1427: RPG With a Stupid Name

Nearly forgot to write something today. But here I am at 2 in the morning having just finished a lengthy session of Bravely Default in bed.

(Yes, as promised, I finished Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory earlier, and it was awesome. But I’ll save further discussion of that for another day.)

Bravely Default, meanwhile, has been a very pleasant surprise so far — though at least part of this is due to the fact that, as I mentioned before, I knew very little about this game going into it.

Bravely Default, then, is a new Final Fantasy game. I don’t just mean that in the “it’s a bit like Final Fantasy” sense, I mean that it is Final Fantasy — right down to the item names, abilities and Job system. Quite why it doesn’t carry the Final Fantasy name is anyone’s guess — perhaps Square Enix wants to continue to take the Final Fantasy brand in a different direction, while Bravely Default will pick up where the more old-school installments in the series left off? I can’t say I’d object to that situation all that much; I like the new Final Fantasies for sure, but playing Bravely Default has reminded me somewhat that the older entries had their charms, too.

It’s closest in execution to Final Fantasy V, in that you have a four-character party, each of whom has a character level and a Job level for each of the available Jobs in the game. Both level up independently; levelling up your character improves your base stats, while levelling up your Job gives you access to better abilities and passive skills. You can also make use of the abilities or passive skills from Jobs you’re not currently equipped with, but there are limitations and the stat changes that come with a Job change may make some abilities impractical — while it’s cool to have a heavily-armoured knight that can fling black magic spells around, for example, he’ll never be as good at magic damage as a dedicated black mage.

There’s some interesting modern systems at play amid the traditional RPG mechanics, too. The game’s use of the 3DS StreetPass system allows you to summon other players’ characters and make use of them, and to “link” with your 3DS friends to borrow their abilities — particularly useful if they’ve levelled up a Job you haven’t and unlocked access to a useful special ability.

Less thrilling is the “Bravely Second” system, whereby you can tap the Start button in mid-battle to interrupt whatever’s going on and sneak in an extra turn, with actions in this bonus turn costing “SP” rather than the usual “BP” to perform. You can only “carry” up to three SP at once, and they’re acquired at the rate of one every eight hours you have the 3DS asleep and running Bravely Default — or, alternatively, you can pay for them. Ugh. Fortunately, so far I haven’t seen any need to make use of this system; it mostly seems to be a “panic button” system whereby you can get yourself out of a sticky situation should the worst happen. If you play well, you shouldn’t need to use it at all, I hope.

There’s also a strange real-time building minigame where you reconstruct a village, and the more players you StreetPassed with, the more workers you have to devote to projects and, consequently, the quicker they can complete their work. Working on the village unlocks shops, special abilities and new items; it’s a neat use of real-time mechanics without it feeling like a means of extracting money from you, because there’s mercifully no monetisation option to speed things along. What it does mean is that you can make some sort of “progress” on the game even if you don’t have a lot of time to play; simply flip open your 3DS, start your workers on a project, then put it to sleep and come back later — when you do have time to play the game proper, you’ll have some handy extras.

Mostly, though, the emphasis is on a beautifully presented old-school role-playing game with some excellent mechanics, some stunning music and a pretty cool augmented reality opening cutscene. I’m looking forward to playing more, and I anticipate it stealing a significant proportion of my time from hereon.

Lucky I finished Neptunia Victory, then, huh?