Bravely Default

With a fascinating story that, unfortunately, far overstays its welcome, Bravely Default is a good JRPG that tries to revitalize its classic genre by offering a less frustrating experience.

The game opens with a great tragedy in the world of Luxendarc. After a terrible earthquake, the small village of Norende disappears from the map, giving way to a gigantic crater. So, Agnès Oblige, the vestal of the wind, travels to the kingdom of Caldisla to investigate whether the destruction of Norende has anything to do with the sudden and mysterious corruption of the Wind Crystal, an artifact of mystical powers she’s sworn to protect. In Caldisla, she meets the young Tiz Arrior, the only survivor of the earthquake, and they both unite to investigate the events.

Bravely Default has four main characters. Agnès Oblige is the protagonist, but she soon finds an enemy swordsman, Edea Lee, who decides to change sides in the battle after realizing that the vestal is not the vile and merciless creature her father had described. Agnès also meets a mysterious man with amnesia, aptly named Ringabel (because his condition rings a… you get it), who has a book that can predict future events. Finally, we have Tiz, that young shepherd who survived the earthquake, but lost his little brother in the event.

Agnès is part of a Church known as Crystal Orthodoxy, which venerates the power of the four Crystals spread throughout Luxendarc: there is the Crystal of Wind, Water, Fire, and Earth. Its creed preaches that the Crystals should be worshipped by the people, who should always pray that they continue to bestow their magical gifts upon the world. Opposing the Orthodoxy is the doctrine of Anti-Crystalism of the Kingdom of Eternia, which holds that Crystals have medicinal properties and so should be used by humanity to bring prosperity and health to all – a heresy in the vision of the Orthodoxy, which considers them sacred objects and so untouchable. This ideological dispute is the core of Bravely Default‘s story, being responsible for making a typical motif of the genre – four heroes protecting four magical crystals – more interesting.

The antagonists, for example, are the knights of Eternia, who went on a crusade to capture the four vestals and thus end the main influence of the Orthodoxy over the people. As she travels through the land to save the Crystals from the mysterious corruption, Agnès is constantly persecuted and confronted by these knights, who question the validity of her beliefs and the result of her actions. And they seem much more reasonable than the wind vestal.

While the knights try to explain that any institutionalized religion is run by people with financial and political interests and, consequently, is susceptible to corruption and personal prejudices, Agnès simply repeats the dogmas she has internalized throughtout her whole life, defending that if a religion’s goal is noble (like peace and understanding) than everything else related to it is obviously alright. So, we can easily see – one hopes – the fragility of the vestal’s arguments.

Agnés often shows difficulty accepting that some events happened simply because they contradict her worldview, being the type of person who denies reality when it’s uncomfortable. It’s not a coincidence that her most repeated line is “Unacceptable!“: Agnès, despite being a gentle and idealistic person, is marked by her intolerance. The story, then, deconstructs her worldview – brick by brick – by constantly forcing the vestal to accept the reality around her.

Her friend, Edea Lee, goes through a similar narrative arc. She is the daughter of Agnès’ main enemy, the Grand Marshal of Eternia. Edea starts fighting her former allies and her own family because she abhors their methods – despite their reasonable speeches, the knights of Eternia don’t hesitate to burn villages and murder people to achieve their goals – and sees in Agnès the symbol of her revolt: the young female swordsman discovers that her father had lied about the priestess’ personality and joins her to confront him directly.

The problem is that Edea has a binary worldview. There is only black and white, good and evil. Either Agnès is completely right and her father totally wrong, or the other way around. And her difficult temperament cuts any chance of dialogue with her adversaries: it’s not a coincidence that her most memorable line is an angry grunt (“Mgrgr!“).

In Bravely Default, only part of the characters’ models appear during conversation and cutscenes, under a static background, moving on top of text boxes. However, even within these limitations, the game manages to visually develop the dynamic between its characters. The best example is, without a doubt, the Grand Marshal: whenever he appears in a scene, he has his back to the screen. This hides his face, which makes him appear much more threatening to us, but his position also reflects the distance between him and Edea: he’s turning his back to the player and to his daughter. Consequently, the moment when the Marshal finally turns to face the screen becomes climactic and full of meaning.

