Bravely Second’s new jobs like Cat Master, Patissier, Exorcist, and several others are one of the main things that fans are looking forward to in the upcoming sequel. Producer Tomoya Asano and assistant producer Shinji Takahashi spoke with Dengeki about how they made and balanced the new jobs.
“Whenever we start thinking about new jobs, we start out by keeping the entire game’s balance in mind,” says Asano. “We’d like to have this many attackers; there should be this number of offensive mages; let’s stick to this number for healers… these are some of the thoughts that go into the balancing. One important thing of the Cat Master in particular is how we created it to be a ‘playing around’ type [of class].”
Asano says that, while the Cat Master job was originally made just for players to have fun with, Cat Masters are actually pretty strong. They’re not too shabby when it comes to attacking, and they can also provide support when required.
Bravely Default had the Performer as one of the support jobs in the game, and with Astrologian playing a similar role in Bravely Second, Dengeki asks what the main difference between the two jobs is.
“The Performer had the stance of physical attacks + support. Astrologians, on the other hand, have been allotted the role of magic attacks + support,” says Takahashi. “Again, we’ve been wanting to add new magic-type classes, so we created [the Astrologian] to add to that.
“The Patissier job is a support-type that looks like a playing around-type,” explains Asano. “Rather than support, they actually specialize in weakening enemies than enhancing allies.”
Takahashi also mentions that it’s worth noting that Patissiers have really cute battle animations. While Cat Masters are that way, too, the Patissiers in particular have very detailed movements, and you’ll get a good idea of just how much fun the development team had in designing them.
Meanwhile, the Exorcist class has a unique ability called “Undo,” and as the name implies, it can “undo” whatever happened by going back several turns, which is an ability that could ruin game balance. Dengeki asks if it was difficult to balance this aspect of the game.
“Yes, it was. While we did come to a decision regarding their looks at an early stage, we were much more careful about balance adjustments,” answers Asano. “It wouldn’t be far-fetched to say that out of everything in Bravely Second, this may be the part that we put the most efforts when it comes to balance adjustments.”
“Basically, we thought of the Exorcist as a healing-type role,” adds Takahashi. “Healing-types already have the White Mage, so in order to differentiate from them, we’ve designed Exorcists to have a special way they are used.”
According to Asano, prior to adjustments, the Exorcists were actually too useful, and their ability was pretty much the ultimate one in the game; however, the team able to make the right adjustments to fix that. The producer says that it’s still a really fun job despite having been nerfed somewhat, and says to look forward to trying it out.
Finally, the Guardian sounds like a tank role, but it’s also been described as an attacker. As it turns out, it’s actually a little bit of both. According to Takahashi, Guardians take enemy hits by becoming the decoy, and will also be able to cover allies.
“Actually, the previous game didn’t really have many tank roles, so it was basically just the Knight,” says Asano. “I believe that Guardians will be tanks that are capable of also being attackers.”
“They’re excellent at physical attacks, so depending on the person playing, they could be used as attackers,” adds Takahashi.
Bravely Second will release in Japan on April 23, 2015 for Nintendo 3DS.
Published: Mar 18, 2015 01:03 pm