Quick Look: Bravely Default

@brad, you can press left on the circle pad to see the HP and weaknesses of any pre-examined enemies.

It's not the animation that I have a problem with, it's feeling I'm not directly controlling someone. I'm just listing attacks, like a coach, and they all do it. I like the immediacy of pressing attack, and having my guy attack. I've never ever liked queueing.

Indeed. Usually in a new area it best to default and see what the enemy can do and after awhile you can go all out at the start to just sweep if you can knock them out in a few hits.

*BLAAAARRRRFFF*

"... Welp, thanks for joining us."

Short Look.

@brad : You can take less damage by banking your Defaults up to 4 and then Braving down to zero, so you are ready to Default yourself again in the next turn... It's a bit chicken, but might help you until you get your level up to match the enemies evenly.

From what I understand, the game's essentially a spiritual successor to Final Fantasy 4 Heroes of Light. The original "Flying Fairy" subtitle the Japanese release had was to let the game have a "FF" in the title.

That was an excellent start! :D

The heavy reliance on Street Pass really bums me out about this game. I get (if I'm lucky) one Street Pass a month or so.

Gonna be a looong time before I get any of those town things unlocked.

was I the only one thinking help me obi wan kanobi your my only hope at the start of this?

@christaran: Everything StreetPass works with SpotPass. I have 75 villagers and haven't used StreetPass once. You can get 3-5 villagers every 24 hours.

Looks pretty good, if only it wasn't 3ds exclusive =/

Vinny's trouser genie looks pretty good.

You mean like where it shows you the turn order as you play, and your characters take their turns as soon as you issue the command?

Yeah, a few other games have done that.

Shin Megami Tensei IV has a similar battle system. As does Nostalgia for the DS. Radiant Historia for the DS does some really interesting things with that idea, but that one's probably gonna be hard to get a hold of these days, but if you can, I can't recommend it enough. It's one of the best overlooked JRPGs of the past few years.

Edea and Ringabell are the best.

Yeah, exactly.

I'll take a look into those, thanks!

Brad needs to equip Two-Handed on his Knight. It would almost double the damage that he is doing.

Whelp that's another HR meeting or two.

I played the demo (well, not the whole thing, but a good number of hours) and was super into all the systems and the customizability of everything. I can't wait to pick this up once I have some money.

Also @brad in case you decide to stick with the game you should know that you can press left on the circle pad in battles to check on the enemies family and weaknesses once you've examined them once. It shows you their HP too but unfortunately only on the enemies you've used Examine on in the current battle. It's useful for bosses though.

The world needs more AR based games.

@brad You can set the encounter rate under Tactics -> Config -> Difficulty.

That lady got sucked into Vinny's pants.

While playing the demo waiting for the town to upgrade I just left the game running and closed my 3DS overnight and when I woke up it was done. I don't know if that's common knowledge but I thought I'd share.

To the moon! Big Whale represent!

Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope

Vinnie appearing to commune with a teardrop shaped anime jewel may be the best Quick Look preview image I've seen in a long time.

I completed the game after 70 hours doing basically everything. Even at level 99 with all the bullshit combos and techniques you can employ with the dual class and passive support skills the nemesis bosses you can fight in the town are super hard.

The most fun to be had in the game is in the last 10 or so bosses where you really need to build your party based around specific strategies for the battle, you can't just run in with your best equipment and the same shit every time. There are several bosses that will kill your party in 1 hit in their first turn, which requires you to either get an insane amount of magical resistance on everyone through job passives or build a party that can do so much damage in 1 tun that you can kill the boss before it ever gets a chance to move, which is hard considering it has 120k health and you tend to only be able to do 9999 damage per turn (but it is possible).

Still lots of fun to be had before that, Brad could have started the subquest if he'd inspected the well but, err, oh well?

Can we get more AR Movies? They are fantastic.

This looks amazing. I have not followed this game at all so seeing that they are using the Final Fantasy V job system has me incredibly excited. Does this game have front and back rows for battles? I would love to get my White Mage Archer on the back row and Black Mage Monk on the front again, but it doesn't look like it from watching the gameplay.

What I don't get about gaming press, when Final Fantasy does interesting game systems, they're called desperate (even though every Final Fantasy introduces new systems every time), but when a game basically copies retro Final Fantasy games (like, Warrior of Light, really?), it's the best thing since sliced bread (which was invented the year before.)

I'm not knocking the game, seems interesting and i might pick it up, People (like Alex) just really love to hate on high profile franchises.

No one can replace Ryan, but Vinny is starting to fill in his role on the show. It is interesting to see how that happens when someone is gone.

It's the magic of new IP. That's why everyone always just wants new IP because it's new. No baggage involved. No established fanbase to deal with.

Besides, the games press is full of hypocrisy anyway.

So Vinny's pants are the omnipotent evil force that is the final boss of the game?

Have to admit...That opening was kind of amazing...

I think it's the granularity that's tickling interests. There are so many numbers, grades, and things to tweak. It's a min/maxers wet dream!

I am loving the hell out of this game. I'm in the same place Brad is, but I'm around level 20 now just because I've been running around fighting stuff for fun. Also, the Nemesis guys who show up in your town give a boatload of money and EXP.

Its everything I hate about JRPGs. Yay!

FTFY

That battle music! Oh my God! That battle music!!!

Turning the encounter rate to the lowest cancels random battles entirely.

If you have played a few jrpgs you should consider playing on hard hard it's far more satisfying. Normal ends up being a cake walk if you do the sidequests which you will probably want to do as they are are the way you get a lot of the jobs. Hard reqires a little grinding outside of the sidequests but mostly when you want to level a new job, there is also an auto option so with the right set up and battle speed on 4x it's not too bad anyway.

FYI, you can summon random people from the internet once per day in lieu of actually street passing. It's pretty nice to be able to participate too!

@linus_south said:

Rendered opinion about someone, never met him.

@linus_south: Oh my god, you just reminded me of what I loved so much from the comments of the BR run of Deadly Premonition.