This review will contain spoilers. Fuck Airy. That is all.
Bravely Default is one of the better RPG’s to grace the 3DS with its presence. The 3DS hasn’t had a lot of good games released for it. This one will hopefully be the precursor to better ones.
I can feel people’s Ninten-boners raging now, so calm them.
One of the interesting features of the game was the demo that was released before it. Mind you, it only allowed you to go to level 20 but it was enough of a taste to wet my mouth and make me cry and whine until I got the full game. (It was a good demo. Don’t judge.)
This game took up what little free time I thought I had and then some other time I didn’t know I had. Seriously, I didn’t think that I would be putting in sixty plus hours into this game and that was just one side of the story! (Celestia damn!) (I blame my compulsive need for 100% completion, so there.)
I bought Pokemon Y a few months ago, and it has been collecting dust since I got BV. After all the time I put into BV, I really didn’t know or care what a Pokemon was. I just really wanted to kill that summoner bitch…. and that witch bitch… and that fairy bitch. Ok, I just wanted them all to die. (You will have that same rage, trust me)
Bravely Default mixed things up by having your set four characters to play as but with the addition of having different jobs that they could have which meant different skills they could use in combat. Also, the costumes for the jobs stay with them outside of battle. Too bad the issues they have can’t be solved in combat.
The game starts by wrenching your heart out watching Tiz, the main character, live his happy and wonderful life until whatever god that rules this land decides that he has had too much happiness and fucks all his shit up. His family dies including his only brother. And his whole village that he lived in with all his friends and sheep gets sucked up by a huge chasm. What a great opener. You then must team with three other adventures with their own set of crap ranging from daddy issues to amnesia.
There is Tiz, who is the “leader” of the group and the virgin. He basically moves things along with the story and decides everything from ‘we are going to this crystal’ to ‘we are going to save this little kid because he reminds me of my little brother I couldn’t save and I have to do whatever it takes to save all the little kids though no one kid will amount to my little brother’. Yeah, shit like that.
There is Agnes (whiny bitch), the holy one who has to sacrifice herself for the sake of the world. (You will want to punch her, I did.) I can see the play on words here. ‘Agnes’, the sacrificial angel/holy one.
Ha.
You can instantly tell what word she chose as her focus for “Hooked On Vestal Phonics”; Unacceptable. Everything is unacceptable. She is like Oprah giving those words away under people’s seats.
Ringabel is the smooth talking charmer of the group. Oh, and he has amnesia. (Get it? Ring-a-bel? Because of his memory? Lol.) At almost every town I went into a town, he had talked the women up or something along those lines. There is never talk of sex, just hypnotizing, poison, and other terrible deeds. If I had my choice, I would be Ringabel. Minus the whole, ‘not knowing who I am’ I would be a boss with the ladies. I would have a journal that could tell the future and the amazing excuse of amnesia anytime something bad happened. Yes, please.
Next comes Edea, the daughter of the templar, who I immediately thought was a lesbian until her and Ringabel get into more fights than a married couple. I want to say that she has an anger and eating problem but none really get flushed out so I am just going to say she’s nuts but the best one with a sword. If Ringabel wasn’t there, I am sure there would be ‘special’ scenes involving Agnes and Edea since throughout the whole game she seems to hate everything with a penis. (Except Tiz. He isn’t using his.) There is even a scene when they get to some flower town and talk up how lovely Agnes would be in a ‘Bravo Bikini’ (Not kidding.)
The fighting style is different as well. There are two forms of action: Brave and Default. Brave gives you more chance to attack with 4 being the max. (You will abuse the fuck out of being able to attack four times in one turn)
Default is essentially going into defense mode, minimizing the damage you take, and the only way to naturally get more brave points.. There is another mechanic called Bravely Second that you can only get when your 3DS has had the game playing in sleep mode for eight hours with a max of three that you can hold at once. Using that gives you another chance to attack but with time stopped so take special care of those! The wonderful thing about that is that if you are like me, you had this game constantly running and was always getting SP (Bravely Second points. Don’t ask me how ‘SP’ equals ‘Bravely Second’. It just does.) The bad thing was if you were like me, you did occasionally switch games which meant that BV wasn’t in sleep mode because you weren’t playing it and forgot about it because you memory sucks and then you got pissed when you left you 3DS sitting there and expect for the 99 hour bridge in your village to be finished and it wasn’t. Fuck.
With the Streetpass system, you can send moves you use in battle to other players and also add people to your village that you have to restore. Each village helps take a few minutes to build up the different sections of your village. It was great if you played the demo because you were able to bring those village (Up to 20) with you. This is an amazing mechanic for people to actually walk around and meet others (Kinda). I, for one, am not exactly opposed to walking and exercise and the like but if I don’t have to move get what I want then guess what I don’t do.
Most of my time was actually spent just walking around one area when I found that one person who had a move that did 9999 damage and hoping/cursing when he/she did/didn’t update their move. Every time you start the game, it likes to give you this little hints and tips to help you out. Since the only way for you to get the moves back is for the person to send the move again, you just spend a lot of time waiting and waiting and waiting then saying fuck that and grinding your way to victory.
The game even does that cute little “True” and “Alternate” ending crap. I am calling this crap because the level of “fuck this” rose to some new heights with the differences of the endings. Seriously, there was rage. Words were screamed. I was kind of embarrassed afterwards. Fuck that fairy. There is one important scene that raises a few questions for me about literally everything that I was doing in the game. Ringabel asks “What happens if we over-charge the crystal?” or something like that. In the game, you are told by fairy bitch (That is her new name) to never do that because it would end the world. After restoring all the crystals for the third time, I was wondering about it and decided to do it.
Holy. Shit. Things got real hard, real fast.
Good news, the game rewards you with the Alternate ending and instantly starts you on the “Finale” chapter. Bad news, depending on where and when you did this, you could be severely under level and never know it, just bending over for the butthurt. Good luck!
In the end, Bravely Default is an amazing game to add to your 3DS collection. It gives you more than your money worth for just a simple game and more than a day’s worth of action getting both endings.