Way back in 2014 I had just finished Bravely Default and felt the need to post my opinions of it on the internet. Since then, it’s been sitting on my site, basically inaccessible and collecting dust. It’s not too dissimilar from the other articles I’ve written here, so I figured I would import it.
Bravely Default is an RPG for the Nintendo 3DS, created by Square-Enix and developed by Silicon Studio. It was released in North America on February 7th, 2014. Blah blah blah, information shamelessly ripped from wikipedia. If you want more lists of objective facts about the game, just go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravely_Default. I recently finished the game, and throughout my playtime I found myself turning a critical eye toward it more often than I do for most games. This “review” is just the collection of these criticisms (both positive and negative) and observations I’ve accumulated over my ~65 hours of play time. This review will contain lots of spoilers for the game. If that’s something you care about, I suggest reading something else, such as my other wonderful articles.
BACKGROUND
Before we get into the meat of the review, I think it may be useful to give some context concerning my experiences with JRPGs. Feel free to skip to the next section if you want. My history with the genre goes way back to the original Final Fantasy. At only 5 or 6 years old, tactics, strategy and planning weren’t even in my vocabulary at the time. What stuck with me the most, however, was the sense of ownership over your party. Even the 4-color sprites with all of 3 frames of animation begin to endear themselves to your after you’ve weathered dozens of battles and had near death experiences with ferocious bosses with them. This makes the sense of progression through leveling up and acquiring stronger equipment all the more rewarding. It also makes the ending of the game rather bitter sweet. You’ve done it. You’ve defeated the big evil and saved the world, but those characters you’ve become so attached to are now meaningless. They’ve fulfilled their purpose and will exist only as a fading memory. Despite all the time my young self wandered through the game, oblivious to much of what was happening, the attachment I felt toward it made a long term impact on my opinions of games.
It was no surprise that a few years later, when my parents bought me an SNES, I jumped onto Final Fantasies 4 and 6 immediately. I won’t say too much about these because they’re still among my favorite games of all time (FF6 is still my #1 favorite game of all time), and I would end up rambling on about them for 10,000 words. Besides the obvious graphical improvements, these games pushed story telling in games to new levels. Now each member of your party had their own explicit personality, fears, hopes, friendships, enemies, etc. This allowed interactions between the characters and with the world itself. I’m ashamed to admit it, but the storytelling and characterization in FF6 was so spot on that my silly 8–9 year old self developed a bit of a crush on Terra. She’s still probably my favorite Final Fantasy character.
Fast forward to just a few years ago, past many other JRPGs, and we get to Final Fantasy 5. Although I owned the Final Fantasy Chronicles collection for PS1, I never really made any significant progress with FF5 (possibly because the load times are horrendous). It wasn’t until I heard about the Final Fantasy 5 Four Job Fiesta (http://fourjobfiesta.com/) that I started to look at the game seriously. I did a normal, causal playthrough of the game before signing up for a FJF run.
What FF5 really excelled at was the depth of its mechanics. The job system is surprisingly complex compared to the games surrounding it in the Final Fantasy series. The ability to use skills from other jobs creates a massive range of strategy. Figuring out which jobs and skill synergize with each other and formulating a plan based on them was a huge draw for me. Finding, training and exploiting these combinations can make for a very strong party, even at low levels, which is (probably) why FF5 is a fair step up in difficulty from most others in the series. This aspect of gameplay comes to the forefront when a boss can wreck you in short order if you go in unprepared.
Finally, we reach the present with Bravely Default. I was fairly slow in picking up the game — 5 months after release because the demo hadn’t really impressed me. It felt poorly tuned, with enemies that can kill a character in 1 shot, just steps away from the starting point. Once the 2014 FJF fiesta had concluded and sparked a new interest in JRPGs, I ordered Bravely Default post haste.
STORY
At first glance, the story of Bravely Default seems very generically Final Fantasy. Four warriors of light go on a quest to save the world by visiting mystical crystals, each representing a different element. That brief description could apply perfectly to FF5 as well. The comparisons to FF5 are so strong in nearly every aspect of the game that it nearly feels like it could be a sequel.