People who like to complain that things are “woke” (hahaha) will certainly love to know that the female characters are the most complex and important in the game. Ringabel, in spite of his tragic past, for example, is the group’s comic relief, never missing an opportunity to court Edea – or any other woman who passes in front of him. Ringabel is essentially a romantic who, more than anything, and unlike the previously mentioned people, worships the female body. When he meets an enemy knight who objectifies women, then, Ringabel’s hatred and disgust for the man couldn’t be bigger.

Finally, Tiz is just the group’s moral compass: when the party tells him that he never changes, they do it with affection and even a certain relief in their voice. Tiz only gains prominence in the third chapter of the game when he meets a boy who reminds him of his little brother and, for the first time, goes against Agnès.

Being a classic JRPG, Bravely Default is built around turn-based battles and random encounters. The turn-based combat, like the old Final Fantasy games, has the main characters on the right corner of the screen and the enemies on the left. This is where Bravely Default’s main mechanics come in: the skills “Brave” and… “Default”.

During battles, each action spends one action point, which is recovered at the beginning of each turn, allowing our characters to always perform one action in normal conditions. However, by selecting the Brave skill, we can spend additional action points to perform more actions – this can be done up to three times during one turn. That is, if we wish, we can make a character act four times in the same turn, but we will have to wait for three turns to use that character again, leaving them vulnerable for a long time. The Default skill serves as a counterpoint: by selecting it, we make a character stay in a defensive position – taking less damage – to gain an extra action point in the next turn.

The implications are innumerable, especially since this system is available to our enemies as well. First, there is the basic strong risk/reward dynamic: on the one hand, we can launch sixteen attacks at once with all four characters, but on the other, if our enemies don’t fall, our whole party will probably be slaughtered before having the chance to act again.

Then we have the fact that certain abilities can spend several action points, while others get more powerful for each action point in stock – stimulating the use of Default. There are abilities that hand points to other characters and those that take them away from opponents.

Then we add a complex job system to the mix. Jobs come with particular attributes and abilities, serving as the characters’ class: Ringabel can be a knight and have his defense increased, or a singer and specialize in changing other characters’ status, or maybe a thief who steals items from the enemy, and so on. The available jobs, although in great quantity, are the typical classes present in other JRPGs: we have the white mage, the black mage, the red mage, the thief, the paladin, among others. However, each one has its own focus: the paladin is focused on accumulating action points, for example, while the alchemist specializes in using items.

But what makes this system complex is the fact that we can combine jobs – which can be changed at any time outside of combat – for devastating effect, since each one of them has its own unique set of active and passive abilities, which remain available when changing jobs if we have gotten enough XP. This allows us to build mechanically unique characters that are not limited to their current profession. It’s possible, for example, to have four completely different thieves: one with healing magic, one with offensive magic, the third specialized in status effects, and the last one built as a tank capable of sustaining a lot of damage.

Bravely Default also tries to get around the common problems of the genre to mitigate frustration. Let’s take random encounters, for example, which are usually hated for their inconvenience: if the player is after a specific monster, they won’t be able to go confront it directly, having to walk in circles for a while instead, facing several battles until they find the monster they are looking for – which can take too long if they, just like me, have incredible bad luck. Random battles also discourage exploration, since we have to consider if what we’ll find at the end of a corridor will be worth the eighteen battles that will take place on the way, especially since the treasure may very well be worse than our characters’ current equipment.

In Bravely Default, however, we can fully control the pace of random encounters, being able to set their frequency and even abolish them altogether. This leaves in our hands the task of deciding when we should be fighting more battles and when they’ll just get in the way and disrupt the experience. We can leave the game on “automatic” too, making our party repeat our last performed actions, and also increase the speed of battles, which turns even grinding into a much less time-consuming activity.

