Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs) have a long and illustrious history. Among the most dominant forces in this genre was arguably Square Enix. As the JRPG fell out of favour for the freedom of Western RPGs like Elder Scrolls, Fallout and Mass Effect, Square Enix has had an incredibly tough time adapting with the times. Recent entries in their long-running Final Fantasy series has tirelessly tired to modernize the JRPG genre to varying degrees of success. Funny enough, the company's recent entry into the JRPG genre, Bravely Default, has captured the hearts and minds of gamers by going back to the basic storytelling and gameplay of early entries in the genre.
Bravely Default's premise is very similar to first few Final Fantasies. You control the four Heroes of Light (Tiz, Agnes, Ringabell and Edea) as they purify four elemental crystals in order to save the world. On their journey to purify the crystals, the Heroes of Light must combat the forces of the Duchy of Eternia and discover the truth behind the Crystal Orthodoxy. On the surface, the story and the protagonists seem to fall under many classic JRPG tropes such as a heroes' hometown getting decimated and one of the heroes conveniently suffering from amnesia. As the story advances, the depth and complexity of the huge cast of characters becomes evident. The conflict between the Crystalism and Anti-Crystalism is not as black-and-white as the game originally makes it out to be. Bravely Default offers a good amount of twists and turns to keep gamers interested. While the story provides motivation to keep playing, it is not the most compelling feature of Bravely Default.
Bravely Default truly shines above other entries in the JRPG genre through its combat and job systems. The combat is similar to other turn-based RPGs as the player and their opponents takes turns attacking, defending and using items. The creative twist in Bravely Default's combat comes from the brave-default system. Default acts like defending as it decreases damage taken, but also increases battle points (BP). You use BP to brave, which allows a character to unleash multiple attacks in a single turn or spend on job-specific attacks and abilities. Braving and defaulting is a risk-reward system that adds an extra layer of strategy to battles. You can try to dispatch enemies in one turn by attacking multiple times, but you risk leaving your party vulnerable to multiple attacks if they survive your onslaught. Managing when to brave or default can be the difference between life or death in Bravely Default. The game's job system has clearly been inspired by the systems implemented in past Final Fantasy games. Although the inspirations from other titles, Bravely Default's job system is much more approachable than other RPGs due to the improvements Square Enix and Silicon Studio has made. Jobs level up independently of the character's actual level so changing jobs does not reset a character's overall level. While characters can only be employed by one job at a time, you can equip the attacks and abilities from another job to use as well. This feature allows for tons of customization as you can have a white mage that can cast black magic on top of healing spells or a knight that can imbue their blade with a spell fencer's sword magic. Going along with the customizable jobs, you can equip any special attribute learned through levelling up jobs or those your friends have learned through the Ablink feature. These two systems are only just one slice of the great suite of features that Bravely Default gives you to play with. From the excellent StreetPass and online features like rebuilding the town of Norende with the people you StreetPass and connect with online or summoning friends to help in battle to the incredible ability to change encounter rates and game difficulty at anytime, Bravely Default offers tons of features to keep players satisfied.
With all the great features and systems Bravely Default has to offer, it has one critical blemish that almost derails the entire experience. What easily could have been an excellent fifty to sixty hour experience receives some completely unnecessary padding that doubles the length of the game. What makes this padding even worse is how tedious it is. Instead of adding some worthwhile quests to elaborate on the story, you repeat the same exact tasks over and over again until the game deems it time to move on to the true final chapter. After the second time repeating this process, the story stops advancing altogether until the true final chapter which makes a good twenty hours of the game feel like an absolute waste of time. You can break from the tedium at anytime to complete the normal ending of Bravely Default, but that does not give much closure to the story of the game. Funny enough, the normal ending of Bravely Default is more satisfying than the true ending of the game because it lacks the drastic difficulty spike the true ending has and it makes more sense than most of the plot points inserted into the true ending with little to no explanation whatsoever. The true ending is not worth the time and effort needed to reach it. In fact, trying to reach the true ending could compromise your enjoyment of Bravely Default as a whole.
Aside from the unnecessary padding, Bravely Default is a great game. There are enough great features packed into this small 3DS cartridge to keep anyone satisfied for days, possibly months on end. The one thing holding Bravely Default back from being the definitive RPG experience on the 3DS is the major misstep taken in the most crucial hours of the game. Padding the game by a few hours is understandable, but by close to fifty plus hours cannot be easily reconciled. While the padding may leave some upset and disappointed, Bravely Default's strengths more than make up for the underwhelming endgame. For those looking for an old-school RPG with some excellent modern twists, Bravely Default is definitely a game worth picking up.
