Revisiting Bravely Second: Never realized just how short this really was.

As mentioned on the Bravely Default Revisit, I originally played Second before I played Default, and I couldn't understand why so many of the series' fans didn't like Second.  It clicked to me after I'd played Default and then Second, in that order.

What I Liked

✅ Music was better than the first game. That's not to say the first had bad music, simply that Second took it up a step.

✅ Character models are significantly improved.  Things like legs actually look like legs instead of deformed baseball bats.

✅ The branching system was interesting for the time, basically allowing players to make their own difficulty path.

✅ No repeating section like with Default.

✅ Being able to save favorite battle setups and equipment was a great QoL consideration.

What I Didn't Like

👎 Second has you literally going back to every place you went in the first game if you actually want to get asterisks.

👎 Reused map assets without modification felt lazy; for example, cave sprites that you can't enter (So why leave them on the map?)

👎 The layout of the world has dramatically changed, inexplicably.  An entire large town (the one you start in) has sprouted up in a place where there was just a single obelisk and the town you started in + Norende from the first game is nowhere to be seen.  In two years entire city ecosystems are changed.

👎 The moon rebuilding sidequest gives pitiful benefits compared to the Norende rebuild of the first.

👎 The intro cutscene replays at the beginning of each chapter - it gets annoying real fast, and I like cutscenes, but not the same one over and over again.

👎 The voice acting is not as good as the first.

👎 There's not very much "game".  It's just short compared to the first, and feels like a prologue rather than a full game.

Summary

I still say that Second was a smoother, overall more mature experience, but it took quite a few steps back from Default.  It may be the reason that the head folks apologized for it when announcing Default II; unfortunately, Default II was arguably worse than both Default and Second by a large margin.