and lowered platforms, slopes, and even tunnels, all seen from an angle lower to the ground. It’s a big change from the original game’s dungeons, which were top-down and often felt a bit flat. Navigating the dungeon was made friendly thanks to a shortcut button on the touchscreen that brought up a pop-up menu for the auto battle settings and the encounter rate (the encounter rate meter was buried deep in the menu of the first game).

The combat mechanics themselves are identical to Bravely Default‘s, as far as the demo showed, but hints of new content offer visions of how new jobs might shake up old strategies. Yuu’s job was fixed as the brand-new Wizard job, which, in addition to having Black-Magic-like spells, has the ability to add optional modifiers to spells for an extra MP cost. “Dart” added to a spell would make that spell the first action of a round, “Burst” would make a spell target all, “Mist” dealt slow damage over time, and “Hammer” would turn a spell’s damage into physical damage. These modfiers could be added to Black and White magic as well as the Wizard’s new magic. Nikolai also had some kind of Moon magic, which dealt exclusively in stat buffs; what job it belonged to or how it might differ strategically from Performer wasn’t clear.

Bravely Second is projected for a Winter 2014 release date in Japan, and there have not been any plans for localization announced at this time.

Topics: Bravely Second, Previews, Tokyo Game Show, Tokyo Game Show 2014