On the face of it, Bravely Default looks like it will be just my sort of thing. A Squeenix J-RPG with classic turn-based combat, a fantasy epic storyline and cute adolescent characters. It was highly lauded when it came out, with many saying how it felt like a nostalgic return to the kind of game they used to play a decade ago. Perhaps this was my problem - for me, this wasn't a return to something half-forgotten. I only recently finished Tales of the Abyss and not so long before that I was was playing Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, which while based on the Tactics side of the franchise felt far more classic and refreshingly old-fashioned than this. I play J-RPGs all the time, including old-fashioned ones, and beside the best of them, Bravely Default really isn't one of the better iterations.
As has been widely reported, Bravely Default is in essence part of the Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, having begun there conceptually before diverging, but retaining much of the crystal lore as well as the familiar job classes. Rather than Ivalice, Bravely Default takes place in the world of 'Luxendarc'. If that name makes you cringe, be prepared for a whole lot of similar awful names for characters and places. Good guys are called 'Goodman', characters who live to accompany others get names like Vincent S. Court, and of course there's Airy the Fairy. One character's name is a painful anagram of 'Magic Knight', and some names had to be changed from the Japanese because a guy who looks like a rat called 'Ratz' was apparently too far...and, well, it sounds to me like they've totally changed the name of conniving desert country monarch Khamer VIII because his original name was a bit too uncomfortably close to 'Mohammad'.
The only thing I unreservedly liked about Bravely Default was its music, which was consistently brilliant and often had me nodding along during dungeon runs. Revo is amazing and this is up there with his Attack on Titan intros, and if Linked Horizon toured Europe with their concert I’d definitely go, especially if Marty Friedman from Megadeth was there to reprise his little bit as he did in the Japanlive. I only looked the soundtrack up after I saw his name on the credits – and I totally adore the live version, orchestra, choirs and pop singers included! Other than that - well, I have to say that it was a bust.
The story is not good. The makers learned nothing from the second season of Suzumiya Haruhi I suppose: doing the same thing over and over and over is not even remotely fun. From Pan's Labyrinth to Bioshock, I have loved stories that play with free will and make you stop to question why the impressionable good guys go along with what they're told to do, but this one does it incredibly awkwardly and the ways it contrives to have the heroes not find out what their enemies are really trying to do really stretch credibility (especially over repeated meetings with the same people), and it becomes ridiculous when the game has made it incredibly obvious who the antagonist actually is - long before it starts spelling it out on the goddamn title screen - yet tries to have us believe our characters carry on their path. I’m only grateful that in only concerning a limited, if large, number of worlds, it avoids infinite world paradoxes – though presumably only one Lester of the many on the myriad different worlds had to show up, so there are plenty of others still left.
The main characters don't appeal to me the way the best RPG characters do. I quite liked Agnes, with her 'Unacceptable!' catchphrase and utter lack of worldly guile, but she was extremely bland. Edea's character was totally ruined by the way they had to keep forcing her into battles before she actually stopped to talk to her former allies. Ringabell was kind of meant to be an annoying bastard, but unlike, say, Luke in Tales of the Abyss, I didn't grow to like him more once the angst got heaped on. He carried on being irritating all the time, and the way the game made it far too obvious who his alter-ego is (they even have him conspicuously leave the scene at just the right time, even though that's not necessary plot-wise, only a massive signpost to the 'twist') even without the hilarious original name 'Anazelle', which for most of the game I heard as 'Annabelle'.
Then there was Tiz. Ah, Tiz, exactly the kind of character I usually totally fall for. Young, naive, good-hearted Tiz, made to suffer such terrible losses, awkward around his more knowing peers and diffident in matters of the heart, he ought to be adorable. But I really, really cannot get over his scumbag behaviour over his brother. He loses his brother in the intro, which ought to be incredibly harrowing. He then doesn't even mention it for a good few hours of gameplay. Okay, he's in denial. When he begins to finally open up about it, he fixes upon a surrogate of sorts, a little boy called Egil forced to work in the mines. He develops a bond with Egil because of how much he's reminded of his brother Til. He cares for Egil on their adventure, finds him a new family, goes to check on him often and it helps him deal with the loss of his brother.
