Bravely Default

Bravely Default is a classic JRPG with an interesting story and great gameplay, but that far overstays its welcome. The game aims to revitalize a classic story by problematizing the protagonist’s beliefs and discussing the nature of her conflicts. In addition, it is also concerned with the limitations of the genre, trying to offer solutions that enable a less frustrating experience. The biggest problem of the game, however, is extremely serious: its narrative goes off the rails halfway through the story, forcing the player to repeat missions for countless hours without any significant return.

Bravely Default begins with a great tragedy in the world of Luxendarc. After a terrible earthquake, the small village of Norende disappears from the map, giving way to a gigantic crater. Agnès Oblige, the vestal of the wind, travels to the kingdom of Caldisla to investigate whether the destruction of Norende has anything to do with the sudden and mysterious corruption that struck the Crystal of the Wind, an artifact of mystical powers that she swore to protect. In Caldisla, she meets young Tiz Arrior, the only survivor of the earthquake, and they both come together to investigate the events.

The story – divided into eight chapters – revolves around four main characters. Agnès Oblige is the protagonist, but she soon finds an enemy swordsman, Edea Lee, who decides to change sides in the battle, stunned to realize that the vestal is not the vile and merciless creature her father described. Agnès also meets a mysterious boy suffering from amnesia, aptly named Ringabel, who has a book with the apparent ability to predict future events. Finally, we have Tiz, a young shepherd who lost his little brother in the earthquake.

Agnès is part of a Church known as Crystal Orthodoxy, which venerates the power of the four Crystals spread throughout Luxendarc: there is the Crystal of Wind, Water, Fire, and Earth. Its creed preaches that the Crystals should be worshipped by the people, who should always pray that the crystals may continue to bestow their magical gifts upon the world. Opposing the Orthodoxy is the doctrine of Anti-Crystalism of the Kingdom of Eternia, which holds that Crystals have medicinal properties and so should be used by humanity to bring prosperity and health to all – a heresy in the vision of Orthodoxy, which considers them untouchable. This ideological dispute is the foundation of Bravely Default‘s story and is responsible for making a motif typical of the genre – four heroes protecting four magical crystals – more interesting.

The antagonists of the game are the knights of Eternia, who went on a crusade to capture the four vestals of Luxendarc and thus end the main influence of the Orthodoxy over the people. As she travels through Luxendarc to save the Crystals from the mysterious corruption, Agnès is constantly persecuted and confronted by the knights, who question the validity of her beliefs and the result of her actions. Bravely Default’s writers, Naotaka Hayashi and Keiichi Ajiro, succeed in making the antagonists present a much more logical and reasoned discourse than the protagonist herself, making their dynamic more complex.

While the knights explain that any institutionalized religion is run by people with financial and political interests and, consequently, is susceptible to corruption and prejudice, Agnès simply repeats the dogmas of her religion and defends the truthfulness of her teachings by claiming that they aim for peace and unity among people. The writers are able to make the player realize the fragility of the priestess’ arguments, who often even displays some difficulty in accepting some events simply because she doesn’t believe in them, denying reality when it’s uncomfortable. It is not a coincidence that her most repeated line is “Unacceptable!“: Agnès, despite being a gentle and idealistic person, is marked by her intolerance. The narrative, then, deconstructs this worldview by forcing the priestess to accept the reality that surrounds her.

Her friend, Edea Lee, goes through a similar narrative arc. She is the daughter of Agnès’ main enemy, the Grand Marshal of Eternia. Edea starts fighting her former allies because she abhors their methods – despite their reasonable speech, the knights of Eternia don’t hesitate to burn villages and murder people to achieve their goals – and sees in Agnès the symbol of her revolt: the young female swordsman discovers that her father had lied about the priestess’ personality and joins her to confront him directly.

The problem is that Edea has a binary worldview. There is only black and white, good and evil. Either Agnès is completely right and her father completely wrong or the other way around. Her difficult temperament – her most memorable line is a grunt (“Mgrgr!”) – prevents any possibility of dialogue with her enemies.

Bravely Default, therefore, contains one of those typical stories that would have all their conflicts solved if the characters simply stopped killing each other and sat down to talk for a moment about their disagreements.

It’s interesting to see that the female characters are the most complex and important in the game. Ringabel, in spite of his tragic past, is the group’s comic relief, never missing an opportunity to court Edea – or any other woman who passes in front of him. Ringabel is essentially a romantic who, more than anything, worships the female body. When he meets an enemy knight who objectifies women, Ringabel’s hatred and disgust for the man are enormous. Because of his constant jokes and romanticism, it would be easy for one of them to end up denoting a lack of respect for women and contradicting the character’s personality. The writers, then, make the jokes be less about the women themselves and more about the tireless attitude of the boy.

