Bravely Default was a game that revelled in genre tropes. The result of Square Enix doing what it does best, this 2012 turn-based RPG for 3DS was the kind of thing you’d expect if you grew up on a diet of early Final Fantasy. Such is the overlap that I had to go and look up whether this was ever planned as a Final Fantasy title — it turns out it was, as a sequel to DS game The Four Warriors of Light.
The game was met with mostly positive reviews at the time, with the odd complaint about pacing and tropes mostly being drowned out by praise for the second half of the game. As huge JPRG fans here at TSA, that made us cautiously optimistic about Bravely Default: Flying Fairy HD Remaster, with all the new and modern touches things this would bring.
Bravely Default’s title is a nod to the game’s innovative combat system. On top of the standard turn-based affair that older gamers will remember from Final Fantasy in the 1990s, we have what is effectively a turn gambling feature. During battle you have a given number of battle points (BP), which you spend to take turns. Defaulting (defending) gives you an additional BP, while Braving lets you use multiple BP to stack consecutive back-to-back turns. The gamble is that you can immediately take four turns per player on your first turn, which effectively gives the enemy three turns to try to kill you while you recover your BP.
Sadly, this quickly gets stale as battle devolves into just figuring out how best to stack your 16 actions in the shortest time possible. The game gets significantly better once you drop the encounter rate to 50%. There’s also a Special Attack (limit break) system, but because it resets every time you upgrade your weapons, and they trigger on some really stupid things like using 10 items, the first time I triggered it was 20 hours into the game. This feature is practically worthless.
Putting the unique aspects of the game aside, everything that follows is your standard fare: four would-be adventurers (plus a fairy called Airy) go on a walk to pray to some fancy crystals so the world doesn’t end. You know the story — you’ve played it a bunch of times already. All the usual tropes are there too: there’s a bunch of different jobs you can take on to change your stats (and outfits); the baddies are so bad that even the baddies are looking at each other like ‘are you for real?’; the healer of your party is the most obviously sheltered person in the world; and there’s a lecherous pervy character who only ever talks about women and sex. It’s basically every conversation with him and he’s in every goddamn conversation. Oh, and to try and make him more likeable, he’s an amnesiac whose name is… Ringabel. Truly, this game is aimed exclusively at 14-year-old boys.
For a game from the 2010s, the characters are remarkably one-dimensional. The plot is basic and it really drags for the first 20 or so hours. It picks up later on, but do you really want to spend half a working week to get to something passable? Probably not.
This brings us to the remastered bits. Flying Fairy HD Remaster brings a couple of new features that improve on the original experience, though the biggest part of any remaster is going to be with the graphical improvements. The watercolour backdrops are gorgeous, the towns look great (if comically small), and the spruced up Chibi-like character models are decent. The music is awesome, too.
However, there’s also plenty more that Square Enix could have done. There are some issues with the brim of the stupidly large Black Mage hat occasionally clipping through things, and annoying issues like mouths being thin black circles on an otherwise skin-coloured head (think Lego games if the mouths weren’t coloured in), but these aren’t the most glaring shortcomings. The biggest issue is that enemies didn’t get the same care and attention as the main cast. Sure, in general they’re keeping with the low-poly aesthetic of what the 3DS could handle and some do look good, but there’s plenty that just seem to have sharper polygons than before. Great, now we get to look at crisper, sharper triangles? This could have gone further, while retaining the same visual tone and feel.
Since features like adjusting the random battle rate and speeding up combat were already in the original game, what else has this remaster been able to do? Well, there’s a new UI, but that’s par for the course when moving from a dual screen to a single screen. There’s also reworked online features in that you can send AI versions of your characters to your friends, but this only works if you have friends who play the game. Lastly, there’s the addition of two new minigames that have virtually no impact on the game.
Both use the new Joy-Con 2 controllers in mouse mode. The first is a rhythm game that is, to be blunt, the worst rhythm game I’ve played in a very long time. You simply move your controllers to make a laser trap that collects most of the notes, and then occasionally click on the note if the game is feeling frisky — or click with both controllers if it’s a particularly difficult move. It’s pretty rubbish.
The second minigame is a fair bit more involved — it’s the direct inversion of the first game. This sees you fly your ship through a predetermined course, using the controllers to steer the ship along the X and Y axes, while also adjusting the AC, using a fly swatter, fixing broken fuses and playing with the radio, all at your utterly useless companions’ request. This makes for a nice tech demo, but it gets pretty stale very quickly — especially as you have to go back to playing the game to unlock more courses.