Each of the four crystals (wind, water, fire, earth) have their own chapter in the first part of the game. Within each chapter are various twists, turns and detours that lead up to finally reaching and awakening their respective crystal. Most of the events in these chapters range from good to just inoffensive, while a few are simply frustratingly stupid.
Chapter 2 is particularly bad. The goal of the chapter is to awaken the water crystal, but the vestal (basically just the ordained keepers of the crystals) of water and Agnès’s childhood friend, Olivia is nowhere to be found. Despite the water crystal being accessible nearly from the start of the chapter, the party chooses to not awaken it. The reasoning for this being that Agnès, while capable of doing it herself, is too concerned about Olivia and does not want to encroach on what she feels is Olivia’s relationship with the water crystal. The entire chapter then becomes based around the search for Olivia.
This seems to be a very flimsy excuse to pad out this chapter. From the very beginning of the game, Agnès is painted as someone who is very much driven by duty and responsibility for the greater good. It’s probably meant to emphasize the closeness between Agnès and Olivia — such that Agnès would defer her duty out of concern for her friend. This doesn’t really work though, since the strength of the vestals’ relationship to their crystals is poorly explored. Awakening the water crystal without Olivia would take an insignificant amount of time, restore the whole world’s seas, and have no effect on Olivia’s well-being. It seems that Agnès is simply trying to be polite by wanting Olivia to awaken her own crystal, making this whole scenario feel very forced.
This situation could easily be salvaged by simply putting Olivia in peril if the crystal were awakened without her. If Agnès awakening a crystal that is not her own would kill that crystal’s vestal, then her insistence to seek out Olivia would be must more sensible.
Additionally in chapter 2 is a sub-plot in which the party attempts to get Olivia’s attention from her hiding place. The plan is for Agnès to enter the annual beauty pageant in the city of Florem. The most obvious question is why Olivia, who is in hiding due to a threat on her life, would attend a public event, or risk coming into contact with anyone at the event. The more bizarre event occurs next, where the group treks south to ask Sage Yulyana for a costume for Agnès to wear during the beauty pageant. A completely ridiculous scene ensues where Agnès refuses to wear an incredibly skimpy outfit called the “bravo bikini”.
This scene really stood out to me because this comedy routine is surrounded plot elements that all have a very serious tone. If it were a side quest or part of another plot thread, it would be understandable, but as is, it feels very out of place and jarring. To top it off, Agnès decides to just wear her vestal garb to the festival — the garb she’s had with her the whole time, making the entire trek to the Sage pointless.
The most egregious example of bad storytelling and planning, however, is Ringabel’s “D” journal. The “D” should should stand for “Deus Ex Machina” because that’s exactly what it is. If the party runs out of leads for what needs to be done, they simply check the journal and all questions are magically answered in nearly every case. This is incredibly lazy writing. There are so many instances where the writers had written themselves into a corner that I’m not going to attempt to suggest improvements.
On the good side of criticisms, the “Party Chat” system gives the characters some development that would feel out of place anywhere else. Party chats are just non-voiced cutscenes with various characters talking amongst themselves. The Tales series of games have been doing the same thing (called skits) for more than a decade to great effect, and Bravely Default uses the concept similarly to inject some non-jarring levity to a generally serious story.
Jumping ahead to the end of the game, one small things I thought was cute was the “twist” where the celestial realm is the our real world was rather cute. It got a smile out of me when I noticed, in the final fight, the game used the inward facing camera of the 3DS to project an image of me onto the background.
GRAPHICS & SOUND
I’ll just make a few brief notes here, since there really isn’t a whole lot to say here.
