Bravely Second Demo Thoughts

Bravely Second, Square Enix’s upcoming rpg for the 3DS, will be coming out next month. Ahead of that, Square released a demo for the game. The demo is titled Bravely Second: The Ballad of the Three Cavaliers and features a story that can’t be found in the full game. How is this demo and is it worth downloading? Here are my thoughts!

I wasn’t sure what to expect with the Bravely Second demo. I was hoping that it would be good, but I remembered how disappointed I was in the first game. But the demo was free, so I figured, why not download it?

Bravely Second: The Ballad of the Three Cavaliers is a unique story that you won’t find in the full Bravely Second game. Not only that, but the demo has unlimited retries and the experience as a whole feels more like a full game and less like a demo. There are jobs to unlock, bosses to fight, multiple dungeons, side quests, cutscenes, and more. The demo is supposed to be ten hours long, but I beat the demo at about five hours. I feel like I may have missed at least a couple of things, though I’m not sure if the demo is actually 10 hours or not! I suspect you could play the game a really long time by just fighting a lot of random battles! There are bunch of those, but you can increase or decrease their frequency. The demo has a lot of options, much like the first game did. It also has the same gorgeous graphics that the first game had.

The demo has great graphics, but these graphics are not that much different from Bravely Default (the first game in the series). In fact, the demo as a whole feels more like an add-on to the first game and less like the start of a sequel. The battle system, the job system, the menus, and just basically everything feels very similar to Bravely Default. This is not totally bad thing because the first game had a lot of great things going for it. I guess it just comes down to a feeling that Square Enix took the easy route here and just built a second game with all the materials from the first game. It doesn’t have the new feeling that you’d expect or at least hope for in a sequel.

The game does have a different story and some new characters though. I found some of the demo’s dialogue to be a bit corny and the voice acting is definitely a mixed bag. It is pretty impressive how much voice acting there is considering this is just a demo though. The story and characters are likeable overall.

I really enjoyed the demo’s story, battle system, and everything else. It may not have a brand new feeling, but the demo is an enjoyable experience. I just had to play the demo till the end and find out what was going to happen! Though, I have no plans to buy the full Bravely Second game. I was disappointed in the first game because of the padding toward the end of that game. I’m worried that the second game may do the same thing.

That said, I do think that if you’re an rpg fan, you should download the Bravely Second demo. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, its free and has unlimited tries. So you just can’t lose by playing this demo. Maybe it’ll convince you to buy the full game and maybe it won’t. Though I think you’ll have fun with the demo if you like rpgs at all.

Check out this trailer for Bravely Second:

Bravely Second: The Ballad of the Three Cavaliers is currently on the 3DS eshop for free. Have you played it? What did you think of it? Will you be buying Bravely Second? Let us know in the comments! Bravely Second comes to the North American 3DS eshop on April 15th.