Let me tell you a story: there was once a gung-ho old pirate and an effervescent teenybopper. They both wanted the rights to a song; one wanted to preserve it in its original format, the other wanted to modernise it, and a troop of warriors were asked to mediate. In one timeline, the heroic quartet sided with the pirate and beat the songbird into compliance. In another, they tentatively sided with youth and gave the old seadog a beating, expecting an unpleasant conclusion to the war of copyrights.
It didn't happen. Instead, they got a goddamned party.
Bravely Second is a lot of this. Good-hearted camaraderie interlaced with sprawling battles, silliness balanced with meditations on ethical behaviour, a dollop of drama, and an overarching sense of kindness. Bravely Second is kind. The characters are kind. No one really wants to hurt anyone else, they're all trying to preserve what they believe is the best way to be good to the people who matter, and that's both oddly twee yet strangely satisfying. I think it's because JRPGs always seem fixated with dire circumstances, while Bravely Second feels more like a case of people who can't agree on how best to be nice.
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