So while every other self-respecting grown gamer out there has already completed Bravely Default, I’m still chipping away at it during my morning and evening commute. I’ve been wanting to write more about it than a simple essay on what it is not, but it has been rough figuring out what exactly to write or say about it.

I’ve already discussed the battle system based on my time with the demo, and the full game doesn’t really change much. Your basic battles all rely on what jobs you’ve assigned to your characters and carefully assigning attacks as you burn turns up with the Brave system. Boss fights have taken on several different forms, however, where when to Brave and when to Default is a little bit more complicated. This is also where your party build will be most carefully tested.

Then, sometimes, the game takes a sudden leap from one mountain peak to the other, spiking the difficulty up to a brand new layer of the atmosphere. I had spent two chapters wiping the floor with each dungeon’s trash mobs, inching one level over another as I confronted and pummeled the different optional and required bosses. Now, in the second-to-last chapter, those optional bosses have suddenly been given even greater power and wiped my own blood off the floor with my face.

So I decided to grind. That’s what you do in old school RPG’s, after all. The game giving you a rough time? Well, you can either try repeatedly until you succeed, or you can grind trash mobs into dust until you’ve gained a significant number of levels. Seven, in this case, and only in roughly half an hour due to Bravely Default’s various configuration options. Kick up the encounter rate and max out battle speed, then hit auto-battle and watch the foes fall before your team of elite warriors.

Then, those seven additional levels later, I needed to try three times to defeat that optional battle.

It’s pretty clear that those seven levels weren’t enough to guarantee me an easier path, so naturally my first instinct is to go back and grind a bit more. In fact, I’m at roughly level 85, what’s to stop me from maxing at 99? The amount of experience required per level seems to have capped and remained consistent, so I know it’ll take maybe an hour of time tops.

Or perhaps, just maybe, there is an alternative method.

The game has difficulty settings available that can be changed at any time. So, similarly to Dragon Age: Origins, I can simply set the game to “Easy” if it’s giving me trouble. That option is available to me right now, and there are not “you will not earn X achievement for this switch” notifications to dissuade me from this course of action. Instead of spending an hour running in circles letting the game play itself (new meaning to the term “circle jerk”?), I could simply pop open the menu, adjust the challenge level and go about my day.

The temptation is certainly great here. While the gameplay continues to be enjoyable, and each of these optional missions and confrontations yield bits and pieces of additional story content, it is ultimately serving as little more than padding to the game. The characters are intentionally being written as naive and foolish in regards to their actions and choices in order to justify keeping the game going. The world is smaller with very few dungeons, yet here I am at sixty-some hours inching ever closer to seventy and the game is still going.

Yet, even though I know it should have finished by now, though I would like the story to simply wrap up, I cannot bring myself to merely select that “easy” option. I feel like I should at least maximize my character levels first, as if that will somehow earn me an easier time against my foes.

There is no challenge to this grind. As stated, I just set the game to automatically issue commands in battle and run at a speed faster than I can comprehend, existing merely to mash the confirm button and keep the game going. Yet it still feels “more honorable” than simply changing the difficulty, even though the processes are comparable.

This, I think, is the danger of forming habits in regards to games. In my mind, manipulating the game’s built-in experience system to drive down the difficulty is “earning” it. To simply save myself some time in the menu by selecting an easier difficulty is to give up, or to cheat. I only view it in such a manner because I grew up with one being a staple of the genre, while the other is a new entity that calls into question my “gamer cred”.

Put simply, I’m too old for this shit.

Yet I cannot bring myself to make that selection. I will spend this evening’s commute and tomorrow morning’s grinding my characters until I can grind no more, and while I shall still be preoccupied enough that each stop the train makes will pass by unnoticed, it is still time that could be spent simply progressing through the story.

Apparently the only thing harder to kill than these optional bosses are old habits.