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| Yes, you can use healing spells and items to kill the undead. |
It's as though Final Fantasy V and IX had a baby who got their best genes: turn-based battles, an intricate job system, full 3D character models, and the lovely pre-rendered backdrops of a 32-bit PlayStation-era Final Fantasy. And like more recent entries in the series, it has full voiceover for cutscenes, with the option to choose between English and Japanese voice actors.
For running on a relatively underpowered platform, Bravely Default is also very pretty. Character models (and the myriad job-based character costumes) are charming and detailed, impressive enemy designs range from cute to grotesque, weapons are fully modeled in battles, and the aforementioned backdrops use the stereoscopic 3D to great effect. The story is pretty compelling, too.
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| The Kingdom of Caldisla is breathtaking in 3D |
You control Agnès Oblige, pious vestal of the Wind Crystal; Tiz Arrior, a simple shepherd boy in the arcadian village of Norende; Ringabel, a mysterious platinum-blond playboy with no memory of his past; and Edea Lee, daughter to the Grand Marshal of the Eternian Forces (an anti-Crystalist military power invading all neighboring kingdoms in the world of Luxendarc). You're joined along the way by Airy, a cryst-fairy who guides Agnès and provides story hints.
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| L-R: Edea, Tiz, Agnès, and Ringabel |
When the Wind Crystal is suddenly overtaken by a swirling darkness, a great chasm swallows up Norende (and Tiz's brother), and Edea is assigned field duty with the Eternian Sky Knights, the four heroes cross paths in the kingdom of Caldisla.
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| Edea and the Eschalot |
It's fairly standard stuff for a JRPG. But for every time the plot relies on a tired anime cliché ("How could you? I'll never forgive you!") or stock character (the dirty-minded ossan), it surprises with a willingness to explore complex foes who are often empathetic and oppose you not as evildoers, but as ideological and religious opponents. In fact, the villains tend to believe they are saving the world, treating your heroes as a threat to peace and challenging them to question the truths they hold dear.
Unlike the similar-looking PlayStation Final Fantasies with their showy (read: interminably long) battle animations and frequent load times, Bravely Default is super snappy. The cutscenes are skippable (and fully replayable from the menu, which I appreciate as a story-obsessive player), its tutorials are brief, and it provides exhaustive options for the player to adjust and smooth over points of friction typical to the genre. You can slow down or speed up battle animations, adjust the enemy encounter rate, turn on auto-battle to repeat your party's last actions, change the game difficulty on the fly, and switch between any of several languages for voice and text.
To be honest, when I first heard about how replete-with-options Bravely Default was, I balked. I like my RPGs linear, story-driven, and Japanese, and I find too much choice potentially paralyzing. A few hours in, though, and my fear proved unfounded. All options are exactly that—optional. And they're anything but intrusive. I didn't even realize auto-battle was an option until a couple dozen hours into the game. (Go ahead; laugh it up.)
Once I was in the rhythm of things, the gameplay in Bravely Default was a pure pleasure. I like grinding and over-leveling in JRPGs, so I turned the encounter rate to 150%. In most RPGs, that would slow my progression down to a crawl. But turning the battle speed up to maximum and auto-battling my way through trash mobs in between story segments kept things moving briskly, even on my chosen Hard difficulty setting. And if I were a player who valued story alone, I could've turned the difficulty down to Normal, turned the encounter rate to 50% or 0%, and blazed through the game even faster. Either play style is perfectly legitimate.
Bravely Default gets its name from a unique twist on the turn-based formula in which a character can borrow from a reserve of turn actions (Brave Points, or BP) to perform more than one action per turn ('Braving'), or take no action and defend until the next turn ('Defaulting') to build up extra BP for a future turn.
In keeping with the game's ethos of making gameplay more efficient, Braving allows your characters to take four actions each in one turn, making it possible to take up to sixteen actions total and wipe out weaker parties of enemies in the very first turn of battle. But there's risk involved—if you push a character into a BP-deficit before you finish a battle, your enemies can deliver unanswered blows against your party until you're out of the red, which can be fatal. Balancing Braving and Defaulting adds a great layer of strategy and forethought that not only speeds up the grind, but makes the longer boss battles even more demanding and satisfying.
