Before we get to the main walkthrough, here are some helpful tips that we hope will make your experience more enjoyable. Because what are games for, if not for fun?

1. Play How You Want¶

One of the things that makes Bravely Second great is how darn flexible it is. For instance, you can speed up and slow down battles on the fly, configure various Auto-Battle settings, skip or replay cutscenes and even allow the game to save for you.

Most importantly, however, you’re free to change the difficulty level and encounter rate whenever you’re on the field. To do so, open the Party menu and go to Tactics - Config - Difficulty. You can also adjust the encounter rate by pressing the R button.

Difficulty is self-explanatory; if you’re finding the game too challenging, don’t be ashamed to lower the difficulty a notch. Or if you’re finding Normal difficulty too pedestrian, you can raise it to Hard–and if that’s not enough, disable experience gain, etc.

Meanwhile, changing the encounter rate can benefit in two ways. If you’re tired of fighting, you can lower the encounter rate or set it to zero; just be careful not to deprive yourself of experience. On the other hand, you can up the encounter rate to speed up level gain.

2. Study Your Foe¶

It’s good to be forward-thinking, but try to avoid going in all guns blazing during your first encounter with a new enemy. Some enemies, particularly bosses or those from later on, can have some really nasty tricks up their sleeves, which can catch you off-guard.

Instead, try to spend some turns Defaulting to observe what your opponent does, perhaps taking a few pot shots to see how they react. At the same time, you should use the Freelancer’s Examine ability or a Magnifying Glass item to check their stats, elemental weakness and monster family.

For instance, some enemies–particularly bulky ones–are resistant to physical attacks. So you don’t want to waste time poking them with your weapons, when you could scan their stats and discover they have high physical defence, but low magical defence–and thus easy prey for your wizards.

Another example: an enemy might absorb fire-based damage, so rather than unleash four lots of fire magic from the go, you can cast one spell and stop. Plus if you discover an enemy has a particular elemental weakness or is from a certain monster family, you can target those to finish it quicker than usual.

3. Connect Online¶

This game includes many incentives to connect your 3DS or 2DS to the Internet. Early on, you can access the online functions through the Save menu, which is available by speaking to the orange-suited Adventurer or from the world map.

Select Add Friends and the game will search your Friend List, adding all of your friends (up to 20) who have played Bravely Second. You can borrow your friends’ learned abilities via Abilink, under “Tactics” in the Party menu, which is extremely useful if they’re ahead of you.

Plus, when you’re stuck, you can summon your friends’ characters into battle to perform their most recent move–again a massive help if they’re higher level than you. Secondly, choose Update Data and you will download guests from across the world and Ba’als (optional bosses) for Fort-Lune.

Guests can be summoned like friends, but you can’t use Abilink with them. However, for each guest you meet, you’ll receive an additional resident for Fort-Lune, which is perfect if you lack the means to StreetPass. Note that you can only Update Data once a day.

4. Rebuild Fort-Lune¶

With so much to do, so little time, it’s easy to dismiss or forget about rebuilding Magnolia’s homeland of Fort-Lune. But that’s a big mistake because rebuilding Fort-Lune will help you a lot . For one, upgrading the Pharm-lab will **** expand the inventory of the Adventurer’s shop.

Since the Adventurer is always found right before boss battles, it helps to have a wide variety of items easily available. Plus, every now and then, you’ll receive some free samples so it’s win-win! Secondly, you can only get new–and stronger– Special Moves by upgrading the Special R&D Labs.

Special Moves are fantastic for taking down tricky foes–of which this game has many of–so you really want to focus on getting new ones. Similarly, by upgrading the Parts Labs and Trigger Labs, you can further customise your Special Moves, to make them pack a bigger punch.

Besides, your journey’s going to be long, so you may as well spare some time to assign workers. Plus if you leave your 3DS or 2DS on sleep mode with Bravely Second running, your workers will continue while you take a break and you can gather SP–two birds with one stone!

5. Amazing Checklist¶

With myriad jobs, abilities, items and equipments at your disposal, it can be hard to discern which ones are keepers. Thankfully, you can complete the game with the most basic of setups, but there are definitely some things we recommend you keep an eye out for…

Of course, there’s a lot more, but if we listed them all, we’d be here all day! Instead, hopefully this checklist will serve as a good starting point.