Bravely Default

[The Shoemaker]

I just recently completed Bravely Default (perhaps a bit behind crowd) and I'd like to know what everyone thinks about it, especially those who love old school RPG's, or even the opinions of those that don't have the game.

I was quite impressed with the game. I don't have an extensive history with RPG's like a lot of you 80's/90's gamers here, most of the old school RPG's I've played I've experienced through the Virtual Console; titles like Breath of Fire II, EarthBound and Final Fantasy III. I enjoyed those games but I don't really have the same tolerance for those games anymore. JRPG's have a lot of nuances, random battles, slow combat, too much text, too much grinding, it can be hard to get into these types of games when we live in such a "now, now, now!" culture.

The thing about Bravely Default is, it takes what we love about old school RPG's but applies such a modern touch to get rid of these nuances it becomes a much more approachable experience. This is mainly due to the game's big hook; the Brave and Default feature. You can brave and act more than once in one turn and wait that many turns afterwards to act again, or default which will let you pass on a turn giving you a defensive boost and letting you act twice the next turn without a penalty. This opens up the way you play, but more than that it helps the game move along a lot faster and gives the player more control over their actions. This feature fixes almost all the problems I have with JRPG's; it makes random encounters go by quicker because you can just have everyone brave and destroy the enemies in one turn, having those encounters go by quicker makes them seem less tedious, and of course this in turn makes grinding a much more enjoyable experience because it's not as time consuming or frustrating.

The customization is the icing on the cake though; you can actually adjust the random encounters by turning them off completely or doubling their frequency. On one hand this helps you when you don't want to battle and you just want to explore and move along, and it also helps you when you want to grind and fight enemies quicker. This was honestly one of my favourite features, it made grinding fun because I was doing it when I wanted to do it, not when the game told me to do it. You can also speed up the battle sections as well by pressing right on the D-pad, just another well appreciated feature.

The game is full of a lot of other great feautres, like linking your game with a friend to share their attributes or building a town using internet and StreetPass friends. It's a basic RPG at its core but with all the best supplementary features. It's because of all of these features that I think this might be the most fun I've had with a JPRG. It really makes it hard to go back and play other JRPG's.

[Kong Wen]

I played and completed the demo and I found it pretty entertaining. I'm a sucker for job systems, and this game is very much a spiritual sequel to Final Fantasy III, particularly the DS remake. I ordered the full game on the strength of the demo, but then I never ended up playing it yet, because I think it came at a bad time (other better games or something).

The customization is the icing on the cake though; you can actually adjust the random encounters by turning them off completely or doubling their frequency. On one hand this helps you when you don't want to battle and you just want to explore and move along, and it also helps you when you want to grind and fight enemies quicker. This was honestly one of my favourite features, it made grinding fun because I was doing it when I wanted to do it, not when the game told me to do it. You can also speed up the battle sections as well by pressing right on the D-pad, just another well appreciated feature.

The Brave system is interesting. Since I only played the demo, I have a limited experience for how fleshed out the system becomes. In my limited experience, it was too unbalanced—there was no real drawback to unloading on enemies. This might change later in the game, for example with more powerful enemies who can punish it, but in the demo it was pretty broken.

But the bonus features you're describing here—adjusting the random encounter rate down to explore and up to grind—are the hallmarks of lazy, terrible game design. If encounters are so poorly implemented that they're seen as boring, or interrupting, or in the way, when they're not intentionally designed to seem like that, then that's bad design. If the player needs to "grind" in order to accomplish a goal, and that grinding has to be mechanically assisted with a gameplay feature, then that's bad design. The proper way to go about tackling the problems you have with RPGs is to plot and balance the game more carefully. Obviously, that's a lot harder, so what you end up with is an options menu with items like "win the game now plz".

If battles and encounters with enemies are a part of the challenge of advancing through the game, then players shouldn't be able to cheat their way out of them. It would be silly for Super Mario Bros. to have a menu option to disable all the enemies or bottomless pits. It would be silly for Super Meat Boy to have an option to disable saws. Those conflicts are at the core of those gameplay experiences. The only difference is Super Mario Bros. and Super Meat Boy are well-designed, whereas random battles have become a mindless genre staple. Random encounters are important in RPGs—they're even built into P&P RPGs from the early days—but they shouldn't just be scattered throughout a game as a means to facilitate gaining XP and increasing stats. They should be part of the conflict. They should be controlled by tight plotting and game design.

