Bravely Second European Release Date Announced

Square Enix's Bravely Second: End Layer will launch for the 3DS in Europe on February 26, Nintendo has announced. In a post on Twitter, the company showed off a special edition of the game which includes a soundtrack CD and a figure of returning character Anges.

The original Bravely Default won GameSpot's 3DS Game of the Year award in 2014.

"Bravely Default's combat system and presentation are the best arguments for it to take home the award for the best 3DS game of 2014," we said. "The ability to sacrifice turns in the present to use in the future gives Bravely Default a unique feel, and though you run the risk of being cut down by your enemies, you may gain an advantage over creatures that are too strong to take down via traditional methods.

"Bravely Default is an innovative game that also manages to deliver classic elements in a new way, and while it has pacing issues during the latter half, that fact doesn't detract from the dozens of hours of greatness that come before.

As of yet, Bravely Second is not available outside of Japan. GameSpot's Alexa Ray Corriea played an import copy for preview and said it offers "interesting combat," but its early hours are a little lacklustre.

"It has an abrupt takeoff," she said. "I wouldn't recommend Bravely Second to those who haven't played Bravely Default, because the game relies heavily on you knowing what happened in the previous game. Some events won't mean much if you aren't aware how important certain characters are to the narrative."

She continued: "The Asterisk job class system and combat are essentially the same as Bravely Default. While there are a handful of new job classes to equip and master--such as the Tomahawk, Fencer, and Bishop--nothing has changed in how you set them up and use them. However, the My Set feature allows you to save job class configurations. For example, if you have a Valkyrie with several White Mage abilities added and a certain set of equipment, you can save that entire configuration. So if you switch to another job and back, your preferred setup will still be there."