Each time you defeat a major boss from the ranks of Eternian forces, you are granted a new job skill. Like Final Fantasy V (and III before it), your characters can swap between the jobs your team knows, which changes their costume and their current stats. (Mages, for example, will generally have higher Magic Attack and lower Physical Defense). A character learns skills unique to that job by defeating enemies and earning Job Points.
In addition to knowing the abilities of a job you're actively leveling, you can also equip the abilities of one other job. So while a character maybe currently be a White Mage with low Physical Defense, they can throw on the abilities of a Ninja to avoid or counter physical attacks. Mixing and matching jobs between characters to develop an unstoppable team provides the meat of the challenge and much of the fun of Bravely Default.
While I swapped jobs and abilities as needed for the uber-challenging late-game bosses, my standard team makeup was:
If you're struggling with tough battles, Bravely Default gives you a leg up with Sleep Points (SP). Press the 'Select' button in battle and you'll be able to freeze time and take an action without using any BP. This feature is called 'Bravely Second,' and it can get you out of sticky situations as they arise. However, your party can only use three SP at one time. To use more, you have to put the 3DS system in Sleep Mode for eight hours for another SP to regenerate, or you can buy more via the eShop.
You might think an in-app purchase option in the game would break the balance by giving paying players an advantage, but in practice it's so unobtrusive that there was never a time I needed or even considered buying SP.
Additionally, some StreetPasses you collect come with a high-difficulty optional boss called a Nemesis. These bosses are easily the freakiest and toughest in the game. Beat one for a chance to get rare items that permanently raise a character's stats.
There's plenty more about Bravely Default to praise, too. The soundtrack is bursting with excellent orchestral and modern-rock arrangements that complement and color the game's different cities, dungeons, and battlefields. The script is great, full of smart character choices and "Party Chat" side conversations (resembling FFIX's ATEs—Active Time Events) that do a lot to flesh out the personalities, motivations, and humanity of the main cast. The abundant flavor text from the in-game encyclopedia is also a delight to read, adding tons of depth and lore to the world of Luxendarc.
There's a good 40-70 hours of content in the game across the four main kingdoms, multiple optional dungeons, and plentiful optional bosses. In that time, the game did almost everything right and won the crusty old heart of a guy who misses the glory days of Squaresoft RPGs. If you like (or used to like) Final Fantasy games, I can't recommend enough that you play Bravely Default…just not the second half.
If want to avoid spoilers, Default here. If you are bold, then Brave on.
*** SPOILER WARNING ***
*** YOU'VE BEEN WARNED ***
I can't in good conscience recommend that you play Bravely Default through to completion. Coming from an avowed completionist, you should consider that damning indeed.
Without spoiling the specifics of the plot, Bravely Default is guilty of the most egregious content and asset recycling of any game I've played. Ever. It goes beyond the standard palette-swapping of enemies (though it does that, too), all the way into testing the limits of player sanity and endurance.
Here's how it goes: After your party accomplishes its established goal of awakening all four of Luxendarc's elemental crystals, you travel to the final area, fight a final battle, and then…
…wake up in the starting town again. Only the members of your party remember your adventures and accomplishments. All the NPCs around you are meeting you for the first time. Your work has not just been undone—it's never been done.
Confused and at a loss for what to do next, your team sheepishly decides to soldier on and do it all again. That's right. Every crystal needs to be revisited and required bosses need to be fought again.
When I reached this point, I was confused and slightly amused at the audacity of this twist, and I continued on. Luckily, you still have all jobs, gear, and the airship you had when entering the endpoint. And fortunately for those who know their limits, you don't need to re-fight every job-holding Eternian boss from your first go-round—those are now optional bosses.
But speed or slog your way through it, your heroes will find their way to the endpoint again, fight the final boss again, and then…
…wake up in the starting town again.
