Bravely Default: Good story, unique engine, mashed like Play-Doh instead of sculpted to fine art.

I have a confession.

I played Bravely Second before Bravely Default, because Bravely Second was consistently $20 compared to the over $100 that Bravely Default always was. I actually enjoyed Second quite a bit even though it seemed like fans hated it; but I never understood why until much later.

Now having played both of these plus Alliance Alive and Legend of Legacy (all of these games clearly share inspiration) and the Bravely Default 2 demo, I can safely say that they were onto something with Bravely Default, but in their quest to be unique and different, ended up throwing a bunch of mechanics and needless padding into the game that they didn't need. It's twice as long as it should be.

What I Liked

Stuck on the 3DS (it REALLY needs a Switch remaster by now), the game is easily underappreciated, but now that I can play it on a full OLED...wow. This is a GORGEOUS game, and it's a shame it's stuck on a terrible platform.

This is IN-GAME FOOTAGE. Every town is beautiful when it zooms out, upscaled.

Character development was excellent at least for the main players.

The engine used was unique, and still stands out in a crowd. It doesn't take too long to master and there's a lot of strategic variety early on.

Some of the villains are very well fleshed out, more than you would expect.

What I Didn't Like

Default suffers from the same type of bizarre unbalanced difficulty seen in the others. At one point you'll feel like the challenge is just right, then run into an enemy that can one-shot you. But more frequent are the HP sponges that aren't really "hard", they're just tedious. It's so bad there is/was a culture of people out there finding various ways to "break" the game and cakewalk these enemies.

At some point the developers figured they would tell the story in a very unique way; if you've ever watched Star Trek: The Next Generation (Episode: "Parallels"), the second half of the game essentially a carbon copy; the only difference is that the ship is on water rather than space, the crystals aren't dilithium and...well...the 'antagonist' is actually a being rather than an anomaly.

This second half is good for story, but for gameplay it's arguably some of the worst in RPG history. Good idea, not good execution.

Requiring StreetPass and internet access is never a good thing in any game. It's fine as a completely optional (as in, no items or help in the game, just something for fun) thing. Not when you basically miss out on significantly helpful items if you don't use these features.

I felt they could have done a better job with some of the...well, jobs. Ones like the Summoner are completely useless and others like Red Mage are (or eventually become) way overpowered when combined with others like Thief or Templar. Some jobs are just so broken that one can run through every boss in the game in short order once you've built them up - and it's a shame to have so many jobs that simply can't keep up.

I didn't dislike Bravely Default; as I said, it was an intriguing idea, and Default II appears to be continuing this pattern. It just seemed like they were trying something new, and though rough, Second came around and significantly refined a lot of what I took issue with (but not all, as I'll cover later.)