So I mentioned this one in a review a few weeks back. I had my big summer vacation planned for this year to travel down to Austin for RTX. At this point in my life I consider myself to be a fairly seasoned con-goer. I've got a number of ohayocons under my belt, and have also been to a very crowded PAX East. So I knew two things for sure going in. I knew I would have some long travel ahead, and I knew I'd be spending time in line.
I sort of fell out of touch with handheld gaming for a while. Have a wave 1 DS Lite and a launch PSP. They pretty much provided all I needed in the way of handheld gaming. But as new iterations of handhelds came out, close to my trip I started hearing rumblings of a off shot game put out by Square Enix that took the world by surprise. It being heralded it as the Final Fantasy game we've all been waiting for. Well, hearing things like that piqued my interest. So after years of not using handhelds, I caved and got a 3DS specifically to play...
BRAVELY DEFAULT:(3DS)
The tale of Bravely Default weaves together the travels of four characters from across Luxendarc. Our main protagonist Agnes is a vestal to the crystal of wind, seeking to restore the power of the crystals in the hopes of stopping the decline of the world. Tiz, a country bumpkin who sees his whole village swallowed up by a massive sinkhole resulting from the decline of the crystals power. Ringabel, our resident womanizing amnesiac (who is a total douche in my opinion). And finally Edea, The daughter of the Grand Marshall of the Duchy of Eternia.
Despite the 4 of them each having a difference of beginnings, they all end up walking along the same path. They travel across Luxendarc to each of the realms crystals in the hopes of reactivating their power, and hopefully restoring balance to the world. But the Duchy of Eternia sees the dependency of the crystals as a curse, and are out to stop Agnes in her quest.
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| Ringabel, Agnes, Tiz, and Edea |
This is another one of those stories I kind of had to gloss over for the intro paragraphs because I don't really want to play spoiler. But did any of those story elements kinda stick out in your head? Four different crystals across the world corresponding to the for cardinal elements? A world in decline because of the crystals power? A warring empire looking to control the crystals? A ragtag band of hero's with at least one or more nobles? This is Final Fantasy 101, and has basically been the stories of FF's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, and to a lesser degree 12. So anyone who's familiar with classic Final Fantasy is going to find these story elements pretty familiar.
But that isn't the only thing that rings familiar. Although all the character models and designs are original to the game, but if you ever played the Final Fantasy III or IV remakes on the DS, you'll note that the visual style of the characters looks remarkably familiar to those iterations. But I mean, alright, maybe it uses the same artists, and stories are kinda similar, and they came from the same company. That doesn't mean they are same thing, right?
Normally I would agree, but those are not the only comparisons. All of the spell names are practically the same from their FF counterparts, It functions with pretty much the exact same job system (at least that I remember) from Final Fantasy 3 and 5. Jobs that similarly to previous FF games had and many of them with the same names and features, nearly every aspect of this game calls back to those classic JRPGs from the NES and SNES eras, and I honestly couldn't be happier about it.
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| While I'm never crazy about the Knight class, 2 handing a weapon does big damage And is a handy skill to unlock early. I find big damage is better than the shield defense. |
The battle system of this game also remains classic, but has some of its own tricks to make it original. Namely, the Brave and Default system. These really are clever names for point system. Each round, a character and enemy gets one action a turn, and when you use an action, it spends that point. Simple right? However, you can choose to default (ie: defend) for a round. You take reduced damage but you store up a battle point when you do so. you can store them up to 3.
Once you are ready to really go on the offensive you can "brave" to spend these additional points and have that character take an additional turn. so with a full stack of points, you can unload up to 4 attacks with each character (since you can dip into the negatives when you brave). So on certain bosses, you can really fire off a massive assault for big damage. Or, if you are confident you can win quickly, you can brave 4 times and bring yourself down to -3 or -4 at the end of the turn. This is a gamble though since if you don't kill off all the baddies you are then vulnerable for 3 or 4 rounds of attacks.
And this game will quickly, and I mean QUICKLY, let you know this isn't baby's first JRPG. I am barely halfway though the game and the bosses I have encountered very quickly let me know that haphazard strategy will result in a game over screen. So for most of the regular battles you can tear through fine, but you definitely need to use the Brave and Default system smartly if you are going to beat this game.
You also have conditions for special moves you can do that hinge on the weapon type you are currently using. If you fulfill them, it allows you to fire off a special for big damage. They also can be customized to be more effective on a specific enemy type, elemental, and inflict status effects. On top of that, while that characters theme is playing, the party receives bonus effects as well, so a well placed special with a stockpile of BP can quickly turn the tide of battle.
