Bravely Default: Flying Fairy, ridiculous title aside, is clearly meant as another callback to 16-bit Final Fantasy, copying in particular from Final Fantasy V. The overall storyline and job system is there, with each of the 24 jobs having around 20 abilities to unlock, as well as the ability to mix-and-match class abilities and skill sets to create hybrids. Aside from that, the new additions are mostly ancillary - there's a little achievement system built in for filling out the bestiary, equipment lists and hitting certain story points, and various other little quests to complete that serve as compliments to the tutorial messages by awarding items when you successfully put their lessons into action. A major subplot/sidequest is rebuilding a town by assigning workers, which takes numerous hours of real time; finding "Passing Souls" (avatars of other players on your friends list) will give you more workers to utilize to speed up the process, and the town in question can be accessed at any time outside of battle via the menu to take advantage of its services. The only notable addition to combat is the titular Brave and Default system - Default is your Defend but also stores up an extra turn for you to use, and Brave spends those extra turns, as well as letting you spend later turns in advance, allowing you to get up to four consecutive actions per character in a round. All this sounds interesting, but they forgot to make any of it particularly fun or engaging. Combat is super slow and drawn-out, with even normal enemies being walls of HP that take numerous turns to whittle down, and boss battles reach into almost unbearable territory. Theincredibly high encounter rate manages to make relatively short dungeons unbearable, and even the option to turn it down to half doesn't help much. Fights all give a pittance of Experience and Job Points so it takes absolutely forever to power up and learn skills, and that's just ridiculous; modern RPGs, even ones that are allegedly "homages" to what came before, should be more briskly paced and less grindy than games from the '90s, not worse in both categories. It never feels like you're building an effective team to counter a bosses' patterns or exploit their weaknesses, just trying to outlast them through sheer endurance regardless of your party build. Also not helping the engagement factor are the extremely basic and derivative story, clichéd characters and ultra campy dialog that feels like it came straight out of an episode of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. It's just baffling why they got big-name VAs like Erin Fitzgerald, Bryce Papenbrook and Spike Spencer aboard just so they could waste their talents with terrible directing and such an insipid script. I only spent about five or six hours with Bravely Default; in that time, I saw nothing to convince me that this isn't just another forgettable, mediocre game coasting on nostalgia for an earlier era, which makes little sense considering the game it's clearly aping from was readily available on numerous platforms even at the time it was originally released on the 3DS. Really, just grab a copy of the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters instead of settling for this lame knockoff; Final Fantasy V is a timeless game that still holds up beautifully, whereas this game (and franchise) will only get a few more fleeting months of attention before everyone remembers why it sucks and it's cast into bargain bins to be forgotten once again. And hey, you get five more games for your buck with the Pixel Remaster collection; four of them are even good!
Developer: Silicon Studio/Cattle Call
Publisher: Square Enix
Released: 2012,2025
Platform: 3DS, Switch 2