Bravely Default - Or, Square Enix still loves stupid names

I thought that we were getting Flying Fairy?

shanks wrote:

I thought that we were getting Flying Fairy?

What we're getting is called Flying Fairy, but the game itself is For The Sequel rebadged.

flying fairy was it in japan then it got a enhanced release called for the sequel which will be branded in the west as flying fairy.

Er alrighty then, think I'll just get it on my other 3DS

Actually you don't have to. If you have a bigger SD card (about £15 at GAME for 16gbs) and a PC that's able to transfer encrypted software, then you might be able to do so. Once you move all the licenses over to the 3DS, make sure you move the folders (4 of them) from one ID to the emptier one (1 folder), and then you should be able to retain the purchases without using a system transfer.

I've now been playing for just over one and a half hours so I thought I'd message some of my initial impressions of the game for those yet to decide or just interested in hearing them.  So, the game stats with a lovely cg cutscene showing off who are clearly going to be our main party eventually.  This was a lovely looking thing, and did a great job making me eager to dive in to the game.  Most of what was seen in the cutscene was the sort of stuff that will be explained later in the game rather than right now.  

So after that the game starts following the fallout of the introduction of Tiz, our lead.  An unassuming sheep farmer kid who we see his whole town swalled by a chasm in the opening scene, he wakes up to find he is the sole survivor of this crisis and is in the city inn being looked after.  Shortly after that he has a meeting with the king and trots off to see what happened for himself.  It's at this point upon leaving the first chance to enter battle is experienced, all up it wasn't overly long before we get to see some actual gameplay.  As far as the battle goes, very typical turn based jrpg stuff, albiet with a twist.  The Bravely Default system for which the game is named after.  On the typical battle menu you will find two options, Bravely and Default.  To cut this to its simplist explanation Bravely when used gives you an extra turn (up to four at once), Default is in place of the defence option and besides serving as it it also allows you to effectively store turns (up to three all up) that can be used later with Bravely.

This has two implications with the way you fight, you can either go in guns blazing and try to wipe the foes out in one turn with Bravely, or you can store turns with Default.  Or you can just use your turn how you normally would.  Now this may sound cheap, but it actually isn't, for two reasons.  The first one being that if you take a loan out with bravely you won't be able to move for as many turns as you used, which as you can imagine can backfire very badly.  The second one being this ability from what I just saw isn't exclusive to the player, the enemy can use it as well.  They don't seem to go in all guns blazing either, but they do use it.  So unless the enemy is so weak you can kill them before they move you are probably not wise to get in to debt with bravely.  

Next we have the job systems.  If you've played any game with jobs or classes before odds are you know the drill here, mages can use spells depending on their type while various other jobs have special things about them.  All jobs have passive abilities and abilities you use which you will gain as you level up the job.  Jobs also have customization however, as you can use abilities and equip them while using another job, within various limits.  

Overall I'm liking the battle system so far, it's everything I liked about the final fantasy 3 ds game system only far more refined (from the looks of my first impressions) and open to player choice.  So back to what was happening.  So Tiz makes his way through what I suppose would count as a mini dungeon before reaching to top of the area and seeing the chasm that was once his home.  There he encounters a girl (of course) that is clearly going to be one of the major components of the story.  It isn't long before her role is revealed as the "Wind Vestal", and she is acompanied by a fairy who I assume has something to do with the game's old subtitle of Fairy Flying.  It isn't long after meeting the girl Agnès that they come under attack by an airship that is after her, captained by a muscle bound guy and a evil white mage.  Anyway things go from there and that's as much of the story I'll be detailing.  

Obviously nothing original about that stuff but the presentation is very charming and entertaining.  So far where I'm up to we've just had the third member of the party join, one Ringabel.  For once the girl isn't the amnesiac, no, it's him.  As for my thoughts on the presentation in general.  Originally the voice acting in the trailers sounded awful, and it's certainly not going to win the award of best dub I've heard but it's actually decent enough when in actual context.  They just chose some really dorky quotes to plonk as sound bites in the trailers.  The graphics for some will no doubt be off putting, but I think it lends to the old school charm this game is going for with its thing being intentionally channeling old school turn based jrpgs.  And the music is much the same minus the potentially off putting part, composed by Revo who some will know as the composer of the opening themes for Attack on Titan.  The themes do a good job fitting in with the games flavour, with the more extravagant rocky side of things he's capable of coming out in the boss themes.  

So, my overall impressions of the game after about one a half hours are that it's going to be a fun romp.  More of a true Final Fantasy than any of the actual Final Fantasy games from the last decade or so (it has so much in common they even use the spell and item names), this won't be winning any fans from people who don't like the genre, but if you like old school turn based jrpgs and wish you had one that was modern and well polished then this is the game for you!  And that concludes my first impressions of Bravely Default, I probably waffled on far too much with them but there ya go.

