Bravely Default
Mar. 28th, 2016 05:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroTiz’s hometown disappears into a crater. Agnes’s temple is attacked. Ringabel’s memory is gone. Edea’s nation isn’t what she’d thought. The four of them gather together as the new warriors of light, guided by a fairy named Airy to return light to the crystals and balance to the world.
It’s like they took the DS remake of Final Fantasy 3 and Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light, took out all the crappy parts, and put in a bunch of things that actually worked. The classes unlock fairly quickly, to the point where you can have all but one by the game’s halfway point. (You get classes by defeating characters who hold those classes and taking their “asterisks,” and as far as I can tell none of them can ever be lost forever.) The internet-based features are a cute addition that offers some bonus stores and bosses, but is far from necessary to complete the game. (And can be used even if you don’t personally know anyone else who plays the game.) There’s a great automap system! You have a party of four characters and that party is virtually never split. There are three difficulty levels and you can independently adjust things like the random encounter rate.
The class system is only slightly modified from the FF5/Tactics system: You gain levels in various jobs and gain a new skill at each level. They’re split up into active skills that you can use when equipped with that class’s main skill set, and support skills that you eventually get five points to assign towards (some cost 2-3 points to equip). The vast majority of class combinations are viable, and there are no points where it seems strictly necessary to have someone be a specific class. (Though some are, admittedly, more broken than others.)
The ability to Brave (use BP for extra actions) and Default (defend to gain BP) actually adds a layer of strategy to the game that differentiates it from other job system classic rpgs. Your BP can go negative, for instance, so blitzing through random encounters is dependent on going deeply negative on BP and winning on the first turn.
The characters get a LOT of interaction time, to the point where most events are followed by an optional “party chat” event where they discuss what happened…or something completely random, like how they take their coffee.
SPOILERS:
I’ll admit some irritation that chapters 5-8 are basically retreads of the same boss rush. I get what they were going for (and it’s nice not to have to re-map dungeons or learn a new world map), and they did try to add new things to collect (the variations on the optional asterisk holder fights, the chest key, the genome powers, some altered plot bits), but it still gets tedious.
There are two endings, and I only got the first one by breaking the last crystal in chapter 6—by that point, I had done pretty much everything and wasn’t interested in more rounds of boss retreads. The game tries very hard to steer you into that, to the point where “Where The Fairy Flies” on the title screen transforms into “Airy Lies”. I checked a walkthrough and determined that the “true” ending only gets me a couple more bosses and one more floor in the bonus dungeon, which really didn’t feel worth my time and effort.
Overall: This was a really solid classic Final Fantasy-style jrpg with really good characterization and an eminently fun, playable system. The second half of the game gets a bit repetitive, but I didn’t think that was enough to detract from the overall quality of the experience.
It’s like they took the DS remake of Final Fantasy 3 and Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light, took out all the crappy parts, and put in a bunch of things that actually worked. The classes unlock fairly quickly, to the point where you can have all but one by the game’s halfway point. (You get classes by defeating characters who hold those classes and taking their “asterisks,” and as far as I can tell none of them can ever be lost forever.) The internet-based features are a cute addition that offers some bonus stores and bosses, but is far from necessary to complete the game. (And can be used even if you don’t personally know anyone else who plays the game.) There’s a great automap system! You have a party of four characters and that party is virtually never split. There are three difficulty levels and you can independently adjust things like the random encounter rate.
The class system is only slightly modified from the FF5/Tactics system: You gain levels in various jobs and gain a new skill at each level. They’re split up into active skills that you can use when equipped with that class’s main skill set, and support skills that you eventually get five points to assign towards (some cost 2-3 points to equip). The vast majority of class combinations are viable, and there are no points where it seems strictly necessary to have someone be a specific class. (Though some are, admittedly, more broken than others.)
The ability to Brave (use BP for extra actions) and Default (defend to gain BP) actually adds a layer of strategy to the game that differentiates it from other job system classic rpgs. Your BP can go negative, for instance, so blitzing through random encounters is dependent on going deeply negative on BP and winning on the first turn.
The characters get a LOT of interaction time, to the point where most events are followed by an optional “party chat” event where they discuss what happened…or something completely random, like how they take their coffee.
SPOILERS:
I’ll admit some irritation that chapters 5-8 are basically retreads of the same boss rush. I get what they were going for (and it’s nice not to have to re-map dungeons or learn a new world map), and they did try to add new things to collect (the variations on the optional asterisk holder fights, the chest key, the genome powers, some altered plot bits), but it still gets tedious.
There are two endings, and I only got the first one by breaking the last crystal in chapter 6—by that point, I had done pretty much everything and wasn’t interested in more rounds of boss retreads. The game tries very hard to steer you into that, to the point where “Where The Fairy Flies” on the title screen transforms into “Airy Lies”. I checked a walkthrough and determined that the “true” ending only gets me a couple more bosses and one more floor in the bonus dungeon, which really didn’t feel worth my time and effort.
Overall: This was a really solid classic Final Fantasy-style jrpg with really good characterization and an eminently fun, playable system. The second half of the game gets a bit repetitive, but I didn’t think that was enough to detract from the overall quality of the experience.
