Bravely Default (2013)

Stopped playing it before thinking that the worst part was having to beat the same 4 bosses 5 times each was boring. How naive I was. The final two bosses are a complete nightmare. First comes Airy's 3rd form. Here's a good explanation why Airy is so bad: https://www.fireallmissiles.com/bravely-default-airy-boss-guide She can wipe the entire party with the best equipment in a single turn. She lowers resistances of the entire party, then immediately deals maximum damage to everyone. People mostly beat her by exploiting one of the game mechanics. I managed to do it only by spamming Giant Draft consumables, and lots of luck.

Then comes Ouroboros, which does basically the same, but his Disaster attack simply penetrates immunities, without any explanation. Again, you just need to be lucky and hope he casts Divergence instead, which "just" disables a character for 2 turns. My guess is that the game authors either expected players to buy limit breakers with real money (Pay2Win scheme) or to exploit the social element and summon overpowered friends (that's why Divergence stills allow you to "Summon friend"). But since I have 0 friends, I had to go the hard way.

The saddest part, is there is no character development in the game. Best way to demonstrate it, is that there's a dialogue at the very end, where each character tells what they plan to do once this is all over. The village boy plans to return to his village. The priestess plans to go back to her temple. There was some romantic innuendo, but it all gets discarded. It is as if the game couldn't decide whether it's intended for children or adults. There are some adult themes, but then in the end, everything becomes inconsequential, and everyone basically return to where they're started. Even the Final Fantasy X trick they tried to pull, where Tiz apparently dies without others noticing gets dismissed after a few moments .

At last. It took 7 years of playing off and on but I'm finally done with this game. I still have a copy of Bravely Second to get to though, so it's hard to feel too triumphant.

Like many JRPGs, this is a very long game. It took me just a little across the 100 hour mark before I finally saw the credits. The real ones, anyway. For most of those hours, I had a good time!

The world set up in this game is actually really cool and the characters are a lot of fun. While I'm not a fan of the random encounters style of enemy design, the game gave me the tools to control that as I saw fit by adjusting encounter rates in the options, which is huge for me. If I wanted to run through a dungeon straight to the boss without worrying about being chipped down by the enemies there, it was easy to do so. No Repel item needed. Take notes, Pokemon.

I also feel like I need to talk about the brilliant simplicity of the battle system. Being able to take multiple turns at once at the cost of future turns is already pretty cool as a core concept, but it's the design of the jobs/classes which your characters can leverage that really make the combat shine. Pulling off combos only made possible through combining job abilities makes you feel like a master tactician, and it never got old for me. I'm definitely looking forward to playing around some more with the system in the next game.

I found that around chapter 4 I was getting really into the plot. I'm not usually one for digging hard into lore in RPGs, but here I found myself wanting to read every single new entry which showed up in the in-game journal, which was a brilliant way to allow those who are interested to learn all they could ever want to know about the game world while also being handy for those like me, who took forever to finish the game and needed the occasional reminder of what was happening in the plot.

I had heard a little about the repetitive nature of the endgame in Bravely Default, but actually playing through it was a very different experience. It was far from the worst I've seen in the genre, but for the sake of staying relatively spoiler free I'll leave it at this-- The last third of this game brings the concept of recycled bosses to a level I'm not sure I've ever seen before. I maxed out my levels across all characters just to reduce the grind of the battles required for the plot, and found myself skipping out on the optional fights because I just wanted to push through.

That said, once I got through that portion of the game, things got better for the final boss. Battling it was a long affair, but it felt like a very satisfying conclusion after having played so many hours, as it should be.

The non-true ending does not share this sense of satisfaction, and was honestly a disappointment after coming so far, so I'm glad I stuck it out for the true one.

I'd recommend this to anyone who enjoys JRPGs. Just be ready for the last couple chapters of the game to be quite a slog before you jump in. Almost everything else here; the combat, the plot, the visuals, and the music- is absolutely worth your time. I'm going to wait a while before jumping into Bravely Second, as I want to relax without having this franchise hanging over my head for a little, but I'm excited to fire up the next game.

If you´re reading this review trying to figure out if the game is worth playing, chances are you've seen some footage of the game somewhere that caught your eye, because oh boy, this games looks and sounds great! Or maybe you've heard, and rightly so, that it pays homage to the classic JRPGs with it's job system and turn-based combat.

In any case, and in my humble opinion, some of the nice things you'll find are:

• Gorgeus art style, with beautiful watercolour-esque backgrounds in the cities, and great soundtrack.
• Interesting premise for the story, with plot twists and reflecting over good and evil, or progress versus religion and traditions.
• Interesting brave/default mechanic adding another layer of strategy to the battles.
• Huge and very synergistic job system with many interesting combinations to try.
• Good balance of difficulty, with ocasional grinding needed (especially if played nowadays, without many actives players to take advantage of the abilink mechanic or to speed up the Norende Village reconstruction) but very rewarding, with the most difficult bosses forcing the players to tailor their builds for that battle.
• Night and day cycle that changes the quests and monsters available.
• Player friendly additions, such as convenient saving points, option to speed up battle animations or automate battle commands (or auto-battle if you like), or the option to adjust encounter rate to the point of removing battles altogether if desired.

