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Each job comes with its own (often funky) costume.

One of the best parts of the Bravely series is the multitude of jobs and abilities that you can assign to each character and the near countless combinations that you can create to devastate even the toughest enemy mobs or boss fights.

However, for those new to Bravely, it can be hard to grasp the job and ability mechanics at first–perhaps even overwhelming. Of course, you’ve got plenty of time during your long adventure to learn the ropes and, as always, we’re here to provide some top-notch guidance.

The Job Market¶

Jobs are roles or classes that each character can assume. Each of the four heroes starts in the lowly Freelancer job, but as you progress, you’ll earn new jobs by defeating the Glanz Empire’s finest or the Eternian elites and acquiring their prized job asterisks.

Every job has its own unique characteristics, down to its stat distribution, weapon proficiencies and set of abilities. For example, a Wizard specialises in casting magic spells and thus has high Intelligence, a high Rod proficiency and many abilities that augment its spells.

All About Abilities¶

Abilities are pretty self-explanatory–they’re skills that do something good. Each job has its own unique set of abilities and characters can acquire these abilities by leveling up in that job. In addition, abilities come in two distinct flavours.

Command Abilities are abilities that you can select during battle via the Ability command. These have a variety of different effects, ranging from dealing additional damage, causing a status effect, healing HP or perhaps a mixture. Depending on the ability, there may be a cost involved, such as MP or BP.

Character can possess two sets of command abilities at any one time. One of those will be from the character’s current job–this is known as the “Fixed Command”. The second–known as the “Job Command”–can be from any of the character’s available jobs.

Meanwhile, Support Abilities are passive abilities. Unlike Command Abilities, these don’t work automatically and must be individually set via the “Support Abilities” menu. Characters can equip support abilities learned from any job.

However, each character is limited to 5 Support Ability slots and thus can accomodate a maximum of 5 different Support Abilities. Also, bear in mind that some Support Abilities–generally the better ones–can individually take up 2 or 3 slots.

Finally, to make jobs somewhat more unique, each job has an innate Support Ability, called a Specialty . While Specialties can eventually be learned as a regular Special Ability, it doesn’t “waste” a Support Ability slot when it’s a Specialty, making it all the more useful.