And Tiz is just the moral compass of the group: when the characters tell him that he never changes, they do it with affection and even a certain relief in their voice. Tiz only gains prominence in the third chapter of the game when he meets a boy who reminds him of his little brother and, for the first time, goes against Agnès.

Throughout its first four chapters, Bravely Default‘s narrative is impeccable. The characters are developed and their beliefs, gradually deconstructed. The game’s director, Kensuke Nakahara, even manages to work miracles with the game’s limited presentation. In Bravely Default, only part of the characters’ models appears during conversation and cutscenes, under a static background, moving on top of text boxes. However, even with these limitations, Nakahara manages to develop the dynamic between the characters. The best example is, without a doubt, the Grand Marshal: at the beginning of the game, whenever the character appears in a scene, the Grand Marshal has his back to the screen. By hiding his face, the director makes the character appear much more threatening to the player. However, his position on the screen also reflects the distance between the character and his daughter: he’s turning his back to the player and to Edea. Consequently, the moment when the Marshal finally turns to face the screen is brilliant: (spoilers) the moment when he finally shows his face is the one when he accepts to talk to his daughter: by revealing his paternal side, the threatening one-dimensional villain façade falls to the ground as he becomes a more rounded character.

Being a classic JRPG, Bravely Default is built around several elements of the genre, such as turn-based battles and random encounters. Nevertheless, the team at Silicon Studios has tried to present some new mechanics and to solve the common problems of old systems, albeit not very elegantly.

The turn-based combat, like classic Final Fantasy, has the main characters on the right corner of the screen and the enemies on the left. This is where the mechanic that names the game comes in: the skills “Brave” and “Default”. During the fight, each character’s action spends one action point, which is recovered at the beginning of each turn, allowing them to always act. However, by selecting the Brave skill – which can be done up to three times during one turn – the player spends an additional action point to perform one more action. That is, if we wish, we can make a character act four times in the same turn, but we will have to wait for three turns to use that character again, leaving them vulnerable. The Default skill serves as a counterpoint: by selecting it, we make a character stay in a defensive position – taking less damage – to gain an extra action point in the next turn.

The implications of this mechanic are numerous, since it is available to enemies as well. First of all, there is a strong risk/reward dynamic: on the one hand, the player can launch sixteen attacks at once with all four characters, but on the other, this strategy can easily turn against them if the blows do not have the desired effect, allowing opponents – if there are four, and can be as many as six – to attack sixteen times as well. Besides that, the use of additional actions is essential for the creation of combos.

The Brave/Default mechanic, after all, is also incorporated into the common abilities available to the characters. There are certain attacks, for example, that spend several action points, while others get more powerful for each action point stocked – stimulating the use of Default –, and there are those that give points to other characters and those that take them away from opponents. In other words, the main mechanic is sufficiently integrated with other elements of combat to make it complex and strategic.

The job system, in turn, is fundamental for building the complexity of the game. The professions have their specific attributes and abilities, serving as the characters’ class: they can be a knight and have their defense increased, a singer and specialize in changing characters’ status, a thief who steals items from the enemy, and so on. The available jobs, although in great quantity, are the typical classes present in other JRPGs: there is the white mage, the black mage, the red mage, the thief, the paladin, among others. However, each one has its own focus: the paladin is focused on accumulating action points, for example, while the alchemist is specialized in using items.

The most important point of this system is the fact that the player can combine jobs – which can be changed at any time outside of combat – for devastating effect, since each one of them has its own unique set of passive and active abilities, which remain available when changing jobs after enough experience is gained. This allows the player to build mechanically unique characters that are not limited to their current profession. It’s possible, for example, to have four completely different thieves: one with healing magic, one with offensive magic, the third with status skills, and the last one with increased defense.

It is also commendable the effort to make use of almost all the features of the 3DS. The game starts by using AR Cards to immediately immerse the player, who will probably see Agnès being sucked into a vortex on the floor of their own room. The handheld’s motion sensor is used in a special cutscene unlocked at the end of the game, in which the player assumes the perspective of a mysterious character trapped in a water chamber: they can only look sideways, which is done by moving the 3DS.