There are a bunch wonderful additions that I love and wish Square Enix would have incorporated sooner and in more of their games. One is the classic auto-fight. I love this feature because it basically remembers the last set of actions you used for that character so if you are in an area with certain baddies you and set your attacks properly with the proper amount of braves, tap Y to go into auto, and then just walk the world map and the game will take care of those for you. Its better than Normal because usually auto-fight is just physical attacks. Setting up to remember specific actions makes clearing out randoms simple.
It also doesn't need to be an arduous process either, because if you tap left or right on the d-pad, you can increase or decrease the speed of the battle. So if you are traveling to a specific point and wanna save time, you can just set the battle speed to highest and have your auto fight commands set, and the tedious random battles can be over in a flash. Excellent feature and I wish this was standard in JRPGs.
But what if we step into a cave and half way through we find out we are not ready for it?. We clearly don't want to die but have no teleport stones (which you should, you flippin idiot)? No problem. In the configure menus, you can also set the likelihood of getting into random battles by increments of 50%. So you can adjust it to have half the battles happen, or even none (but you gain no EXP that way). Inversely, say you want to grind some fights to get more xp or increase your job ranks. All you have to do is crank the encounter rate up to 100% extra and you will be in a fight every few steps. This is incredibly handy.
The game has a pretty awesome soundtrack as well. This was one of the things I would see articles often brag about when they wrote about the game. It didn't take me long to see why. I don't know exactly how long ago this started but its becoming common enough in RPGs that I've noticed it as a trend, but a lot of games seem to be blending the classical sounding style you usually hear in a game like this, and mixing it with contemporary rock. The results are exceptional and they really help sell the battle. I've seen Final Fantasy and the Atelier series do this, and frankly I hope this becomes standard practice. It's fantastic.
Now as I tend to say, no game ever manages to get a perfect score from me and even those who make an outstanding case are no exception to the rule. This includes Bravely Default. As I have previously mentioned, there are points in the game where the difficulty really ratchets up. Normally I am ok with a steeper difficulty curve, but there are points in this game where it feels the boss for an area is grossly overpowered to the baddies I have been thrashing going up to it.
On more than one occasion if not every other dungeon, I will be happily tromping my way through a dungeon mashing through all the fodder baddies it throws at me. I get the end of the dungeon where I get treated a cutscene (typically featuring Edea or Agnes yelling at someone), boss fight starts and inside of 3 or 4 rounds of combat I get completely steamrolled. Even at max level, there are bosses who just wail on me. It can be frustrating and it sort of messes up the difficulty curve. I'm told it gets murderous on difficulties higher than normal but I haven't gone higher yet. But the fact that I'm at level 99 and still getting creamed by bosses on normal says something
While I love the music in this game, the voice acting I am a little more meh about. I try to be objective when I first hear character voices, because sometimes they start off wonky and get better. There are lots of examples of this: Any Star Ocean game, Infinite Undiscovery, a handful of Tales characters, Blue Dragon, and the list goes on. While on the whole I like the voices of these characters, when Edea or Agnes gets worked up it makes me wince a bit. I've gotten more used to them as the game went on. Few games have 100% peerless voice acting, so this one doesn't rub me too badly.
But since I'm on the topic of characters, Ringabel and Tiz suck. I'm only in chapter 6 or 7 or so at time but so far neither of them have once had the slightest bit of interesting dialog to me. Tiz has a very powerful beginning that sort of starts him on the hero's quest but then immediately takes a backseat to the girls, who have actual important shit going on like saving the world from destruction, or committing high treason to your country. I guess his kind of generic facade is meant to be so the player projects themselves to him, but honestly I didn't feel it, nor have I cared yet.
Ringabel is a womanizing amnesiac: Fucking, Snore. Its been done a million times, and does nothing to make me care about that character. The story finally seems to be starting to address who he is, but by this point I already don't care. Trying not to play the spoiler here but when certain events within the world start to take place, it starts to paint a pretty clear picture about who he is/used to be. So when he finally made the big reveal, it was promptly met with a "yeah no shit, I figured that out already when you SHOWED ME 10 hours before".
