GOTY 2021 mini-reviews: Bravely Default II (Patreon)

(brandon:) Woooo, continuing my series of small reviews of games I had to play for competitions, here's one I never talked about on the show! I didn't want to dignify it with a conversation ha ha. Maybe if I played it more than 2 hours something would've opened up but this was sure not for me.

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Bravely Default II is a pretty standard JRPG with the main "twist" being the "default system" in battles. Essentially, when you "default" you guard and store up action points so that you can use more next turn. You can also be "brave" and use more action points than you should normally have, which will leave you with a deficit next turn. Predictably this turns into a pattern of default early, brave at the end when you know you can win. Ultimately I don't find it as interesting as the developers hoped it'd be, and the sequel here doesn't do much to make it more interesting. It just feels like a slightly different way to go through the motions.

When you come right down to it I did not like this game. There's a lot here that just feels strained, poorly thought through, or rushed. There are tooltips for each action, like attack, brave, default, etc. And those tooltips cover up about 70% of the menu! Out of 5 default options, as many as 2.5 are covered up by the tooltip depending on which one you're highlighting. Eventually you can get rid of them, but like... come on!! Likewise in equip menus, the description will just roll right over the stat preview. Can you see what's back there? Yes, basically, it's semi-transparent. But it just feels bad and looks sloppy.

Speaking of showing information, characters have a weight limit, in terms of stuff they can equip (but not in terms of how much they can carry, making it feel super arbitrary, but that's a different problem). When you try to equip something above your weight limit, the game will allow you, but all the stats will be nerfed. what this means is when you try to preview new equipment on yourself, it basically always looks worse unless it fits in your weight limit. You can't go "oh man, can't wait to get this cool sword equipped when I level up!" because you highlight it and all the stats are in the red with big down arrows next to them. Actually, you CAN try to get excited about the cool new sword, but you have to do the math yourself and add everything up on your head to see whether it's better than what you're currently carrying. That does not get me excited, that's for sure.

There's a job system, which levels up separately from your character level, but it's nothing you haven't seen before when it comes to square enix job systems. You get a new job, you level it up and get access to specific new skills. It's fine!

Another thing that really rubbed me the wrong way was how, when any character is confused in battle, they can cause you to run from a fight. I was in a high EXP-value fight, and had almost won, when a confused AI character that I could not control decided it was time to run away and I just lost the whole thing, for nothing.

You can see enemies on the overworld, which I appreciate, but they respawn pretty fast and very often are VERY similar colors to the background and almost invisible, so it might as well be random battles every 4-5 steps. And the battles aren't that fun, so...

The story feels pretty basic, and overall it just feels like a B-team that wasn't having any fun made this thing. Visually it's standard and murky though I guess the town is kind of visually alright, abstractly, but it can be tough to see where you can actually go. The localization team had a little fun but that's about it as far as the finished product is presenting itself to me.

Is it in my top 5?

Definitely not. I won't be playing this one any more than I have to.