Bravely Default
Bravely Default is really good?
Bravely Default is one of the weirdest games I’ve played in the past few years. It isn’t because it’s a weird concept like Octodad or Tomodachi Life, but because it a mix of extremely traditional JRPG games and metacommentary about JRPG games. First the traditional. You are a set of four characters who are tasked with saving the world by awakening the four magic crystals. You fight enemies that randomly encounter as you walk about the continents. Yes, you’ll get an airship. Yes, there is an evil empire that is trying to control the world. Yes, each of your characters has a love interest. And yes, there is a really annoying fairy that will make you’ll wish for a “Hey, look” . There is a lot Bravely Default that you’ve seen before.
But there are also a lot incremental improvements in Bravely Default that make the game oh so much better than its contemporaries. Maybe best of all, random encounter rate is controllable. When you want to just get through this dungeon, you can turn encounters off. When it’s time to grind up a few levels, double up encounter rates. It’s such a small feature, but it is such an improvement, it will be tough to ever live without it. Speaking of grinding, Bravely Default gives you the best tool for leveling up I’ve ever encountered: an auto-battler. After any set of actions, simply press the Y button and your characters will repeat their actions as long as they can. It's easy to setup, fast, and makes encounters useful that would otherwise be simply tedious.
Bravely Default will give you good reasons to grind too. Each character can be assigned a ‘job’. These jobs control stats, in and out of battle abilities, weapon aptitude, pretty much everything. Jobs range from your standard white and black mages to templars and vampires. This might sound familiar if you played Final Fantasy 3 (and keep this between us, but Bravely Default is definitely a Final Fantasy game by a different name), but again, Bravely Default does a good job mixing in new mechanics with the old. As you level up in a job, you unlock passive skills. These passive skills can be mixed from every job that a character has. So if you want to have a character that takes a ton of damage to also have a little kick to them, you can slap on physical attack plus 20%. In addition to the passive skills, each job has active skills, like fire, thundaga, and blizzara for a black mage. These active skills are available when you have a job equipped. That means that if you want to use cure, you’ll have to be a white mage. Except that you can also equip the active skills from one other job. This makes for a really nice mix of skills with white mates that can also cast black magic, knights that can heal themselves, and a ton of other stuff that I don’t want to spoil. All told, you’ll get 24 different classes, each with 14 unlockable levels.
So eventually you’ll these very specialized, but how much can you really do with only four characters in one turn? Good question, but here is where Bravely Default makes the biggest jump. Each action that you take in a battle cost a Battle Point(BP). Each turn, you will be given the opportunity to default, an action that adds one BP to your characters total as well as halving the damage you take. Which then leads to Braving, which allows you to take up to 4 actions in a turn in return for 4 BP. With one turn, you can turn the tide of a battle with 16 actions between four characters. This mechanic makes a huge difference in every battle you face. Boss battles are a careful balance of reading enemy’s attack patterns, defaulting when the big attacks are coming and braving when they lower their defenses. I could give countless examples of how important this feature is, but instead envision this: Three of your characters just went down after the boss unleashed his final stand. Your white mage survived the onslaught, and braves four times, bringing back and healing all your other characters as well as using a group healing to get back a little heal. Or braving so that your first attack lowers your foes defense then clobbering them with an MP enhanced attack. It really makes a huge difference, giving you enough small advantages to allow you to beat foes that would otherwise be impossible.
There is obviously more depth in each job that I don’t want to spoil as well as some weird few mechanics that I thought were lame, but that were also optional so I’m just going to glaze over. If you’re interested in that other stuff, look up Norende reconstruction, friend summoning, bravely second, and special. Special is exactly what it sounds like, a special attack you build up over time.
The art of the game really appealed to me, from the soft colors and storybook-esque look to the music and sound effects, but I understand how that could rub people the wrong way. Granted, you must be some sort of fun hating monster if you don’t like the aesthetic, but I hear those are actually pretty common. The voice-overs and the script are not good. That’s not an opinion thing, that’s just a fact, even if it’s a fact that I’m sad about. But this is easily made up for in that every cut scene and dialog sequence is skippable. And you won’t have a hard time figuring out where to go, there are markers. The music is really good, I know I already said that, but it bears a second mention.