As for the biggest drawback, it has to be how REPETITIVE it can be:

• The story has a very real sense of deja vu. At some stage we got it, OK? Enough of that.
• The dungeons look very similar through their different levels, re-using patterns as if they were procedurally generated (except they're not). To add more insult to the injury, end-game content re-uses chunks of those dungeons once more.
• Although it's nice they added some optional quests, a good portion of those consist of boss rematches in different combinations that feel lazy and uninspired, despite the extra challenge they bring.
• Heck, you´ll even remember by heart some of the dialogs at some point!

In general the game feels excessively padded, to the point it detracts from its enjoyment. Not sure who they were trying to appeal with that design decision, but the same story could have been told in half the amount of time and it would have resulted in a much better game.

I would still recommend playing it for the art and the interesting mechanics, but don´t feel bad if you decide to put it down halfway when you feel like you´re walking in circles.

I love RPGs so I couldn't pass this one up when I heard about it and grabbed the demo right away. Personally, I thought the demo was horribly boring. Because of that I put off buying this game for awhile. But I AM glad I eventually did get the game, because it took me on an absolutely memorable adventure that I haven't experienced from RPGs in awhile!

First off, I wasn't a fan of the chibi style characters, but they really grew on me as the game progressed and now I can't imagine them represented in any other way that would work for Bravely Default. One of the things I enjoyed the most about this game was the conversation between the characters. The light hearted banter they have between each other is actually quite funny. Despite the repetitiveness at some point of the game I did really enjoy the story. There is a purpose to everything in the game and I love how they tie it all together at the end. I don't know about other people, but I really didn't see the twist(s) that came near the end.

The battle system is engaging. Although I found the dress system a bit too much for my brain to wrap around, but if you are a person who likes complete customization and control of your battle style then you will love this. Sometimes going through the dungeons can get gruelling because of the high encounter rate. I found myself turning off encounters at one point just so I could get through the dungeon.

This game took me more than 100 hrs to complete! Surprisingly I didn't mind it because I could start and stop it whenever I wanted to on the 3DS.

If you are on the fence about this and you are a RPG fan, get it!

A gorgeous game with a cast of fun and well-voiced characters (if not somewhat typical for the genre) and stunning music to match; I had high hopes for this title. However, the exasperating 'your princess is in another castle' gameplay pattern that emerges after the first chapter is a serious let-down. I felt slightly hoodwinked into playing on in the conviction that they couldn't possibly make me do everything again, again, right?!

To see the rest of my review, please take a mosey at my blog. Thanks!

I think this game deserves maybe a 4.25 / 5. I can't bring myself to round up because of the stupidity of the repeat business in the latter half of this game.
Final time: 68 hours
I'll keep this short and sweet:

Liked:

- I got pretty attached to the main characters

- The battle mechanics are easy to understand and offer room for coming up with your own strategies

- A nice variety of jobs (classes) available for characters

- Really well done art

Meh:

- Bravely Second mechanic. I would have liked more except the execution of earning them was kind of lame.

Disliked:

- That stupid repetitive bit near the end

- The final boss hit really really hard, until I tried a strategy I read about online. And then it was a cakewalk...

Great game marred by the needless inclination for developers to protract the experience by adding time consuming fluff in the name of advertised playtime! The graphics were exceptional and the gameplay is what kept me going through it all. Character/class combinations were so customizable that creating an invincible team was well within my ability to do so. The music was charming, and the story while being extremely cliche and downright cheesy at times was saved by the characterization and narrative between the main cast, minus some of the juvenile flirtation scenes. The final chapter aptly titled, "The End" makes up for the completely unabashed decision to fluff up the game to twice its playtime(from 35 or so hours to 70) in its second half. I kind of want to give it a 7.9/10 or 3.95/5 stars, so I will settle on the 4/5 since it's close enough, and the fact that the ending, while all too familiar for a jrpg(friendship is magic), more than makes up for the slow trod through chapters 5-7.

3.95/5 Stars, or 7.9/10 - Good, go play it!

Please check out my full review at Glitchslap - A Bravely Default Review

Even though I have an issue with the unkempt endgame storyline, I would highly recommend Bravely Default to any 3DS owner who enjoys RPGs, especially JRPGs. The inventive job and brave/default combat systems really make the game enjoyable. Add in good music, characters, and a really engaging story line until the last few chapters, and you have a solid winner for your time and money. Just go in knowing that they kind of tip their hat and spoil all of the secrets before their time, and you should not be surprised.