It's really fun. The Bravely Default system offers some interesting opportunities, by using Default you 'lose' a turn, although it's more like picking 'Defend' since your defenses raise, but you get a Bravely Point(BP), up to a threshold of 4. You can then use BPs to get extra turns, up to three extra turns since each turn costs 1 BP. You don't need to stockpile BPs, you can simply use your future turns, which means you'll be left with negative BP and must rest up to three turns. This makes grinding fast, and boss battles quite fun. Oh, and battle animations can be sped up, pretty nifty!
The game looks beautiful. At first it's a bit quaint, with what seems to be hand drawn backgrounds, but they are actually made up of both 2-D art as well as a few 3-D assets. This is one of the very few games that actually look better with the 3-D on, everything pops and looks quite pretty. That said, it has a very grey and brown color palette, not unlike Final Fantasy IX or Vagrant's Story, and I'm not much of a fan... but turning on 3-D seems to liven things up a notch, making 3-D even a better sell.
Back when the game first released, during the PS3 and X360 generation, microtransactions were pretty much in every game, so of course you can pay to win. By pressing Start during battle you can act at any time, yes, even during a boss' turn. The catch is that you need SP, one per action, and you get SP by leaving the game in sleep mode, 8 hours a pop, or.... by paying with real money, which is ridiculous.
The job system is your standard Final Fantasy fare, every character can pick any job, each job has a separate level, and you can equip a sub-ability from another job. Say that you want a White Mage that can defend himself? Put Black Magic as the character's alternate ability. Each job must be leveled up separately. Going back to Final Fantasy, all the classics are here, and if they aren't you can probably find an analogue. Every characters' outfits change with each job, which is pretty cute.
The job system is very robust. Besides the secondary job ability, you also get a passive-ability system, initially you only have 1 slot, but the more crystals you save, the more slots you gain. This made it so I would find myself gaining new abilities and thinking "Hey! This could synergize really well with this other ability from this other job!", so it makes you want to use various jobs to min-max your perfect class.
There are Tales-styled 'party chat' optional events every now and then, and they are pretty neat, it's fun seeing the characters interact between each other. Edea is adorable, Tiz and Agnes are cute and Ringabel... is a generic anime 'pervert' cliché who I didn't really like. I think it's possible to pull off the pervert stereotype right, but in this case they failed.
There's a 'rebuild Norende' mini-game of sorts you can access at any time, you send villagers to rebuild and strengthen shops, which can then allow you purchase bonus goodies. Problem is... you need to go online every day to get new villagers, otherwise the time requirements get ridiculous, there are at least 3 99-hour events, and the only way to get it done faster is by using more than one villager. For my playthrough the servers were still online so I managed to get a tiny workforce, but a few years down the line this mini-game will be pretty much useless unless you take long, long breaks from the game.
The game did get a bit boring midway through chapter 4. The encounter rate is pretty high, although admittedly you can lower it on the options menu, as well as the difficulty setting. But even then, it got tough because the escape rate isn't very high, and enemies swarm you. By the lava dungeon it was impossible to keep my mana, I had to use mana to heal and to deal optimal damage, even though my Tiz and Edea Swordmaster combo was dealing a ton of physical damage. Random encounters just got too taxing. And while you don't need to grind since what really matters is your party composition, that's a bit of a lie, because you have to grind each job level to get your abilities and make them useful, and if you want to try out a class it might mean investing XP and time into a class you don't like or won't give your character the abilities that'd match the way you want to build him. Keeping your equipment and your spells updated, as well as mana potions if you need them is very expensive, so you have to grind for cash. What you get is a very slow paced game, that also turns into a rather large time investment. Maybe I should've switched the difficulty setting down to easy....
It says a lot that guides recommend turning off encounters in order to conserve MP and HP. I shouldn't have to tamper with something as basic as the random encounters for the game to become fair.
A bit of a spoiler, but needs to be said... after you hit chapter 5 you get to do everything again. A sort of world reboot happens, and now you can do everything in any order, with things having changed slightly, alongside the fact that your party remembers what happened. It's padding, and the worst kind. And after you defeat everyone again?.... you have to do it all over again, once again, with a few minor changes. And then... you guessed it, all over again. TO be fair, on every repeated cycle you only need to defeat 5 specific bosses, the others being optional, but fighting bosses again helps makes sense of what's going on. The fifth and sixth cycles get a bit more interesting because these bosses come at you in groups, but by then it was too little, too late, I was already uninvested.
You have to awaken the same four crystals like five times, right? Well, every time you need to engage in the dullest minigame of mashing X. But you can't just mash X while you look at something else, because characters will chime in, and you have to press A to advance the dialogue. Jesus christ.
The penultimate boss is incredibly cheap. It can deal humongous amounts of damage with little effort, so if you didn't level up the right jobs... boy, are you in for a surprise. And not a fun surprise. As of this point in time, I haven't defeated this boss yet, but I'm not gonna give up yet. I've seen 95% of the game already, so I felt comfortable writing this.
A bit of a spoiler, but needs to be said... after you hit chapter 5 you get to do everything again. A sort of world reboot happens, and now you can do everything in any order, with things having changed slightly, alongside the fact that your party remembers what happened. It's padding, and the worst kind. And after you defeat everyone again?.... you have to do it all over again, once again, with a few minor changes. And then... you guessed it, all over again. TO be fair, on every repeated cycle you only need to defeat 5 specific bosses, the others being optional, but fighting bosses again helps makes sense of what's going on. The fifth and sixth cycles get a bit more interesting because these bosses come at you in groups, but by then it was too little, too late, I was already uninvested.
You have to awaken the same four crystals like five times, right? Well, every time you need to engage in the dullest minigame of mashing X. But you can't just mash X while you look at something else, because characters will chime in, and you have to press A to advance the dialogue. Jesus christ.
The penultimate boss is incredibly cheap. It can deal humongous amounts of damage with little effort, so if you didn't level up the right jobs... boy, are you in for a surprise. And not a fun surprise. As of this point in time, I haven't defeated this boss yet, but I'm not gonna give up yet. I've seen 95% of the game already, so I felt comfortable writing this.
I really wanted to like Bravely Default, I really did. I love turn based RPGs, so this was right up my alley, but I can't say I did. I don't like forced grinding in my games, and while you can tamper with the difficulty it doesn't change the fact that some of the end-game bosses are downright cheap, even on the easiest difficulty setting. And having to replay so much of the game? Dude, that just ain't right. Square can do better, and should've done better. And this game was so promising that I'm gonna dive into the sequel shortly.
5.5
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