In all, the game demands you complete this circular task a total of four additional times, for a total of five runs through the same set of dungeons and bosses. (That's to earn the true ending; there's an abbreviated ending available from the third cycle on.) And while each cycle causes the characters to become increasingly doubtful of the task at hand, the characters continue on ad nauseam, hoping the next time will be the last.
Had the writers done a better job of showing that the characters recognize the sheer insanity of this seemingly fruitless repetition, I might have been able to empathize with their plight. Instead, the player is offered a few brief lines of dialogue each cycle in which the characters acknowledge frustration and something being wrong, but then continue on like morons. Meanwhile, I as a player grew more and more disconnected from the heroes as I lost sympathy for them and wondered if I was doing something wrong or just being trolled by the developers.
One concession the game makes toward keeping things fresh each cycle is that the optional boss encounters change somewhat. The enemy characters' motivations alter slightly, their difficulty increases, and they begin teaming up with one another, providing increasingly rewarding character development, story scenarios, and challenges for the player to face. But you'll have to spend loads of extra hours and truly love grinding the same content over and over again (or have incredible patience) to reach these tiny morsels of new content.
But like I said above, these encounters are optional. You could probably race through a cycle in just a few hours, adding a minimum of 10-15 hours of dreary repetition onto the game. However, the developers clearly encourage the player to invest more time and energy than that, and I, like a sucker, obliged.
By the time I'd finished the game and earned the true ending and a (very cool) secret cinematic, I had logged 150 hours in the game. Note that in that time, I scoured every inch of the game and fought through all the optional content on Hard mode, so my personal settings and play choices made the game longer than it needed to be. But that's how I play RPGs, and for the middle 50 or so hours, it was a damn slog.
*** SPOILERS OVER***
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| Sage Yulyana, the resident creepy old man of Bravely Default |
Unlike the similar-looking PlayStation Final Fantasies with their showy (read: interminably long) battle animations and frequent load times, Bravely Default is super snappy. The cutscenes are skippable (and fully replayable from the menu, which I appreciate as a story-obsessive player), its tutorials are brief, and it provides exhaustive options for the player to adjust and smooth over points of friction typical to the genre. You can slow down or speed up battle animations, adjust the enemy encounter rate, turn on auto-battle to repeat your party's last actions, change the game difficulty on the fly, and switch between any of several languages for voice and text.
To be honest, when I first heard about how replete-with-options Bravely Default was, I balked. I like my RPGs linear, story-driven, and Japanese, and I find too much choice potentially paralyzing. A few hours in, though, and my fear proved unfounded. All options are exactly that—optional. And they're anything but intrusive. I didn't even realize auto-battle was an option until a couple dozen hours into the game. (Go ahead; laugh it up.)
 |
| Auto-battle is just the best. |
Once I was in the rhythm of things, the gameplay in Bravely Default was a pure pleasure. I like grinding and over-leveling in JRPGs, so I turned the encounter rate to 150%. In most RPGs, that would slow my progression down to a crawl. But turning the battle speed up to maximum and auto-battling my way through trash mobs in between story segments kept things moving briskly, even on my chosen Hard difficulty setting. And if I were a player who valued story alone, I could've turned the difficulty down to Normal, turned the encounter rate to 50% or 0%, and blazed through the game even faster. Either play style is perfectly legitimate.
Bravely Default gets its name from a unique twist on the turn-based formula in which a character can borrow from a reserve of turn actions (Brave Points, or BP) to perform more than one action per turn ('Braving'), or take no action and defend until the next turn ('Defaulting') to build up extra BP for a future turn.
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| Brave or Default, the choice is yours. |
In keeping with the game's ethos of making gameplay more efficient, Braving allows your characters to take four actions each in one turn, making it possible to take up to sixteen actions total and wipe out weaker parties of enemies in the very first turn of battle. But there's risk involved—if you push a character into a BP-deficit before you finish a battle, your enemies can deliver unanswered blows against your party until you're out of the red, which can be fatal. Balancing Braving and Defaulting adds a great layer of strategy and forethought that not only speeds up the grind, but makes the longer boss battles even more demanding and satisfying.