[The Shoemaker]

The brave system makes you feel powerful, but I wouldn't say it's overpowered in the actual game. Most of the time if you go all out and brave everyone you'll screw yourself over and be in trouble. Obviously you can't brave your way through a boss either.

I understand what you're saying how the game should just be more enjoyable rather than having an option to alter how the game plays, but I don't think my point was very clear in my last post. I'm not saying I enjoyed the customization because it allowed me to avoid those gameplay aspects, but that it enhanced them. You don't actually need to grind in this game, I think you'd be fine just going along without adjusting anything and moving from location to location. My point is the customization made me like grinding, I actually found it to be a lot of fun even though it wasn't necessary. Like you I'm a sucker for a job system so I spent a lot of time leveling up my jobs because I was excited to see what abilities I would get. I wanted to get into battle faster so I could level up faster so I would increase the encounter rate. Once I was done and ready to move onto my actual mission I would turn down the encounter rate or just turn it right off; I had just spent my time fighting so I didn't need to do it anymore. It's not that I'm disabling the bottomless pits, I'm just chosing have have more bottomless pits over here and less over there. In the end the number of pits is the same I'm just chosing when I want to jump over them.

I will also say that I didn't find the battles themselves boring, I thought they were fun and the brave/default system added a lot to that. When I say there's the option to speed them up, I'm just talking about the battle animations. I like chosing my moves I just don't need to see the sword animation for the 100th time.

[Kiwi the Tortoise]

This thread hasn't been touched in a while, but here it goes anyway..

A while ago I picked up the game. Actually took an offer for 20 bucks and got send the Collectors Edition Looks like they desperatly wanted to get rid of those boxes gathering dust somewhere in a storage room.

My early impressions were that the game, despite some odd mechanics and distracting gimmicks, in itself is largely ok but falls apart later.

I now replayed it and come to following conclusions:

1. Play on easy
The game offers a fair challange on higher difficulties, which can be fun, but also prevents you from freely experimenting with the classes and skills. In a way normal or higher difficulty forces you to have certain combinations to stand a chance, which doesn't work in the games favor.

2. Skipping cutscenes
Somehow, the game is a lot better to play if you skip the cutscenes as you stay focussed on the game.
Don't get me wrong. You want to watch them to have a clue what is going on. But now that I replay it I find myself enjoying the game a lot more as I can freely skip most of this fluff. Note that the voice acting is good, but sometimes the writing can get unbearable.

3. All Brave
Brave gives you up to four moves per turn on each character. Use them right at the start of an encounter to wipe out the enemies in one turn. Makes your life much easier and the encounters less threatening.

4. Storywise..
The plot starts out weak and stays that for most of the time, even the few instances were they try to go for serious thems arent well written or developed. Essentially you play a group of religious fanatics murdering people for their jobs. Thankfully most of the people turn out to be somewhat evil (at least at first). In one case the characters behave like creepy obsessive stalkers and it isn't until right before they kill their victim that he turns out to be evil after all.... how convinient.
After the game makes you repeat the same stuff over and over again (were it falls apart), thankfully, there is still a good final twist that should make the characters feel like douchebags (appropriatly).

On the positive side, the jobs/skill/equipment are fun and everything revolving about it is fun.
Still... it's a weird one. Wish it had less bizarre fluff and more meat.

[The Shoemaker]

Kiwi- In response to what you said in the chat

I actually liked the town building game! It worked great for me where I would go to class and play on the bus, then leave it in sleep for the day, then when I turned it back on I would have a bunch of items waiting for me. I also love streetpass so there's that.

Ablink was pretty broken, maybe it would have been a little less broken if you played when your friends were playing so that no one was too overpowered and it would give you a glimpse of what a class was like. But when you play it months after and your friends have unlocked every skill, it just ruins the entire class system :p

really what I loved about the game was how when I wanted to grind, I could go to an area with the enemies I wanted, slap the encounter rate up to 100% and just go at it. Then when I wanted to progress without being bothered I could drop the encounter rate down to 0% or 25%.

[Kiwi the Tortoise]

Btw did you notice how the optional bosses outside of the main game are like 86% more fun, interesting and unique?
Like Ba'al who has his own background, moves, status effects and even epic soundtrack.


Instead of having more of those, the game makes you fight the same bosses over and over and over and over....

[Jordan]

I liked the red mage boss, but there were some definitely rapey vibes with all of that. I just found it funny how much of a dickhead that guy was.