Double post!
I'm upgrading my recommendation of Bravely Default from "mild amusement" to "this is actually pretty good".
I've played about... 20 hours or so and am about 75% through the story so I've experienced a lot more than just the initial impressions I had before.
1. Difficulty is lovely. It's rare to find a JPRG that has such challenging bosses. I suspect it's only this way because I keep turning off random encounters (which is another great feature) and only grinding to keep my level about where it should be. And the fact that I'm playing on hard, though you can change the difficulty at any time, another great feature. You'll be spending a lot of time mixing and matching gear with abilities and jobs just to fight every new boss. You might encounter one that likes to replicate itself and change its form at will. You might encounter one that likes to spam instakill spells at you. You might encounter one that exclusively targets the weakest members of your party. Etc.
You need to adapt to it and it's quite a lot harder than it seems. Can get frustrating, but if all else fails you can grind for 10 extra levels and just roflstomp the boss with huge numbers.
2. The story is actually pretty interesting. You kinda have to go out of your way to go through the extra sub quests as well as read some very lengthy lore books / journal entries to see the bigger picture, but it's quite compelling. It starts of as very generic but I'm thinking that was their intention as about midway through you start seeing some more mature plot points appearing. Of course, this isn't some super bestseller novel material, but it's still pretty good.
The game also really likes teasing you with twists that you think are super obvious, but always lacking that one crucial element for you to seal your confirmation. For example, it'll straight up tell you that some major plot events will happen, but it always leaves out important details so you're not actually sure how it's going to happen. Or in some cases you will know that X and Y are the same thing, but it doesn't tell you how the fuck X and Y are the same. You start to think that they have to be the same as they never appear in the same shot together, and every time X leaves, Y enters. Then they throw a curveball and show both of them appearing in the same room and you just go "what the fuuuuck...". It's quite ingenious.
3. I really like the job system. It's really fun discovering the overpowered combos. It all just ties into how the game doesn't try to hold your hand or force you to play a certain way. You can change every single thing about it, from your encounter rate to your difficulty to whatever the hell you want. It has the microtransactions too but I barely ever use it. You don't need to and it impacts nothing.
I also really love how they introduce every new class. Instead of leaving you to wonder what a new class even does like old FF games, here you get the super awesome difficult boss fight to defeat. That boss fight will show you how insane that class can be, as it uses only the skills that class can use. After that you see lots of optional information about the class and some demonstration videos. The game has a really extensive library that keeps track of every single thing and you can check it at any time.
It also makes me feel like I'm playing a party of soul vampires. They consume the lives of the enemies they defeat.
---------------
All in all, I really hope future Square Enix games have the same quality as this. Bravely Default starts off pretty generic and slow, but it ramps up and gets very good once you get a few more jobs to play with and the world is opened up a bit more. The characters are very well done and there's tonnes of well written dialogue, especially the non-main quest stuff. I suspect they intentionally put all the better and more complicated information harder to find so that it doesn't overwhelm people who don't want any plot. Seriously, they are literally essays you can find in the game explaining the more elusive concepts. I remember opening a new journal entry in game and seeing it had TWO HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN PAGES.
Lastly, it has a hilarious failed marriage proposal in the middle of a bossfight at the end of the world.
tl;dr: Bravely Default is really good.
Author
Topic: 3DS games? (Read 5925 times)