I’ve re-written this review so many times I feel like if I don’t just stick with what I’m writing now you’ll end up reading my Bravely Default 2 review after Bravely Default 3 is out. Every few days I put down Bravely Default 2 swearing to not pick it back up. I get frustrated. The long, often difficult boss fights are fairly annoying considering how easy the trash battles are, much of the story at the beginning is incredibly boring and not exciting whatsoever, and I find a lot of the minor technical issues really add up to killing my enjoyment of the game. Yet, I take that small break, pick up the game, and I find myself losing a few hours to a game I swore I was done with. It’s tough to read Bravely Default 2 because, despite a lot of the pieces given to us by the developers being just okay, I find myself having a very good time with the game.
Bravely Default 2
Developer: Claytechworks Co. Ltd.
Price: $60
Platforms: Nintendo Switch (Reviewed)
MonsterVine was provided with a Switch code for review
Bravely Default 1 is one of my favorite RPGs on the Nintendo 3DS. There’s a lot to love about the game even though it’s widely criticized for how the ending plays out. Though most of the game is very appealing, Bravely Default 1’s ending has you repeating a lot of steps without providing much new dialogue or story beats, giving the ending a bad reputation. Bravely Default 2 is similar to Bravely Default 1 in many ways, giving you a fairly robust job system, a very enjoyable combat system, and unfortunately a fairly milquetoast set of characters. Yes, boring characters are precisely what made the game so easy to put down.
It’s hard not to compare Bravely Default 2 with its predecessor. Primarily because most of the pieces are so similar. One piece that’s dissimilar and not for the better is our Bravely Default 2 protagonists. While you’d think the names Seth, Gloria, Elvis, and Adelle would make for an interesting combo, you’d be wrong. Seth and Gloria, while technically being the centerpiece of the story for much of the game, have almost no personality. Likewise, Elvis’s only personality trait is that he goes with the flow and is Scottish. Adelle remains the only interesting character in the game and even she takes a while to get going. Our party lacks any characterization for much of the game and acts so well-intentioned I would not have been surprised if one of them whacked me over the head with the ‘I’m the good protagonist’ stick. It’s boring, it’s mind-numbing, and it makes for boring characters.
The worldbuilding could be lumped in with the characters as well. Backgrounds, cities, and many beautiful sections of Bravely Default 2 have some incredible art. Almost everything static is gorgeous and really shows how much better the Bravely series looks on an actual television and not a 3.5 inch screen. Unfortunately what they do with that art is fairly uninteresting. The very first town your full party visits is a desert town that’s flooding followed by the unnatural magic town overrun with nature. It’s almost trite how little effort was put into making these towns unique or interesting. It’s not until you visit Rimedhal that things even start to get interesting and don’t use light irony as a crutch. In fact, the whole game gets far more interesting. At this point I had invested quite a bit of time into Bravely Default 2. I knew I wouldn’t give up on playing it but it surprised me how long it took to get the story moving forward in a satisfying way.
Along with feeling satisfied with how the story was progressing, I had also collected quite a few jobs at this point, feeling like it was fun to mix and match main-jobs and sub-jobs with each other to make lively archetypes with my characters. The list was getting long but I wasn’t noticing any new jobs. In fact, while playing through Bravely Default 2 I was noticing that it was actually missing jobs from Bravely Second. Some of the names had been changed, Knight is now Vanguard, Valkyrie is now Dragoon, but the missing ones were noticeable. That said, the job list was front-loaded fairly well and had me playing with job structures as early as Chapter 1, instead of there being a slow drip of jobs they were tossing them to me left and right. More importantly, the job system and combat system remained enjoyable. Changing jobs remains as easy as a menu button and each job’s specialty often shared some surprises with just how either dreadful or overpowered they felt. Entering a dungeon was met with limited fear as to how easily I could set up my party on the fly and suffer very little from that decision.
That fear would be overcome with annoyance upon entering the dungeon when realizing there was no longer an area map. No longer a series of paths split up allowing you to see where each one goes, Bravely Default 2 has a series of large open spaces that make dungeon crawling a chore. Occasionally you’ll get a dungeon that’s fairly linear with a few branching paths but not having a broad enough view of where you’re going or where you should be heading gave me some headaches and would artificially increase the time I’d be stuck in a dungeon just trying to remember where I went and where I should go. Fortunately, this led me down many of the wrong paths to find a treasure chest with a nice new piece of gear.
Unfortunately, this was often pointless as my characters had already reached their maximum weight and this new item weighed more than they could allow. The weight system is a bizarre entry into the Bravely series, only allowing your character to equip an amount of gear based on their level and job. I’m not crazy about the weight system. I don’t look at equipment as something that needs to be measured with every new entry, especially when armor and weapons are as common as they are in JRPGs. With fewer options, I’m able to determine which piece of armor is better for which character, but when you throw 20+ hats at me, I start to lose interest and just want to know which one is better. This is another point of frustration that evaporated when I realized the weight system has some hilarious job uses. The Shieldmaster, for example, has several abilities that play with the weight system either by increasing damage dealt based on weight or having speed reduced by weight flipped to increase your speed. Suddenly this system that at first seemed ill-conceived was now getting my brain jogging.
Finally, we land on the technical issues Bravely Default 2 has. Primarily, the performance is just not what I’ve come to expect in 2021. This series has primarily been on handheld consoles less powerful than my cell phone and its first foray into the console space has extremely long and far too many loading screens, hitching on entering the menu and party chat, and some frame drops during in-engine cutscenes. It is an absolute bummer to see how poorly this game performs considering its single-platform target and the previous games being on much worse hardware. The character art is another thing that suffers in this series entry. Doll-faced muppet-like creatures that have varying body types and remain in this strange half-chibi half-not state. I am not a fan of the character art and even less a fan of the odd sexualization of some of the characters and their job costumes. I never thought I’d have to say this but we don’t need large breasts on chibis.
The Final Word
If you can get past the first few chapters on combat/jobs alone, Bravely Default 2 picks up and runs as a fairly enjoyable experience. Not bested by its predecessor, Bravely Default 2 offers a fairly inoffensive experience with some interesting gameplay tweaks and a very enjoyable job system. While it took a while, I came around on not completely hating Bravely Default 2. In fact, I’d even go as far as to say I like Bravely Default 2. I’m eagerly anticipating a Bravely Default 3 in hopes that Bravely Default 2 is merely a bump in a much larger and better road ahead.
MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