Then there really has been an annoying vagueness to the motivations of the antagonists too as I play this game. To unlock each of the jobs, you fight a respective boss with that job. And a lot of the pre fight conversations are "We need to stop the wind vestal, she'll {Do this/Cause this}" to which the heroes defiantly ask what they mean by that, and then all of them just respond by saying they are children or the don't understand. No fucking shit assholes, that's why we keep asking what the fuck is going on! But to make matters worse, not only do you have to refight the bosses at some point, but the game is now making me do it TWICE and seems to make me do it again, and I'm still not learning anything.
Now I heard the back half of the game can be grindy, but this is just ridiculous. Even with max level and encounters turned off, I still find myself getting bored retracing my steps a 3rd time to refight the bosses I've already done twice already. I hope the story payoff gets better because right now its taking a lot of wind out of my sails, and sadly when that happens, I put games down. Thankfully, while the grind is getting irritating, the end of the story is in sight so hopefully I can push through it.
I appreciate that there are a lot of different job options to pick from in the game, it just would have been nice if any of them were worth a shit. Oh sure, a lot of them sound really interesting in concept but after a while, like most job systems, I find myself just relegating to the regular heavy hitting classes and maybe a healer. between a dual wielding swordmaster (read samurai), pirate, valkyrie and a magic user with white magic, everything else ends up being next to use useless. Equip everything with Dual Wield, Multi-task, and Acrobatics, and your three physical fighters can mow down groups with crescent moon, or wail on a single target with 4 braves and 8+ attacks for massive damage. Salve-Maker? Pfft, not in this lifetime.
Lastly, is the insane price of the bonus items you get from the street pass feature. You can rebuild the town destroyed at the beginning of the game, and the way you do that is by collecting street passes and then putting those people to work to unlock things over time. I was fortunate enough to be at a gamer and Internet convention, so I racked up 400+ passes pretty easily. But that still doesn't change that some of the items (such as the gold and growth eggs for grinding) cost like 2 and 5 million respectively. Once you get them farming is a snap but its still highly annoying to get to that stage to start.
Now, a lot of these seem like nitpicks and maybe they are, but I will say it hasn't deterred me from trying to finish this game yet. Reviews weren't kidding, Bravely Default truly is a Final Fantasy title in all but name. And not this Final Fantasy XIII cyber-punk emotionally stoic garbage we've been being shoveled into our faces for the past five years. No, this is straight up SNES/PS1 quality JRPG classic and god am I glad to see it. And I am not the only one either, the world was happy to see it as marked by its sales numbers.
The others who were happy were the people at Square-Enix, who seemed absolutely befuddled by the success of this game. Even to the point where they openly said "huh, we didn't think the rest of the world liked JRPGS." You colossal fucking idiots. YOU BUILT YOUR FUCKING EMPIRE ON JRPGS, OF COURSE PEOPLE LIKE THEM. So now Squeenix is reevaluating their direction and appear to be going back to what they do best and that is a good thing for gamers like me. (Hopefully Sega takes the hint and localizes the last fucking Yakuza games already.)
Believe the hype on this one. Bravely Default was everything I wanted it to be. It certainly has some faults and didn't merit paying for an entirely new system for just one game, but it did motivate me enough to get back into the handheld market. I've got 70+ logged in the game already and still have a good portion of the game to go. At time of writing I am currently in chapter 7 and I think I am making my final push to the end. Here's hoping this marks the start of a long and successful new IP, even if its walking the path of its predecessor to the letter. Highly Recommended.
See Legend of Zelda series? You can make a game identical to what you are and call it something different, and it feels new. Mix shit up a bit.
On more than one occasion if not every other dungeon, I will be happily tromping my way through a dungeon mashing through all the fodder baddies it throws at me. I get the end of the dungeon where I get treated a cutscene (typically featuring Edea or Agnes yelling at someone), boss fight starts and inside of 3 or 4 rounds of combat I get completely steamrolled. Even at max level, there are bosses who just wail on me. It can be frustrating and it sort of messes up the difficulty curve. I'm told it gets murderous on difficulties higher than normal but I haven't gone higher yet. But the fact that I'm at level 99 and still getting creamed by bosses on normal says something
While I love the music in this game, the voice acting I am a little more meh about. I try to be objective when I first hear character voices, because sometimes they start off wonky and get better. There are lots of examples of this: Any Star Ocean game, Infinite Undiscovery, a handful of Tales characters, Blue Dragon, and the list goes on. While on the whole I like the voices of these characters, when Edea or Agnes gets worked up it makes me wince a bit. I've gotten more used to them as the game went on. Few games have 100% peerless voice acting, so this one doesn't rub me too badly.
