Essential Bravely Default tips for beginners

Jobs

Jobs are classes in Bravely Default. They dictate what special abilities your character can use, and your base stats also change depending on which job you have. Jobs level up independently of your character, and each one maxes out at level 14. You’ll either gain a new move or a passive ability each time your job rank increases.

While you’ll eventually have 24 jobs to choose from, these tips will help you get along early in the game, when you don’t have as many choices.

Do sidequests as soon as you can

Sidequests show up on your map as blue speech bubbles. Do them as soon as you can and before you do the available main quest. In the first half of the game, the reward for completing them is always a new job. More jobs means more options, and you’ll want to eventually unlock every single one of them.

Get your bases covered

One of the first jobs you’ll get is the White Mage. This class can heal characters, revive the dead, and cure status ailments. These are incredibly important things. Make sure you have someone leveling up this job as soon as possible.

You’ll also soon gain access to the Black Mage job. Black magic can exploit enemy weakness to deal massive damage (go ahead, make your giant enemy crab joke). If you have someone with the Freelancer job ability Examine, you can find any enemy’s elemental weakness. Do this and exploit it.

Speaking of Freelancer, the base job that every character starts out as, don’t abandon it too quickly. Sure, those new, flashier jobs seem inviting, but the Freelancer learns some nice skills that are especially useful for dungeon exploration, like one that shows you how many treasure chest are left in your area.

Don’t change everyone’s job at the same time

Your stats depend on your job, but they also increase as you level your job up. So when you switch from one with several levels earned to a new job, you’ll see a massive loss to your attack, speed, magic, etc.

You’ll gain most of that back pretty quickly after you gain a few job levels, but don’t make your party vulnerable by switching everyone to a new job at the same time. Make sure that your other three character can pick up the slack while the other one is learning those early levels.

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Using your friends

While Bravely Default is a single-player game, your friends can help thanks to online support and Streetpassing.

Rebuild Norende

Early on, you’ll have the ability to rebuild the village of Norende. You can do so by assigning villagers to rebuild shops, which will then send you periodic gifts and unlock new items, weapons, armor, and special moves that you can buy. Obviously this is all very useful.

You can gain more villagers to help speed the building via Streetpass, the 3DS feature that lets you share data from any other system you come into close proximity with. Getting a lot of villagers fast means you can get access to some great items fairly early in the game.

And if you don’t have anyone to Streetpass with, you can still add a few villagers a day to Norende simply by updating you data at any save location.

Summon friends

You can also summon a character from a friend you’ve Streetpassed in battle to use a special move. These attacks are often powerful — sometimes even more than any move you could do. Don’t be shy about summoning, especially early in the game when you may need some extra help during boss fights.

Also, just like with the Norende villagers, save points will grant you some random friends once per day with characters you can summon.

Ablink

You can register a friend and then link one of your four characters to him or her via the Tactics menu. This gives you access to abilities that they’ve earned that you haven’t yet unlocked. If you have any friends who are further along than you, make sure to use the Ablink ability to give your characters a healthy boost.