Bravely Default is a testament to the fine line that separates excellent games from dreadful ones. The game is the spiritual successor to Final Fantasy: The Four Heroes of Light, a title I viciously panned on this blog for a few reasons. I hated the visuals. I hated the boring jobs system. I hated that you couldn't select targets for attacks in battles with more than one enemy. Most of all, I absolutely detested the level-up system that leveled up the enemies along with you, making grinding your team almost completely pointless. These reasons combined for me to give the game a dreadful 4.0/10.
Bravely Default starts with many of the same conceits of Heroes, which drove me away for a long time. It still has a chibi-ish, washed out art style, shown in the screenshot below. It has a decidedly retro feel to combat, lacking an ATB gauge or any sort of pressing time limitations, and preferring a turn-based approach. You have a cast of four playable characters that never rotate.
But darn it all if Bravely Default doesn't absolutely knock out each and every concern I had with the previous game, transforming literally the worst game I've ever reviewed into an excellent one with a few small design choices.
The art is definitely a lot more varied and interesting this time around, even if I am not a fan of the chibi look in general. Look at this beautiful city they created in this game:
The entire thing is based on the concept of windmills, with various gears powering the city. The whole city is a gorgeous steampunk concept that's really well thought out, and executed to perfection. There are tons of magnificent settings in the game, and everything is designed very well. The game takes a gleeful delight in design, zooming out when entering an area so that you can take in every detail of the surroundings. This is a bit of an annoyance at first, but you get used to it.
The game took the battle system from the previous game, the best part of it, in my opinion, and improved on it. Previously, you could boost to save up points and burn it all on huge attacks, but the boost function has been replaced with a command called "default" that reduces incoming damage, and saves a point up (called BP). You can then spend your BP to perform multiple actions on the same turn, or perform big ones. You can also spend into the negative, making it so that you can't default on later turns, but perhaps can put out enough damage to end the battle before you can be killed. This risk/reward function works great, allowing you to act in a riskier manner in battles with smaller enemies or if you think you are close to putting away a boss and worry that you may not have time to finish him if you think he's going to kill you otherwise.
The jobs system is extremely good, rivaling those of my beloved Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy Tactics. Like in Final Fantasy V, you can bring two sets of job abilities into battle, but also can equip several passives as well. This allows for some excellent mix and matching abilities, with a lot of creative opportunities to make the kind of jobs you desire.
For example, I made a counter attacking ninja/swordmaster. She had the ninja spell to cause all enemies to focus her with any single target attacks, as well as swordmaster spells that take reduced damage from physical and magical attacks, and counter attacking in return. For my passives, I had a skill from the red mage tree that allowed you to gain extra BP when damaged, a skill from swordmaster that increased damage dealt when counterattacking, a skill from dark knight that increased my characters stats when they took damage, and a skill from the knight that increased my physical defense. This allowed me to have a character that would draw aggression away from my big damage dealers, countering hard when hit, and benefiting from the damage I took by building up higher stats, and increasing my BP so I could use my focus aggro/counter combo more often!
The great thing about the job system in Bravely Default is that so many skills from varied jobs could be invested into magnificent combos, even if those jobs didn't seem related. In a typical job-based RPG, you are incentived to spend more time on one class of job (physical, magic damage, magic support/healing, etc.), but in this game, dancing around between classes has huge benefits, and every job has something to bring to the table. In other games, a tanky character would never spend any time as a Red Mage, but it was an absolute necessity in this game to keep my character's BP high enough to draw aggro away successfully.
You can obviously select targets in battle. I have no idea why this needed to be added.
They also made a typical JRPG leveling system in which you can actually get stronger than your foes. I also have no idea why this needed to be added.
So that handles my specific concerns about the game's predecessor. But what about the rest of the game? Well, the story is pretty good, for a JRPG. I don't want to spoil much, because there are actually some great twists and turns along the way. One in particular is some Earthbound-level of JRPG trope shattering, and I fully endorse it.
The music is quite good, with some really excellent tracks throughout. There's a lot of love for the Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy sound here.
The pacing of the game is its biggest flaw. About the time the game is feeling like it's winding down, it's just getting started. What's more, there's a loop in the game (I won't say any more) that gets old very quickly. Unfortunately, to get the best ending, you need to repeat the loop several times, and I'd say that each loop will take you, at a minimum, about 5 hours. I took a lot longer than that. Fortunately, if you finish the game with a suboptimal ending, it will pop you back to before you made your mistake (if you want), and let you continue until the best ending. The pacing was extremely slow, and it made it very hard to want to finish the game. The saving grace of it all was that the grinding was so fun that I felt like there was a lot to do that was different every loop, and it gave me a bunch of chances to experiment with different builds for my characters. In total, I spent about 80 hours playing this game, and most of it felt like a retread. A trim, 40 hour RPG is totally reasonable if that's how much content you have!
In sum, I loved Bravely Default. It brought everything I love in a JRPG. If pacing is a concern for you, though, I'd start elsewhere. I'd recommend it to anyone who loves Final Fantasy V, Final Fantasy Tactics, or just loves classic JRPGs. I'll give it a 9.0/10.
Up next is a game I've already teased before, and that I've FINALLY completed. Stay tuned!
-TRO
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