Kotaku game logThe last thoughts of a Kotaku staff member about a game we’re playing.Sixty hours later, I still like to see these numbers grow.
Like many other JRPGs, Default brave II it is extremely long and extremely ground, but the game is also full of small touches that occasionally punctuate boredom with joy. One of these is the level increase screen. After killing a lot of enemies, you will see the numerical rewards they have left behind, absorbed by your party, making them stronger and unlocking new abilities. The game illustrates this with XP and JP counters that fill up, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, depending on the transport. It’s good. I’m connected to him. I could not care less about the possible cliché destinations of my characters, but I deeply care to see all their accounts to the fullest at this time.
In many of the old Final Fantasy games that inspired Default with courage in series, progress can be slow and granular, but Default brave II has a series of tricks to “extract” the screen to increase the level. First of all, you can equip passive abilities that increase the amount of JP (class leveling work points) gained from battles. Then similar to Brave second, you can stack enemy encounters using bait. Beat several waves of enemies in a row and a multiplier will double you even more. Before you know it, you are learning new skills and mastering new jobs in no time, an achievement that feels even better when the results are viewed elegantly.
There is a long history of JRPGs doing this, but some are certainly more engaged than others. XP screens were common in the old days Final Fantasy games, when meetings were still random and turn-based. Final Fantasy VIIIt has always been a favorite of mine:
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Unfortunately, they abandoned him in Recover, where, instead, the amount of experience, gil, and skill points you gain in each battle flash briefly on the screen for a moment. Dragon Quest XIIn many ways, the gold standard for reviving the old turn-based JRPG formula has done a lot of things right, but a high-level screen wasn’t one of them. He also just delivered the news by text with all the pomp and circumstances of an internal newsletter.
Pokemon the series also used bars to measure XP after battles, starting with a small pixelated bar in Gold and Silver Games:
Through the latest releases of Sword and Shield, you will see what happens after each battle for each Pokémon in your party. Now this is the progress:
Are these types of glorified results pages a cheap trick to exploit the older parts of my lizard Brian? Probably, but when you sign up to get up hundreds of times over tens of hours, these things become important and Default brave II he raises them beyond a stake formality. They head to the camera, the way my Light Warriors turn and dance as they fight on their backs, everything goes a long way to giving me what I want from an otherwise sometimes archaic and too familiar type of JRPG old school. Maybe that’s part of why a month later I’m still grinding all the Brave Default IIthe final game.