Each time you defeat a major boss from the ranks of Eternian forces, you are granted a new job skill. Like Final Fantasy V (and III before it), your characters can swap between the jobs your team knows, which changes their costume and their current stats. (Mages, for example, will generally have higher Magic Attack and lower Physical Defense). A character learns skills unique to that job by defeating enemies and earning Job Points.
 |
| Bosses like Qada the |
In addition to knowing the abilities of a job you're actively leveling, you can also equip the abilities of one other job. So while a character maybe currently be a White Mage with low Physical Defense, they can throw on the abilities of a Ninja to avoid or counter physical attacks. Mixing and matching jobs between characters to develop an unstoppable team provides the meat of the challenge and much of the fun of Bravely Default.
 |
| Edea the Ninja |
While I swapped jobs and abilities as needed for the uber-challenging late-game bosses, my standard team makeup was:
- Agnès as a Salve-Maker/Performer, so I could maximize the effectiveness of healing items and buff my party with stat-boosting songs;
- Tiz as a Monk/Thief, which let me deliver devastating physical blows and steal items as needed (because it wouldn't be Final Fantasy without valuable and unique items to steal from enemies);
- Ringabel as a White Mage/Spiritmaster, allowing me to heal the party and immunize them from status ailments and magic damage; and
- Edea as a Pirate/Freelancer who could deal immense damage with a string of powerful axe attacks.
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| Agnès and Tiz as Salve-Makers |
If you're struggling with tough battles, Bravely Default gives you a leg up with Sleep Points (SP). Press the 'Select' button in battle and you'll be able to freeze time and take an action without using any BP. This feature is called 'Bravely Second,' and it can get you out of sticky situations as they arise. However, your party can only use three SP at one time. To use more, you have to put the 3DS system in Sleep Mode for eight hours for another SP to regenerate, or you can buy more via the eShop.
You might think an in-app purchase option in the game would break the balance by giving paying players an advantage, but in practice it's so unobtrusive that there was never a time I needed or even considered buying SP.
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| Airy and your SP counter occupy the bottom screen on the main menu. |
Another great use of the 3DS hardware is Bravely Default's StreetPass functionality, which has you rebuilding and repopulating Norende. Each StreetPass you collect adds another person to the population. The more you collect, the faster you can rebuild the town and gain new shops that will sell you high-level items and equipment.
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| Beelzebub, a Nemesis and Contra refugee. |
There's plenty more about Bravely Default to praise, too. The soundtrack is bursting with excellent orchestral and modern-rock arrangements that complement and color the game's different cities, dungeons, and battlefields. The script is great, full of smart character choices and "Party Chat" side conversations (resembling FFIX's ATEs—Active Time Events) that do a lot to flesh out the personalities, motivations, and humanity of the main cast. The abundant flavor text from the in-game encyclopedia is also a delight to read, adding tons of depth and lore to the world of Luxendarc.
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| Ringabel's mysterious D's Journal serves as your in-game compendium |
There's a good 40-70 hours of content in the game across the four main kingdoms, multiple optional dungeons, and plentiful optional bosses. In that time, the game did almost everything right and won the crusty old heart of a guy who misses the glory days of Squaresoft RPGs. If you like (or used to like) Final Fantasy games, I can't recommend enough that you play Bravely Default…just not the second half.
If want to avoid spoilers, Default here. If you are bold, then Brave on.
*** SPOILER WARNING ***
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| Stopu, stopu, STOPU! |
*** YOU'VE BEEN WARNED ***
I can't in good conscience recommend that you play Bravely Default through to completion. Coming from an avowed completionist, you should consider that damning indeed.
Without spoiling the specifics of the plot, Bravely Default is guilty of the most egregious content and asset recycling of any game I've played. Ever. It goes beyond the standard palette-swapping of enemies (though it does that, too), all the way into testing the limits of player sanity and endurance.
Here's how it goes: After your party accomplishes its established goal of awakening all four of Luxendarc's elemental crystals, you travel to the final area, fight a final battle, and then…
…wake up in the starting town again. Only the members of your party remember your adventures and accomplishments. All the NPCs around you are meeting you for the first time. Your work has not just been undone—it's never been done.
 |
| Huh?... |
Confused and at a loss for what to do next, your team sheepishly decides to soldier on and do it all again. That's right. Every crystal needs to be revisited and required bosses need to be fought again.
