*There are some light spoilers in this wall of text. If you care, read at your own risk.*
When it was first revealed, Bravely Default seemed like a true renaissance of old-school Final Fantasy-styled gameplay with a very pretty coat of paint. The online circles that I run in were all atwitter about how it looked like it would be the game they had been longing for since the days of the SNES. It took a year and a half, but finally it was localized for North America. And then things went horribly wrong. It was love at first, but then as people got deeper into the game, they began to bellyache about how dumb the plot was and how the second half was nothing but repetitive padding, among other things.
My story begins many years later. While I was interested in the game from the very beginning, I didn’t hop on board the Bravely Default train right away. I played the demo and loved it, but not quite enough to buy in. I waited staunchly for a price drop, but after a year had passed and it became clear that the price was etched in stone for all eternity (it was published by Nintendo outside of Japan, after all), I gave in and pulled the trigger.
Right out of the gate, choosing to wait was a massive boon to me. BD has a streetpass/online feature that lets you sync up your characters’ job levels with those of your friends. So right from the very beginning of the game, I had access to every ability for every job. I still had to level up the jobs on my own to gain their stat bonuses, but having those abilities put me at a great advantage. You can also call upon your friends in battle to dish out an attack that they have chosen to share, which, if a strong enough attack was recorded, could wipe out early-to-mid-game bosses in a single hit. You can only summon each friend once, though, so that was a little less broken.
Speaking of jobs and bosses, I believe that the battle system is the one thing that everyone who played Bravely Default agrees on. Agrees that it is amazing, that is. The job system is ripped nearly wholesale from Final Fantasy V, which means that you have a huge list of jobs which are acquired at predetermined points, and you can switch each character into any job you like at anytime outside of combat. Every job has a list of 14 abilities, one of which remains in effect at all times that a character is using that job. Otherwise, abilities take the form of actions you can perform in battle, or passive skills that give you persistent bonuses like higher attack strength or HP recovery after battle.
Crunch the numbers here: 24 jobs with 14 abilities each, and four characters to build. That’s a lot of options at your disposal. There may be one perfect combination that will carry players from the beginning to the end of the game, but I never bothered to check. Most of the fun in a game like this is throwing together your own builds and seeing what works. The game is built in a way that encourages you to try out all of your options, and it really is exciting to finally put together a build that stomps a boss you’ve been having trouble with.
The plot is where things start to get a little bit shaky. Many would argue that all video game stories are bad, but let’s just take it on its own terms for now, okay? The basic setup is that the world’s four crystals have lost their power, which is causing all sorts of terrible environmental problems, and you must journey to reinvigorate them. Of course, there’s an evil empire out to stop you at every turn because ?????, as evil empires are wont to do. Oh hey guess what THAT’S A FINAL FANTASY ALRIGHT. A little mundane, sure, but not particularly offensive in any way.
Then you get to the second half of the game. This involves travelling through four parallel worlds and reviving all four crystals in each. Which is less repetitive than it sounds, but still a fairly shoddy way to pad out the back half of your game. Along the way, there is a theme of how you shouldn’t always just blindly do what you think is right (hence, bravely default), but it gets a little bit muddled in the melodrama and world-hopping nonsense. I do think that the first half of the story could have made a fine game on its own, but the big twist really didn’t do it any favours.
The one upside to having to repeat your quest five times is that in each subsequent world, you get to fight all the bosses who you’d previously earned jobs from (“asterisk holders”) again. In the first two repeat worlds, they’re just stronger, but in the fourth and fifth worlds they start teaming up and it makes from some really interesting battles. You also get a little more backstory for each asterisk holder in every world, which makes nearly all of them more likeable, but then you stop to consider that they’re all alternate versions of themselves, so there’s no actual character building and it’s all moot.
Okay, so the bad guys were mishandled, but what about the main characters? Sadly to say, it’s a 50/50 split. Agnes and Tiz, who are arguably the mainest characters, are both boring and show exactly zero development over the course of the story. Edea and Ringabel, who are mostly just tag-alongs, are super lovable. They are both overflowing with personality, and have actual character arcs in which they grow as people and come to realize things about both themselves and the world they live in. It’s a little shocking how night and day the character pairs are.
So yeah, it’s got its ups and downs -like any game, really- but I think that at the end of the day, Bravely Default is definitely worth playing. The gameplay is polished to a perfect shine, and if you really can’t bear the plot, nearly every cutscene can be skipped. It took me over a year to bring it to a conclusion, but it was quite a ride. If absolutely nothing else, I was elated when my big, dumb face became a background element in the final battle.
