The Bravely Default review: some brave new features in a default JRPG adventure

For those of you who have been living in a cave, on Mars, with fingers in your ears, Bravely Default is Square Enix’s latest JRPG offering for the 3DS. For gamers outside North America, Bravely Default has been available since December, but those of us cursed with North American consoles were forced to wait until February 7, 2014 to get our hands on it. Curse you, region-locking! But with all that said and done, I did finally get the game.

To be honest I was rather uninterested when I first heard about Bravely Default. The things that stuck out for me where the inclusion of fairies and in-game microtransactions, neither of which appealed to me, as fairies tend be too cute for my dour Scottish tastes and microtransactions within a $40 game seemed downright shameless. However as time went on and the game built up more and more of a following, it was impossible not to get caught up in the excitement. By the time I downloaded the title, I was as giddy as a kid at Christmas.

And I wasn’t disappointed.

The Default

Bravely Default is Square Enix going back to its Squaresoft roots and revisiting the medieval style of Japenese RPGs. You take on the role of four heroes, who go on a quest to save the world from impending doom and meet many obstacles, along the way. It’s certainly not unique, but it’s a tried and tested formula, and one which Square Enix knows how to manipulate. What’s more, the JRPG giant has a few tricks up their sleeve, which make Bravely Default stand out from the crowd.

Does this look familiar?

The brave new battle-system

The most important thing you need to know is that Bravely Default has a new type of battle system that Square Enix obviously agrees with because they named the game after it!

Bravely Default’s battles look like standard turn-based affairs, with one little tweak adding a huge amount of depth to them. In battle you can choose to “brave”, which uses extra turns or you can “default”, which saves these turns.

This means that at the beginning of battle, every character can “brave” three times, meaning that they have a total of four attacks immediately. However using “brave” is a double-edged sword, because it puts you into turn debt. For however many times you opt to “brave” at the beginning of your turn, you have to wait that many turns before you can act again. Default works for both storing turns and as a guard, so if you are attacked whilst defaulting you take less damage.

This sounds really simple, but it actually has a massive impact on the way battles play out. If you try and play Bravely Default like a traditional turn-based JRPG, you will fail. Combat is best approached with strategy in mind, and for the first few hours I found myself struggling with this. However strategy now comes with ease and battles feel like natural, everyday encounters.

If you do end up messing up, you have a get-out-of-jail free card in the form of SP drinks. SP drinks can be gained by either putting your console into sleep mode for eight hours, or by buying them with real cash. They basically give a chosen character four extra turns with no penalty, which can come in very useful. For example, if your party has three character KO’d, you can use your SP drink then use three phoenix downs and one mass cura. It’s like game over screens never existed.