The leveling screen in Bravely Default 2 is so satisfying

Sixty hours later, I still love to see those numbers go up.

Like many other JRPGs, Bravely Default II it is extremely long and extremely heavy, but the game is also full of little touches that occasionally punctuate boredom with joy. One of them is the level-up screen. After killing a multitude of enemies, you’ll see the numerical rewards they left behind absorbed by your party, making them stronger and unlocking new skills. The game illustrates this with XP and JP meters that fill up, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, depending on the move. It’s good. I’m addicted to it. I couldn’t care less about my characters’ cliched fates, but I care deeply about seeing them reach the maximum limit at this point.

In much of the old Final fantasy games that inspired the Bravely Default series, progress can be slow and granular, but Bravely Default II has a number of tricks to “improve” the level up screen. First, you can equip passive skills that increase the amount of JP (work points to increase class level) earned in fights. So, similar to Bravely Second, you can stack encounters with the enemy using bait. Defeat several waves of enemies in a row and a multiplier will double your JP even more. Before you know it, you are learning new skills and mastering new jobs in the blink of an eye, an accomplishment that feels even better when the results are visualized with elegance.

There is a long history of JRPGs doing this, but some are definitely more committed to it than others. XP screens were common in older versions Final fantasy games, when encounters were still random and turn-based. Final Fantasy VIIhas always been one of my favorites:

Unfortunately, they discarded it in the Redo, where, instead, the amount of experience points, skills and skills you earn from each fight briefly flashes on the screen for a moment. Dragon Quest XI, in many ways the gold standard for reviving the old turn-based JRPG formula, got a lot of things right, but an incredible level-up screen was not one of them. He also just delivered the news by text with all the pomp and circumstance of an internal newsletter.

THE Pokémon series also used bars to measure XP after battles, starting with a small pixelated bar on the Gold and Silver games:

For the most recent releases from Sword and Shield, you can see this happen after each fight for each Pokémon in your group. Now this is progress:

Are these types of glorified results pages a cheap scam designed to explore the older parts of my brian lizard? Probably, but when you sign up to level up hundreds of times in dozens of hours, those things become important and Bravely Default II elevates them beyond a formal table game. The way the camera spins, the way my Warriors of Light spin and dance while patting each other on the back, it all goes a long way towards giving me what I want from a type of JRPG that is sometimes archaic and overly familiar. Maybe that’s why a month later I’m still working bravely Standard IIend of the game.