The only big problem with Bravely Default’s combat system is the absence of a turn order. The battlefield can often turn hectic in boss battles, which leads to terrible incidents, as we can’t know beforehand the exact moment each character will perform their actions.

But the biggest issue with Bravely Default – by a margin so large it could pass as the file size of a modern Call of Duty – is its second half, which tests the patience of any human being.

Throughout its first four chapters, Bravely Default‘s narrative is impeccable. The main characters are well-developed, with their long-held beliefs being gradually put in check, and the plot moves at a good pace, constantly moving things along while presenting new locales and people for us to meet. But then we reach chapter five and discover that with a fascinating story that, unfortunately, far overstays its welcome, Bravely Default is a good JRPG that tries to revitalize its classic genre by offering a less frustrating experience.

In chapter five, we must redo everything again from the beginning. All main missions, one by one. Fight each boss battle once more. Go through each dungeon again (thank God for the ability to turn off random encounters, or otherwise I would be in a sanatorium instead of writing this review). Then, in chapter six, we discover that the game opens with a great tragedy in the world of Luxendarc. After a terrible earthquake, the small village of Norende disappears from the map, giving way to a gigantic crater. So, Agnès Oblige, the vestal of the wind, travels to the kingdom of Caldisla to investigate whether the destruction of Norende has anything to do with the sudden and mysterious corruption of the Wind Crystal, an artifact of mystical powers she’s sworn to protect.

Yes, in chapter six, we must we must redo everything again from the beginning. All main missions, one by one. Fight each boss battle once more. Go through each dungeon again (thank God for the ability to turn off random encounters, or otherwise I would be in a sanatorium instead of writing this review).

You already get the point and certainly expect that I’ll be civilized when speaking about what happens in chapter seven and refrain from just repeating previous paragraphs. Part of you – that small optimist part our world didn’t manage to smother yet – even hopes that chapter seven was bold enough to show events instead of just making us redo everything again. Unfortunately, you’re acting just like Agnés, who often shows difficulty accepting that some events happened simply because they contradict her worldview, being the type of person who denies reality when it’s uncomfortable. It’s not a coincidence that her most repeated line is “Unacceptable!“: Agnès, despite being a gentle and idealistic person, is marked by her intolerance. The story, then, deconstructs her worldview – brick by brick – by constantly forcing the vestal to accept the reality around her.

And I’m forcing you to suffer like I did, with the caveat that you – cheater! – can skip lines and paragraphs and I couldn’t skip those same boss fights, those same dungeons, those same main missions. And guess what? We still have chapter eight, where we must redo everything again, we must redo everything again, everything again from the beginning. All main missions, one by one. All main missions. Fight each boss battle, each boss battle, fight each boss battle once more. Go through each dungeon again, again (thank God for the ability to AAAAAAAAA).

Any person blessed with an endless source of patience can either become a monk or beat Bravely Default. And chapter eight even gives us one more opportunity to face all previous bosses together for one last time – which I considered a very funny gag at the time, but I was already losing my mind, so your mileage may vary.

It’s true that the game tries in its last two chapters to bring a different premise to some battles, encouraging different tactics to shake things up a little. But at this point, any player will have more than given up already, still being there just due to the sheer force of inertia – just like my ex.

Finally (I can hear your sigh of relief), Bravely Default offers two possible endings, but chooses as canon precisely the one that makes less sense. At this point, why not, right? In the “best ending”, the main characters simply ignore everything they’ve discovered in the last forty hours – they probably also lost their minds after so many repeated battles – and act totally surprised when a certain someone they knew was acting in a very, very shady manner… betrays them. The icing on the cake? If we go for the “bad ending”, the game ends in chapter four. Hahahahaha (crying).

It’s very likely that of all the people who decide to play Bravely Default, very few will actually bother to finish it. Its final half is… well, insufferable, basically ruining all the excellent things that came before (like the soundtrack, which is brilliant, just banger after banger), and making us ask the age-old question that has haunted humanity since the dawn of time: why?

May 27, 2025.

Review originally published in Portuguese on February 22, 2016.