Graphically, the game looks quite nice. The characters have a rather “chibi” (I literally cringed typing that out) style, but it actually works fairly well to make the characters sufficiently expressive without blowing the entire poly budgets on the character models. What really impressed me the most, though, was the backgrounds. They have a hand-painted aesthetic to them that looks absolutely gorgeous even on the 3DS’s relatively low resolution screen. They aren’t just flat background when models rendered over it, like in Final Fantasies 7–9; they’re broken up and attached to the 3D world, so that non-3D objects in the scene can follow the camera’s perspective shift (to a degree), and appear to have depth when the 3DS’s 3D capabilities are turned on. This makes it feel more dynamic than just a flat background.
The soundtrack is very good in that it was an integral part of developing the mood throughout the various scenes of the game. As is normal for Square-Enix RPGs, the highlights of the soundtracks are usually the battle themes. Bravely Default is no different with most such tracks using an interesting combination of modern rock (even some metal in a few places) with more traditional instruments like violins, pianos, clarinets, trumpets and probably some others that my untrained ear can’t discern. I unashamedly have a good portion of the soundtrack in my playlists and rock out pretty good whenever it comes up. I’ll just leave these here.
GAMEPLAY
There’s a lot to say about the gameplay of Bravely Default, but I’d like to address the elephant in the room first. Chapters 5 through 8 are the most poorly thought out, repetitive and pointless sections of any JRPG I’ve ever played. Each of the chapters have the same objectives — awaken the four crystals… again. The same bosses that guard each crystal return each time with only a slight boost to their numbers (HP, defense, damage, etc). There are several side quests that open in each chapter, but these only involve re-fighting the asterisk bosses. Asterisk bosses are simply those that award new jobs, but subsequent fights only give experience rewards. There’s almost no new content in this stretch, and you’re required to fight the same four bosses four more times each. This is the main reason the game took me so long to finish — this part is a slog.
Removing these chapters completely would actually improve the game overall, I think. Alternatively, they could be easily compressed into a single chapter with nearly no impact on the story. If Airy’s wings were to count down based on the number of crystals needing to be awakened, the pattern would be visible in just two worlds. Adding some actual substance between each crystal in the second world (though less than in chapters 1–4), would give enough time to introduce the concept of defying Airy and destroying one of the crystals without being so damn repetitive.
With that out of the way, let’s get into the actual combat. The game departs from the typical active time system. I’m generally a fan of active time battles, but it’s an acceptable sacrifice for the depth the BP system adds. The “defend” command in most Final Fantasy games is most inconsequential and rarely used, but Bravely Default turns it into one of the strongest actions a character can take. Defending, or “default” as the game calls it, not only reduces all damage taken by half, allows that character to take an additional action with the “brave” command during a future turn. It opens up a new level of strategy and provides a new resource to manage.
Combined with the huge number of jobs available, and the active and passive skill sharing from other jobs, Bravely Default completely blows Final Fantasy 5 out of the water in terms of combat options. The higher level skills of each job also feel far more powerful: Enigma, Stillness, Rampart, Free Lunch, all of the pirate debuffs, all of the performer buffs, salve-maker. As with FF5, Bravely Default ramped up the difficulty as a result of this.
I can definitely appreciate a challenge, but I feel Bravely Default overdid it a little. I played on normal difficulty the whole way through, and most of the bosses in the first half of the game were fairly intense, interesting and fun. They presented fight mechanics that required equal parts intelligent planning and improvisation, but as long as you had a fairly balanced team at a reasonable level, victory was definitely within reach.
Toward the end of the game however, particularly the fights against Airy and Ouroboros, fights began to take on a different feel — one in which your party is always in mortal danger, even at full health. Completing these fight on the first try was not very reasonable, since they introduce mechanics that very often do more than your characters’ maximum health in damage — sometimes even when defaulting. These fights require either foreknowledge of the mechanics, or a significant level advantage. Perhaps it’s just a lack of creativity on my part, but these fights seem to nearly require using one or more specific jobs. For instance, short of exploiting the valkyrie’s jump commands, I’m having a difficult time thinking of a reasonable way to survive several late game attacks without a spiritmaster. Airy’s Acedia and Zeta Flare combo is a prime exmaple. Removing this Acedia debuff from everyone at a reasonable BP is impossible without a spiritmaster or salve-maker. Even worse is when these massively damaging skills are used without any sort of warning. Ouroboros wiped me immediately the first time he used Armageddon. It did more than my characters’ max health, but if I had some sort of tell a turn in advance, I could have defaulted and survived and maybe not have wasted half an hour getting to that point.
