Bravely Default is a return to the classic JRPG roots of the 1990s. It completely sucks you in when you're only 30 minutes into the game... Originally released in Japan with the subtitle Flying Fairy, it initially started off as a Final Fantasy spin-off and still retains a lot of the Final Fantasy elements. It finally made its way to the West exclusively for the Nintendo 3DS, translated into English in December 2013, with additional features compared to the original. Bravely Default harkens back to the turn-based combat of the JRPG glory days with a new twist: the Brave and Default system. During battle, your characters can Default which means you get to stack up extra turns to spend later, called Brave Points, while also reducing damage from enemies at the same time.
Default is effectively like Defend in the earlier Final Fantasy games, but has a more useful purpose. The other side is Brave, by using Brave, the character can use up those extra points and have additional turns within that turn. You're allowed to Brave even without stacking but this means you'll go into deficient Brave Points and will be unable to make a turn until you've reached 0 Brave Points again. While this new system is simple in theory, it completely changes the way you play turn-based battles and it is very well executed. It has added a significant layer of strategy of whether to risk it and overspend for those extra turns, or bide your time and stack it up for later. This makes the combat system so much more fun.
Otherwise, the turn-based system is a typical one; you can attack with your weapon, select magic, do special attacks, use items and run. What dictates your arsenal of abilities is the Job Class system. You can select one of 24 jobs for each character. When defeating enemies, not only do you earn experience points, you earn Job Points which will level up the job, allowing you to use more of that job's abilities. There are the typical staples like White Mage, Dark Knight and Freelancer, but also more unusual job classes such as Arcanist, Merchant and Pirate. Once you've played around with a few jobs, you get to mix and match any two jobs at one time through the current job of your character, and equipping another job's abilities.
Unfortunately, there are random encounters but you are able to tweak the encounter rate at any time. Sick of constantly getting into fights while exploring? You can set it to zero. Need to grind for a few levels? You can set it to double the rate. The flexibility this provides is fantastic and is a boon for people who like to explore every inch of a dungeon. Not only that but you can increase battle speed. No more do you have to painfully wait for an animation to finish, you can set it at a speed that you prefer, whether it be the normal speed, twice the speed or even four times the speed. This can make battle animations blur together in a flurry of movement.
There is a feature called Bravely Second (hint hint, it's also in the sequel) where you can freeze time and just unleash however many attacks you have SP of. You earn SP (up to a max of three at any one time) through putting your 3DS to sleep while keeping Bravely Default suspended. Or you can purchase items with real money. It's not a necessary battle mechanic you need to use in the game and to be honest, feels somewhat tacked on and easy to break the game with. The other features that helps easy leveling up and defeating the random monsters that you're too overpowered for is the Auto Battle. You can set the system to repeat the last set of actions for each character and this means grinding can be done while you're half-asleep and in a more efficient manner.
You also get bonuses depending on your performance each battle, resulting in increases in experience, money and job points. Bravely Default has a world map! Seriously, this game is pulling out all the good bits and putting it into a brand new updated game with contemporary features. The world map and dungeons are rendered in 3D whereas the towns are pre-rendered environments which looks like pieces of artwork. This may seem offputting at first but all doubts will melt away when you enter the first town of Caldisla, they look amazing. If you stop moving, the camera zooms out to show the scale of the town which again, looks amazing. The dungeons have a top down view. Everything looks so crisp and sharp on the 3DS's screen, which is an achievement in and of itself.
You get the airship very soon after you start the game but you are limited by the places you can land it so it's false freedom. There's also a surprising lack of hidden areas on the world map for you to discover. The dungeons also throw back to the past through traps such as panels that poison your party or statues within the walls that blind your party. The only disappointing fact in terms of the graphics is the simplified character models but they hold their own charm in a way. Bravely Default contains both Japanese and English voice acting. The English voices are pretty decent except for Agnes, whose voice is the weakest. JRPGs usually have a decent soundtrack and Bravely Default is no exception. There are some amazing pieces of music here but the dungeon theme alone is superb.