The controls are really smooth. Most of the game can be controlled with your left hand, the game even explicitly states that they intended for you to be able to do this, and they succeed. I’m not sure why you’d need to play with only one hand, but the controls are tight enough that you totally can. It’s hard to describe a good control scheme, but Bravely Default controls really well.
Well, with all that said, the only thing left to talk about is the story, which I left last because it’s the thing I have the most mixed feelings about. On the one hand, Bravely Default’s story is really interesting, but on the other it is totally rotten. Without starting to spoil the story I can’t say much more. So this next segment will feature light spoilers, followed by a section of heavy spoilers.
Mild Spoilers:
Bravely Default quickly introduces you to the central plot of the story, awakening the four crystals to save the world. This story is extremely vanilla, with very little to differentiate it from every other JRPG ever, however, as you draw nearer to awakening the crystals, you will begin to question whether or not this is actually a good idea. This culminates in you awakening the final crystal and the world not being saved, but instead being sent back to the beginning of the story with weapons, equipment, and memory intact. This second run of the story gives light to an interesting commentary about the nature of JRPGs, in how players so often press on toward an objective despite dubious justification to do so. This feeling gets stronger as you slug your way through a second round of crystal awakening and boss fighting. All of the foes you faced have come back for a second run of fights, and each feature slightly different dialog. This is when stuff really starts to go wrong with the story. The refights are not that different than the first time around and most of the bosses will be extremely easy. At some point the fights begin to feel so tedious especially since all but a few are optional. But, it’s only once so it isn’t really a problem. Except that after awakening the crystals a second time, you get spit back at the start of the story again, and the story implies that you’ll have to awaken the crystals at least 3 more times. This is one of the most frustrating and horrible realizations I can remember in a videogame. 3 more rounds of 4 crystals means at least 12 more boss fights that you will breeze through at this point, plus the possibility of a dozen more optional fights per world. All told, you could end up in 40 or 50 more boss fights with little to no plot development. Refighting the same enemies over and over is… horrible. After several more refights, you’ll get an ending, though it isn’t a great one, and is definitely hampered by the fact that you had to redo so much of the game.
Major spoilers.
There is a way to skip many of the refights and in fact is sort of the point of the game. Okay, repeat major spoilers. The point of the game is that it wasn’t a good idea to go around awakening the crystals. You’re being used as a puppet to help destroy the world. Upon realizing that you should stop awakening the crystals, you’ll realize that you can in fact, destroy the crystals and save the world. Except that you’ll then be faced with an impossible fight. The only way to make this fight winnable is to finish all the refights and ignore the idea that what you’re doing is a bad idea. You’re penalized for following the clues that the game leaves you. It is so strange to see the story take two steps forward and then to take five steps back. The worst part might be the final two or three sequences in which friends from several other worlds “unite hearts” or some bullshit in order to save the universe. It is the highest level of bullshit, and is completely counter to the mold breaking game that the rest of Bravely Default is. And the ending, is the worst, with each character dividing up as if they hadn’t just saved the world a thousand times over and dealt with a horrible ordeal. It’s ridiculous and pandering and lame. And it tops it off with some real weird ending where the main character might or might not have been possessed by an angel all along. So, yeah, the ending is really shitty.
End of spoilers. I don’t like the ending, or how you have to get to the true ending. The game is so good, it’s hard to say how much I care, or how much it would change my recommendation to play the game. I think I would say that Bravely Default is a great game with a few serious story problems. I’d also say that the first part of the game is a special game that shouldn’t be missed, and that the second part suffers from some unfortunate story choices.
In closing I'd like to talk about my favorite encounter in Bravely Default, an optional boss, the Adventurer. The Adventurer is a real piece of work. In just about any other game, I would never have dealt with The Adventurer. He's got tons of health, has several attacks that can kill your whole party if they aren't buffed, a sidekick that regenerates, and the fight will take somewhere around an hour if it goes well. But dammit if I didn't beat that asshole. It took basically all day, reading some strategies and developing a few of my own. It took execution and planning. It was a war waged between we two, me and him. And in the end I will remember him, for the pain of defeat, for the struggle. For the victory.