I have to admit, though, that it’s partially my fault that the difficulty was skewed. My characters were slightly under-leveled for a good portion of the game, so some attacks were supposed to have been more survivable than they were. It felt as if I were playing on “hard” difficulty most of the time. In the end though, I think my struggles with this made me love the game even more. To keep the more intense attacks from being an immediate game over, I built an incredibly defensive team that was essentially immortal so long as I knew what the boss was capable of. My final fight with the final boss lasted the better part of an hour but, with the experience of a few wipes, I knew exactly what was coming and planned accordingly. Executing my plan well meant I should be in no danger of dying, but perfect execution over such a long time is no easy task. It was the most, and I do not use this word lightly, “epic” experience I’ve seen in any RPG since the final boss of FF6.
Another big point I want to talk about it how I ended up being under-leveled. Bravely Default has a very interesting feature where you can turn off random encounters completely at any time on the overworld or in a dungeon. I played through the game with the normal encounter rate for the majority of chapters 1–4, but my patience started to wear thin around the end of chapter 4 and onwards. I would set encounters to normal in a dungeon and turn it off when I had enough of the enemies in the area. The time between turning it on and off gradually shrunk until I kept it off almost constantly.
I fully acknowledge this is entirely my fault for not wanting to fight the intended number of battles. However, this exemplifies what I think is a problem endemic to the RPG genre: required tedium. Bravely Default expects me to trudge through a gauntlet of battles as I traverse the dungeons, or defer these battles to separate grinding sessions to keep my levels at the expected level. I appreciate that I can choose when to do this, but I ask why should I need to do this at all? Instead, perhaps the player’s progression and the number of battles the player fights should be more closely controlled. First and foremost, random battles need to finally go away, at least in dungeons. They further penalize getting lost and backtracking — both of which can seriously impact the player’s interest and patience. They discourage exploration, and they’re a large variable in the player characters’ progression.
What I would like to see harkens back to another of my favorite games from the SNES era: Super Mario RPG. Instead of random battles, Mario RPG allows you to see all of your enemies before you fight them, and allows you to avoid some fights with clever or precise movement. This means that if a player encounters an enemy, it’s most likely their own fault for failing to avoid it. In addition, the majority of the player’s experience is gained through the game’s many boss battles. These are unavoidable, but crafted to be unique and interesting. In essence, I think the genre needs to put more emphasis on the unique, scripted sequences to provide character progression. While supplementary battles (such as those from random battles) shouldn’t be eliminated completely, games shouldn’t be designed around the expectation that the player will complete however many of them.
Another change I would like to see is more freedom to alter your setup while in a battle. If you enter a new fight only to find a mechanic that your group is not prepared to deal with, your options are: try to struggle through it with a gimped party, or just accept a wipe and restart with the appropriate setup. Changing jobs in battle would allow for more improvisation options and limit the annoying situation I described above. Of course changing jobs would need a high cost to give the player’s choice of jobs some significance. A cost of 4 BP feels like it would accomplish this.
SUMMARY
Bravely Default is the best RPG I’ve played in quite some time. I wouldn’t quite put it up with my favorites such as Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger, but it’s still a very enjoyable experience. It’s something of a rollercoaster of a game with high points reaching low Earth orbit and low points dipping down to the mantle. The story is fairly generic overall, with some parts that would be embarrassing even in a freshman level creative writing course, but it does its job of keeping the player wanting to know what’s around the corner, with endearing characters that drive it (nearly) every step of the way. The tedium and repetition in the second half of the game is mostly balanced out by the varied and interesting first half. While it still suffers from some anachronistic design choices stemming from its RPG heritage, the depth and breadth of options provided by the job and BP systems makes it stand with, or even above, many games from which Bravely Default draws its inspiration.