Then when he goes to what seems like an alternate world, he doesn't even think about or mention Egil once. There is no forced child labour in this world's mines, and Tiz doesn't think 'Hmm, so where has poor Egil who had nobody until we arrived ended up?' He doesn't mention him once - and nor does the game, right up until the secret credits, in which we discover that what we thought was Tiz was just screwing with the kid anyway and has done things that will really mess with him. But mostly he’s just not even brought up. It's bizarre. And then when another world that offers everything the main characters want comes along and Til is alive, Tiz doesn't actually seem particularly bothered and never raises the possibility of fulfilling the quest as he sees it and then going back to Til, or taking this Til along, or any of the other myriad possibilities to stay with his brother. This bond that's supposed to form the core of the character is just completely unconvincing and underdeveloped, and it destroys the character for me entirely – which isn’t even mentioning the unforeseen twist at the very end which was clearly only thought of once Bravely Second was in development and means effectively we know nothing about the real Tiz at all.
Then there is the lauded combat. I can say without hesitation that it is the worst combat system of any RPG I have ever played, though possibly less annoying than the underwater speeds of the first Wild ARMs thanks to the fast-forward mode. The set-up is a conventional four-person turn-based RPG set-up...and then the add-ons to make it unique totally break it. It's not a bad idea - you can 'Default' to defend but also save up turns, up to a maximum of four at once that can be unleashed if you defended enough, or you can 'brave', spending those turns early but then being unable to move until you have repaid your debt. Good concept, right?
Except that the vast majority of the game - on hard mode, mind - all I did against the very limited varieties of baddies was have everyone brave and then attack. Sixteen attacks in the first turn killed virtually everything I faced, especially once you start getting powerful abilities like the monk's natural talent or the ranger's precision/hawkeye combo. The times you can get problems with this are with enemies that auto-counter physical attacks, but there are various measures to get past that - rampart or utsusemi skills - before you even start thinking about using MP.
Of course, to counter this bosses get absurdly tough, and the way the designers tackle that is to make some skills completely, utterly broken. The vast majority of enemies can be destroyed without a single chance to hit you back, including most of the optional 'Nemesis' baddies (most of them awesome in design terms, by the way), just by having four fast characters constantly doing the high jump skill with Hasten World ensuring they can do it without interruption. This even works on the hidden boss, apparently, though it being single-target meant it would take forever so I went for the similarly broken combo of a spiritmaster nullifying all damage while a dark knight deals out ridiculous damage and also heals with every dark nebula - a performer meanwhile topping up everyone's brave points. There was no strategy to this game, no reward to beating its toughest bosses - only broken combinations and hoping the semi-random approach to agility stats didn't screw you over or a lapse in concentration make you input the wrong thing and die. The Valkyrie trick also works on the final boss, which at least means you don’t have to look at the game at all, and see the bizarre image of your chin projected onto the sky of the multiverse. Please, Squeenix, let’s leave the front-facing camera out of our serious games.
On the plus side, the voice acting is pretty solid. I was dumb and didn't see the Japanese-language option (because it's not in the sound menu, which I feel is silly), so was a good couple of hours in before making the switch, and felt the English performers were strong. The enemies were a bit hammy, but that was also true of the Japanese version, and if anything, I prefer the English Ringabel, who doesn't sound like he's way too old for his model and differentiates between his two roles better - even if that means putting on a really, really smug voice for his primary reading. Though I prefer the more ingenuous performances of the three others in the original, the English actors do good jobs, and the Airy in both versions is the right balance of cute and annoying, and fun to hear begging desperately for aid.
I gave a pretty hefty amount of time to this game, seeing both endings, beating all optional bosses including the full council battle and the amusing surprise boss at the end of Dimension's Hasp, even when consecutive worlds had them doing exactly the same thing. There are parts I will certainly remember fondly, mostly little things like Edea's gluttony and how in one world, Victoriachairs a silly but adorable girl-power group. But I will certainly never replay the game, and much as I liked the ‘secret movie’ and its excellent use of the internal gyro, I will approach the sequel with caution.