But since I'm on the topic of characters, Ringabel and Tiz suck. I'm only in chapter 6 or 7 or so at time but so far neither of them have once had the slightest bit of interesting dialog to me. Tiz has a very powerful beginning that sort of starts him on the hero's quest but then immediately takes a backseat to the girls, who have actual important shit going on like saving the world from destruction, or committing high treason to your country. I guess his kind of generic facade is meant to be so the player projects themselves to him, but honestly I didn't feel it, nor have I cared yet.
Ringabel is a womanizing amnesiac: Fucking, Snore. Its been done a million times, and does nothing to make me care about that character. The story finally seems to be starting to address who he is, but by this point I already don't care. Trying not to play the spoiler here but when certain events within the world start to take place, it starts to paint a pretty clear picture about who he is/used to be. So when he finally made the big reveal, it was promptly met with a "yeah no shit, I figured that out already when you SHOWED ME 10 hours before".
Then there really has been an annoying vagueness to the motivations of the antagonists too as I play this game. To unlock each of the jobs, you fight a respective boss with that job. And a lot of the pre fight conversations are "We need to stop the wind vestal, she'll {Do this/Cause this}" to which the heroes defiantly ask what they mean by that, and then all of them just respond by saying they are children or the don't understand. No fucking shit assholes, that's why we keep asking what the fuck is going on! But to make matters worse, not only do you have to refight the bosses at some point, but the game is now making me do it TWICE and seems to make me do it again, and I'm still not learning anything.
Now I heard the back half of the game can be grindy, but this is just ridiculous. Even with max level and encounters turned off, I still find myself getting bored retracing my steps a 3rd time to refight the bosses I've already done twice already. I hope the story payoff gets better because right now its taking a lot of wind out of my sails, and sadly when that happens, I put games down. Thankfully, while the grind is getting irritating, the end of the story is in sight so hopefully I can push through it.
I appreciate that there are a lot of different job options to pick from in the game, it just would have been nice if any of them were worth a shit. Oh sure, a lot of them sound really interesting in concept but after a while, like most job systems, I find myself just relegating to the regular heavy hitting classes and maybe a healer. between a dual wielding swordmaster (read samurai), pirate, valkyrie and a magic user with white magic, everything else ends up being next to use useless. Equip everything with Dual Wield, Multi-task, and Acrobatics, and your three physical fighters can mow down groups with crescent moon, or wail on a single target with 4 braves and 8+ attacks for massive damage. Salve-Maker? Pfft, not in this lifetime.
Lastly, is the insane price of the bonus items you get from the street pass feature. You can rebuild the town destroyed at the beginning of the game, and the way you do that is by collecting street passes and then putting those people to work to unlock things over time. I was fortunate enough to be at a gamer and Internet convention, so I racked up 400+ passes pretty easily. But that still doesn't change that some of the items (such as the gold and growth eggs for grinding) cost like 2 and 5 million respectively. Once you get them farming is a snap but its still highly annoying to get to that stage to start.
Now, a lot of these seem like nitpicks and maybe they are, but I will say it hasn't deterred me from trying to finish this game yet. Reviews weren't kidding, Bravely Default truly is a Final Fantasy title in all but name. And not this Final Fantasy XIII cyber-punk emotionally stoic garbage we've been being shoveled into our faces for the past five years. No, this is straight up SNES/PS1 quality JRPG classic and god am I glad to see it. And I am not the only one either, the world was happy to see it as marked by its sales numbers.
The others who were happy were the people at Square-Enix, who seemed absolutely befuddled by the success of this game. Even to the point where they openly said "huh, we didn't think the rest of the world liked JRPGS." You colossal fucking idiots. YOU BUILT YOUR FUCKING EMPIRE ON JRPGS, OF COURSE PEOPLE LIKE THEM. So now Squeenix is reevaluating their direction and appear to be going back to what they do best and that is a good thing for gamers like me. (Hopefully Sega takes the hint and localizes the last fucking Yakuza games already.)
Believe the hype on this one. Bravely Default was everything I wanted it to be. It certainly has some faults and didn't merit paying for an entirely new system for just one game, but it did motivate me enough to get back into the handheld market. I've got 70+ logged in the game already and still have a good portion of the game to go. At time of writing I am currently in chapter 7 and I think I am making my final push to the end. Here's hoping this marks the start of a long and successful new IP, even if its walking the path of its predecessor to the letter. Highly Recommended.
