Review: BRAVELY DEFAULT II Shows No Fear In Being Both Familiar And Fresh
Bravely Default II is the kind of JRPG that I expect to see after many years of evolution and innovations in gaming while still holding onto its basic, longform, strategic routes. Players will follow a mostly interesting story with some cool characters and great battle systems. While it continues to innovate on a number of the JRPG formats, it still suffers from the genre tropes that have been there from the inception of these game.
The story for Bravely Default II is entertaining and interesting enough, but never truly challenges or envelops the player. It isn’t because of one thing, in particular, the characters, the plot, and the writing just feels a little shallow and generic. One thing that the game does right is how it presents the story. Most conversations are done with pretty solid voice acting and simplified, scripted cut scenes. It just adds a good bit of flair and entertainment value to the presentation of the story as a whole instead, especially compared to other games and loads of text boxes and reading.
The real part of this game is its optimized combat and job systems. Bravely Default II is pretty much identical to the first game’s systems, but I’ll break them down here and explain why it’s so good. The combat is mostly your classical JRPG, turn-based battles with random encounters. However, instead of choosing an attack, skill, or magic every time, players can “default“ their characters which put them in a defensive position and allows them to stack up turns for later combos. But also, players can “brave” characters up to four times and have their character perform four actions in a row and then skip their next three turns. This juggling between defensive and offensive moves makes the grinding battles go by really quickly and keep the turn-based battling feel fresh and far more involved.
The other major mechanic in this game is the job system. We have seen various job systems around since the very early days of JRPGs, but Bravely Default’s flexibility and growth of these jobs make it stand out. Again, it is more or less identical to its predecessor, but I’ll break it down here. Each character will have a main job and a sub job, being able to access both sets of abilities, attacks, magic, and techniques. Players can customize and create robust teams they have a wide variety of abilities and flexibilities in battle. As a character uses a certain job, they will level up a form of mastery in each of those jobs which unlock new skills, magic attacks, and passive abilities.de variety of sections of the game. The system is both fairly complicated and easily accessible. Players can switch jobs, abilities, passives, and equipment very fast, making these systems feel fluid and fun to use.
There are a variety of other things that are really good in the game. There is the exploration mode that gives players a small variety of loot while the Nintendo Switch is literally in sleep mode. There’s the aesthetic of the game which is cute and simple while still being beautiful and detailed in its environments and character models. It’s also entertaining to see weaker enemies runaway and stronger enemies run at you in the wild. The music, in general, is fantastic! I could list more, but it’s sufficient to say that the game has a lot of finely crafted details.
As great as all these things are, Bravely Default II still has some big issues. Grinding levels in a JRPG are pretty standard and it is well accepted. But I often found myself blowing through all of the random enemy encounters with ease but then approaching bosses and being wildly underpowered. It was almost like clockwork, I would make it through all of the story components and side quests leading up to a boss, but then get to a boss and get demolished. I would then figure out about what level I would have to be at in order to even have a fair fight and grind A LOT to get there. A little bit more tuning and respect for the player’s time could’ve gone a long way. As awesome as the combat and job systems are, they can get very complex very quickly and there is a very little tutorial on how things work or how players should optimize their time and builds. The discovery and trial and error do add some extra levels of depth, but I wish that these complex systems were explained a bit better, especially for new players.
Overall this game has a lot of wonderfully designed aspects that rejuvenate and revitalize the JRPG system (like it did in previous installments). But it doesn’t do anything really different or better than its predecessor and it still suffers from some of the core problems of the genre. It’s a really great game with complex and deep gameplay mechanics, just be sure to have some patience with the grind.