Yup, that is quite TL;DR stuff there! Shorter paragraphs might have helped. But it's good to know that the voice-acting isn't quite as awful as time goes on, although I still think that I might settle for the Japanese voices.

I'm still a bit worried that this game doesn't really have an identity, hope I'm proved wrong. Asides from its rock-solid traditional Final Fantasy-style gameplay and painting/canvas like artstyle, it didn't feel awfully fresh to me. But maybe that's the point. Hm...

It's definitely the point from what I've played thus far.  I like it myself, the style has become so underused it actually feels fresh to me.  

Some other tidbits, the game has a Tales of like party chat for after certain events in the story, it's already helping establish the characters as characters.  The other tidbit is how tutorials are by and large left up to the player, where they can complete tutorial quests.  These are a set of quests the game slowly gives you where by doing something in the game you get a reward, to give an example one tells you about invisible items and tells you where to find one (in the inn in the first town to be exact) and you get an item for completing the quest.

I have logged about 11 hours into the tutorial now and every character has fully levelled up 5 jobs each. I overlooked the village restoration thing, but the otheer day I got two Stretpass hits, so with 3 characters, I have been leaving it in Sleep Mode and fixing the town up.

I almost bought the game as well, at $57 locally, but I could only justify a single game at the time and went with Tales of Xillia. Still, I am pretty desperate to get this game, so I doubt I will wait much longer.

Another thing I'm loving about this game is how it tells you where to go to trigger events.  So often in these games you have to stumble around looking for the next story trigger, and side content being even worse because you seemingly have to talk to everything to find the triggers.  Not this game, the location of the trigger is highlighted by an orange sign on the map, and by the looks of things side content is highlighted with blue markers.  Right now I'm on some side content which looks like it'll unlock the thief class, also it's looking like a good number of the jobs will be unlocked through side content.

Just seen someone post on Twitter, how long is this game. Someone then posted the avg time from HLTB which is 70+hrs, I don't know when I ever get around to finish this game then being so long. Which isn't a bad thing but got things like Link Between World's to play.

I'm starting to see why it's taking people that long to finish this game.  The side quests for new jobs are often as long as proper story segments so if people are picking up jobs when they can it likely adds a lot to the game time.  And speaking of those side quests the summoner one was really messed up, actually the flower country arc in general has been pretty messed up in what has been happening in the side stories.

I've just started this! Impressed by the intro cinematic: I didn't end up hating the characters as much as I'd thought I would. Apart from Tiz, natch.

After it's done, though, the game almost seems abashed: it hurries you into gameplay with the minimum of further story. Who is this king? Who's fighting what now? That's for the game to know, and you to be left in the dark about!

One question: where's the option menu? I want to try out the Japanese voices, but can't find the settings.

They made the options hard to find, the game options are in... Actually I'll just finish that thought after checking.  I need to reassign some villagers in the rebuilding effort by now anyway.

Right, you can find the game options in the Tactics menu in the main status menu (they couldn't have just called it the options menu... why?)  There you can configure a bunch of things including spoken language, and other things like random encounter rates and whether you gain exp and job points.  Also a little tip, make sure to update once every 24 hours as they give you a few villagers for free over the internet once a day as well as nemesis bosses.  It really helps in rebuilding the village.

Under tactics? Of course, it's so obvious! Why didn't I see that before?  Thanks Athrun. I don't think I've hit the village re-building yet, but when I get there I'll bear your advice in mind.

Looks like I'm going to have to get hold of this... I've heard reports that it's had a small print-run and will soon be rarer than.

Ah well I should stop putting it off and get it myself then

Agnès isn't quite as much of a milksop as I'd thought, which is a small bonus. On the other hand, Airey's voice is giving me earache.

Even some of the Japanese voices are bad? What hope do my ears have?

Ah, sorry - I am in fact still on English voices, although it is betraying myself. She's quite interesting in Japanese, and Agnès does not have the milksop voice I expected.

Small print run, I hear people say. GNNH! I do want this game, but not right now...

Chapter two was one of the most bizarre things I've seen in a video game. It wasn't blatant about its themes, but christ its themes were dark and twisted. And the note it ended on was just, well, I won't say any more.

I've done my usual gender-subversion thing, with Tiz being my White Mage and Agnès being a Monk.

Athrun, any chance you could MP me your friend code?  I need more village people!

Just opened the box set which I got for Christmas.
Not actually played the game yet, but I'm loving the soundtrack CD.

Apparently, this game is getting increasingly hard to find in Europe, and Nintendo is not issuing any more copies. In other words, this could be one of those incredibly rare 3DS games soon.