The enemies are a walk in the park at the beginning of the game but will quickly grow to become very powerful and forcing you to grind in order to advance the story. This need for grinding kind of sucks but at least you can level up quickly or just switch it to Easy mode. The side stories on the other hand, require excessive grinding even on Easy difficulty. It's annoying that the side stories will actually disappear if you don't play through them in time yet the bosses in these side stories can be overpowered. The side story bosses can decimate your party, requiring specific strategies to defeat, which sucks if you have to rearrange your party. The game will get more difficult once you reach the second city, and you will start to struggle.
What's frustrating is that there are frequent cheap one-hit KO moves from bosses, to the point where these attacks can even be multi-targeted attacks! It's aggravating when the bosses spam these instant death moves towards the end of a fight and keep killing your party members before you can revive. There are two other minor features to the game. One is a real-time town rebuilding mini-game, where you get friends over the internet to increase the town's population. You then associate these town members to rebuild certain parts of the town, which will reward you with items to use in the game. There are social features too, but if you don't have friends you can get random friends. During encounters, you can summon your friends to use their abilities.
The other thing is that you can link your friends (or AI characters if you don't have real-life friends) to your characters to share abilities. The story is a classic tale and manages to suck you in immediately. The first half of the story and just the general theme overall feels very much like the original Final Fantasy. Agnes is a vestal of the Wind Crystal. The four Crystals of Luxendarc have been overtaken by dark power, and Agnes, along with her three friends, Tiz, Ringabell and Edea, must travel around the world to revive the Cyrstals. It's a predictable and simple story but halfway into the game, a twist happens and throws the plot completely around.
Unfortunately, and without spoiling too much, this story event causes you to having retrek through all the dungeons again, and even repeats all the sidequests to defeat the same bosses again, but more powerful this time. What's disappointing is that you don't do this only once but three more times! It can be overlooked when you are forced to beat the identical boss the second time, but forcing you to beat the same bosses five times in a row is obnoxious. Granted, if you decide to do the sidequest bosses as well, there will be some new dialogue to expand upon their backstory but so much of the content is recycled it becomes tedious and repetitive. It felt like the developers were too lazy to create anything new but still needed to pad out the game.
During the late game, you are disadvantaged to swap Job Classes since if you do, it will mean lower stats and cannot use the more powerful magic or abilities from that Job Class until you can grind the level up to be much higher. This means that defeating the bosses, especially the side bosses, a little bit harder. This is not necessarily poor design but limited and frustrating since as each boss requires a specific strategy, you will have to constantly switch jobs, change abilities and equipment. Even more annoying is that the repeated bosses don't even give you experience points! You have to shudder at the face that the original game that was released in Japan did not even have the option to turn off random encounters. Imagine that not only do you have to trek all over the world AND through all the floors of the dungeons, while being forced into encounters every ten steps.
Seriously, the second half of Bravely Default is horrible and leaves a sour taste after the stellar first half. Bravely Default offers two endings and if you go for the True Ending, you will get hyped up during the final battle as it pulls together the various story threads, and manages to incorporate the social feature of the game quite cleverly. It presented a nice ending. It still doesn't make up for the horrible lead up of the second half of the game though. Just a note to make sure to check out the Title Screen once you've near the end of the game for a neat change in the subtitle, which will strike you as clever and ingenious. The game will take anywhere from 40 to 60 hours to finish, highly dependent on the difficulty you've played it at, whether you've grinded, whether you bothered to defeat all the side story bosses again, and whether you ended up turning off encounter rates. Nonetheless, Bravely Default is a long and meaty game.
Once you finished the game, it will unlock a teaser for the sequel, Bravely Second. This is a pretty cool movie especially since it uses the gyro on the 3DS so you can look around yourself (similar to Virtual Reality). It makes you so immersed into that scene and entertaining. Overall, Bravely Default is a fantastic game. The padding becomes such a joke, and the second half of the game feels shafted with the repetitive nature and lack of original content. The shameless recycling is frustrating and taint the whole title. Nevertheless, Bravely Default has an amazing battle system, neat story (albeit bad execution in terms of gameplay), great graphics, music and just about great everything else. You owe it to yourself to purchase and play this game if you own a 3DS.
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