Getting Back to Bravely Default

So I took a rather long break from the story for a variety of reasons, which I shall attempt to explain briefly.

• Grinding Norende completion
• Grinding job levels to fight Nemeses, indirectly resulting in overlevelling my party
• Updating my data to get more Nemeses, in hopes of getting the elusive Japanese Elixir Mammon
• Swapping out the cartridge for Chrono Trigger after updating and grinding tech points in that
• Letting Norende give me gifts
• Eventually getting the elusive Japanese Elixir Mammon, and stealing enough Elixirs to buy the most expensive Norende stuff (all the costumes and a Growth Egg), then stealing an entire stack of 99 Elixirs to use as income since the Growth Egg prevents you from getting money from battles

Today I finally resumed the story.  I was in Florem looking for the Water Vestal.  BTW, going off of the Japanese audio, the word "Vestal" seems to be used as a translation for the Japanese word "miko", because the Wind Vestal is "kaze no miko" and the Water Vestal is "mizu no miko".  Advanced that a bit and noticed the blue sidequest bubbles starting to pop up, so I went and did all of those, which resulted in me getting the Ranger, Summoner, Valkyrie, and Red Mage jobs.  Then kurtjmac decided to stream some more work on building the Wilson Hall building from FermiLab on the MindCrack server, so I saved and watched that.  The stream actually started while I was doing the stupid Red Mage side quest, which requires you to enter Florem at night several times in a row, so I just had the stream audio turned down until I finished it.  Regardless, I now have the location of the Water Vestal and everything involving her will happen next time.

Level 53 in Chapter 2 is definitely overlevelled, you think?  It's actually kind of pointless to level grind so close to the beginning of the game since rewards go up by a significant amount from one chapter to the next, but...  I wanted those Norende items and the Japanese Elixir Mammon.  In terms of grinding, I'm probably not going to do any more job grinding for a while, since my current party combination (Tiz: Black Mage/Freelancer, Agnes: White Mage/Black Mage, Ringabel: Black Mage/variable, Edea: Black Mage/variable) works pretty well, and I've got several levels of each sitting there being pointless because I haven't yet gotten to the vendor that sells the necessary spell scrolls.  My party before all the Nemesis fights was Monk/Freelancer, White Mage/Black Mage, Black Mage/variable, and Spell Fencer/variable.  I haven't really settled on secondary jobs for Ringabel and Edea yet.

Ranger looks interesting and I'll have to give it a shot when I get a chance, pun intended.  I hope bows don't suffer from crap damage like they do in some other RPGs.

Summoner looks like a job that could help in the right situation at the right time, and be mostly useless the rest of the time, which makes it a good candidate to be a secondary job.  The summons, of which I have the first two, cost 40 MP each, when my best available Black Magic spells cost 15 MP each.  There better be a significant damage advantage or ancillary benefits to justify that increased MP cost.

Valkyrie uses spears in melee and the only real ability I saw during the asterisk fight was Jump, which gave me the opportunity to have everyone Default and then I won the fight on the next turn, after the hit from Jump, with the extra BP I'd gained from Defaulting because I didn't have anything else to do.

Red Mage looks like it'll be interesting, mainly as a secondary job since it can use the lower level White Magic and Black Magic spells.  As a primary, it has varying levels of semi-decent proficiency with all the weapons.  Also as a primary, it has a random source of extra BP when you get hit, but for it to work, that specific character has to be hit, and even then there's only a 25% chance of getting BP.  It'll probably be a job I ignore until I'm at the endgame and grinding all the jobs up on everyone for support ability purposes.

I do like how the jobs get gradually unlocked as you play through the game.  This allows jobs obtained later on in the game to be more powerful, while at the same time encouraging the player to experiment with what works rather than staying in a rut, since new options are constantly opening up.