When I reached this point, I was confused and slightly amused at the audacity of this twist, and I continued on. Luckily, you still have all jobs, gear, and the airship you had when entering the endpoint. And fortunately for those who know their limits, you don't need to re-fight every job-holding Eternian boss from your first go-round—those are now optional bosses.
But speed or slog your way through it, your heroes will find their way to the endpoint again, fight the final boss again, and then…
…wake up in the starting town again.
 |
| Incredulous Ringabel is incredulous |
In all, the game demands you complete this circular task a total of four additional times, for a total of five runs through the same set of dungeons and bosses. (That's to earn the true ending; there's an abbreviated ending available from the third cycle on.) And while each cycle causes the characters to become increasingly doubtful of the task at hand, the characters continue on ad nauseam, hoping the next time will be the last.
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| Play to the end and you'll get reeeeeaaaaally tired of seeing this. |
Had the writers done a better job of showing that the characters recognize the sheer insanity of this seemingly fruitless repetition, I might have been able to empathize with their plight. Instead, the player is offered a few brief lines of dialogue each cycle in which the characters acknowledge frustration and something being wrong, but then continue on like morons. Meanwhile, I as a player grew more and more disconnected from the heroes as I lost sympathy for them and wondered if I was doing something wrong or just being trolled by the developers.
One concession the game makes toward keeping things fresh each cycle is that the optional boss encounters change somewhat. The enemy characters' motivations alter slightly, their difficulty increases, and they begin teaming up with one another, providing increasingly rewarding character development, story scenarios, and challenges for the player to face. But you'll have to spend loads of extra hours and truly love grinding the same content over and over again (or have incredible patience) to reach these tiny morsels of new content.
 |
| When the bosses team up, you'll probably die. A lot. |
By the time I'd finished the game and earned the true ending and a (very cool) secret cinematic, I had logged 150 hours in the game. Note that in that time, I scoured every inch of the game and fought through all the optional content on Hard mode, so my personal settings and play choices made the game longer than it needed to be. But that's how I play RPGs, and for the middle 50 or so hours, it was a damn slog.
*** SPOILERS OVER***
Great article!
ReplyDeleteI haven't played this game, but superficially, it looks a lot like the DS remake of Final Fantasy III. I'm sure BD is a lot more complex, but it has a similar class system, and also the same shrunken, over-cutesified 3D character models with giant heads.
I have mixed feelings about the latter. On the one hand, they keep the tone somewhat light-hearted. On the other, they make it a little hard to take the plot seriously. I know JRPG plots can be very ridiculous, but in my opinion the best ones go all in.
Thanks! I didn't really comment on the chibi look because I found it charming and it just worked for me. In fact, I got so used to the big-head character models that when I went back and watched the intro movie (which shows the characters as proportional/realistic) after finishing the game, and it really threw me off.
DeleteAnd to be fair to the big-head look, every Final Fantasy game before FFVIII had deformed or inconsistent character models that clashed with either Amano's original illustrations or the in-game movies.
I'm actually a big fan of stylized representations, but something about this particular style rubs me the wrong way.
DeleteI don't think it was the intention of early Final Fantasies to present their characters as toys or dolls. When I play Final Fantasies I-V as an adult in 2015, I'm amused and charmed by the tiny sprites, but I think people felt differently at the time, and I can at least tell the developers were trying to tell an epic and moving story given the limitations of the technology. When BD and FFIII DS use these models, I think they're responding to the way we feel about old JRPGs now. It's meant to be a throwback, but it feels false somehow.
But that said, I love my FFIII characters. My Refia was a totally badass ninja, even if she looked absolutely adorable. (Seriously, judge for yourself: http://www.creativeuncut.com/gallery-04/ff3-refia-ninja.html)
Hmmm. That's fair. But give it a chance, and you might be able to overlook that sense of falseness.
DeleteAnd now I really want to play FFIII. :)