The Streetpass, meanwhile, is used in a more substantial way and is linked to the story: Tiz intends to rebuild Norende, so with each Streetpass received the player gets additional villagers to live there and help with the constructions – if ten people build a gun shop in eight real hours, twenty will build in four. And the shops built this way provide unique equipment and abilities, encouraging the use of this system. To speed up the process, the player can also leave the handheld closed in Sleep Mode. In addition to that, connecting the game to the internet makes the player acquire villagers from other people around the world, and get the special attacks the people on their Friends List have uploaded, which can be used in battles.

The developers have also tried to get around the usual problems of the genre, albeit with relative success. The first concerns the presence of random encounters, which are usually hated for their inconvenience: the player doesn’t choose with whom they will battle and even when they will do so, which generates several situations in which the fights end up disrupting the experience. If the player, for example, is after a specific monster, they won’t be able to go confront it directly, having to walk in circles instead, facing several battles until they find the one they are looking for – which could take a while if they have bad luck. Random battles also strongly discourage exploration, since we have to consider if what we’ll find at the end of a corridor will be worth the eighteen battles that will take place on the way. It’s one thing to counterbalance risk and reward in exploration by putting the treasure behind a bigger challenge; it’s quite another to waste the player’s time by making us face several battles for some treasure, which may very well be worse than the characters’ current equipment – something that will always occur in Bravely Default if the player abuses the street/spotpass system.

The second problem is related to the infamous grinding process – the act of repeatedly eliminating hundreds of the same monsters just to gain the experience points that should have been distributed normally during the course of the adventure. Present in most JRPGs, grinding is an annoying process, whose main issue is the gigantic waste of time it represents: to level up two times, for example, a player may need to kill two hundred monsters, and they may need ten additional levels to fight the next boss under acceptable conditions.

Bravely Default’s developers tried to solve these problems, but the solutions they came upon, although functional, don’t leave the experience fluid for the player. In Bravely Default we can establish the pace of random encounters. In other words, we can choose at any time whether random encounters will occur with little or more frequency or even not at all. This leaves in our hands the task to decide at which moment of the game we should fight more battles.  Concerning grinding, we can leave the game on automatic, making the characters repeat the last actions chosen by the player, and we can also control the speed of the battles to lose less time.

All these solutions certainly solve the typical problems of the genre, but are still problematic in the sense that they treat the symptoms rather than curing the disease. In other words, although the random battles and grinding don’t bother so much now, they remain there: if we wasted time with them before, now we waste time by making them disappear. Instead of balancing the elements so that there is no grinding and removing random encounters in favor of other systems – or doing like Pokémon, with its tall grass, and finding an organic solution to the mechanics without abandoning it – the developers throw everything in menus and let the player do all the work.

Another problem present in Bravely Default systems is the absence of turn order during combat. With the constant status variation occurring on both sides of the battlefield it becomes very complicated for the player to maintain control over when each character will act, leading to incidents that could have been easily avoided if the player knew beforehand the exact moment when each character would attack.

But those problems would not have been serious enough to eclipse the positive elements of the game if the second half of Bravely Default had not been so disastrous, testing the patience of any human being.

When we reach chapter five, we suddenly discover that we have to redo all main missions again, one by one. Then, in chapter six, we discover that we have to complete them all once more. In chapter seven, possibly acting now on autopilot, we will have to redo everything again. And if the player is blessed with an endless source of patience, they will finally arrive at chapter eight to realize that yes, the director of Bravely Default, wants them to redo everything one more time…and in the same chapter there is one more opportunity to face all the enemies together for one last time.

It’s simply appalling that such a terrible, terrible idea – to make the player repeat their actions thousands of times – has been approved during the development process. The game even tries in the last two chapters to bring a different premise to some battles, encouraging different tactics, but at this point, the player has probably already found a strategy to make the characters virtually invincible, and will stick to it.

But if we can find something new in the peculiarity of some challenges, when it comes to the story, boredom reigns. In this second half, information that could have been offered in a single scene – such as the resolution of Ringabel’s amnesia – is extended for what appears to be an eternity. It is as if the game’s writers had suddenly resigned, and in their place were hired the people who wrote The Hobbit movie trilogy: everything is stretched as far as possible, creating a tiresome narrative.

Finally, Bravely Default offers two possible endings, but chooses as cannon precisely the one that makes less sense, since in it the characters simply ignore everything they’ve discovered in the last forty hours – the repeated battles must have messed with their heads – acting with surprise when characters they knew were acting very, very shady suddenly betray them.

It’s very likely that of all the people who decide to play Bravely Default, few will actually bother to finish it. Its final half is simply insufferable, almost ruining all the good things that came before. All that remains is to hope that the Silicon Studios team doesn’t commit the same sin in the inevitable sequence.

January 01, 2020.

Review originally published in Portuguese on February 22, 2016.