The Bravely games are iconic Nintendo 3DS RPGs. If you had that system in its heyday and enjoyed turn-based games, there’s a chance you probably played them. As cool of a system as the 3DS was, though, it presented a bit of a challenge for companies looking to easily bring those games to other platforms. A 3D-capable portable with two screens, 240p max resolution, a camera, touchscreen support, gyro aiming, and more? Bravely uses most of these, so Square Enix announced it coming back alongside the launch of the Nintendo Switch 2 was interesting. I always vastly preferred the sequel, Bravely Second: End Layer, and found the third game, Bravely Default II, to be underwhelming. Enough time had passed, though, and I was ready to give Bravely Default another shot.
Your cast consists of four Heroes of Light: Tiz, Agnès, Edea, and Ringabel. Agnès is the vestal of the Wind Crystal, and she tasks the group with helping her on her quest to awaken all the crystals and save the world of Luxendarc. What starts as a pretty simple homage to Final Fantasy III and V spirals into a subversively clever spin on the genre. It takes its sweet time getting there, but you can see why they made it a big deal of Steins;Gate writer Naotaka Hayashi being involved. There are some seriously out there twists in store, and this isn’t the game it appears to be at all initially.
I found myself a lot more invested in the story this time around, especially the characters. It isn’t my favorite story of the Bravely series, but there’s a lot more energy than I found in Bravely Default II. Some of the character bits might be a bit one-dimensional (Ringabel probably came to your mind), but I think their simplicity helps make the journey feel casual and charming. Their motives are compelling, but the game has fun with the scenarios it puts them through. I was worried about revisiting the repetitive endgame again, but I think that’s also something I respect more the older I’ve gotten. This game will put you through the ringer in many ways, and while it can be tedious, that tedium feels additive to the themes and feelings intended by the original developer.
The real pull to this game is the gameplay, and I think that has held up really well. The Job system takes important roles across the Final Fantasy series, and allows your four blank slate characters to take on that class. Leveling that up from battles will unlock actions for that Job or passive abilities you can bring over to other Jobs. The level of customization for your characters and how in-depth you can get with building them rises to meet the level of Final Fantasy V and goes further with some clever job designs. You can have a secondary job just like in that game, so this feels like the ultimate 3D revival of the system.
Battles involve Braving and Defaulting, where you’ll either stack multiple turns in one action (Brave) or defend to add a turn to that party member’s “bank” (Default). The currency for this battle transaction is “BP” or Brave Points. If your character has a negative amount of BP, they can’t act until that returns to its default state of 0. You’ll often be encouraged to balance defense and offense, since wasting all your BP by spamming Braves can leave characters open to attacks and can lead to a very quick death. However, finishing battles in the very first turn also gives you more JP, so I often found myself handling most normal encounters by having my physical attackers use all their BP immediately to get four turns and take out every enemy fast. This kind of game style isn’t truly rewarded until Second, which lets you chain encounters for higher money and JP rewards, but that’s a story for another day.
Given that it is a Job System game, you’ll probably be spending a lot of your time grinding up your jobs. The boss battles can get really hard from the get-go, and encounters are random, so they made the smart decision to let players adjust the encounter rate themselves. Knowing that I could be just a bit more prepared for a boss with an added job level, and can easily just double the rate and get there faster, is great. Alternatively, if you need to leave the dungeon and head back to town, it’s nice to lower it down to 50%. This does kind of make game balance feel unrefined since grinding is more expected than many Job System games, but it rewards the player that truly loves delving into the depths of Job leveling.
Everything from the overworld explorations, towns, and dungeons just feels like the classic 2D Final Fantasy games. At the time, this felt like a needed throwback to the old style of Final Fantasy, and it’s interesting that Bravely coming back today fills a similar role. Just as I’ve grown to value the Final Fantasy games of the 2010s, I have no real issue with modern Final Fantasy besides just being sad that it takes so many years to make new mainline games because of AAA development cycles. Bravely’s scale is commendable, and it was the kind of thing you’d only get on a portable RPG of that era. I really want more games like this from Square Enix, because it uses a lot with a little and manages to be pretty experimental with a tried and true formula.
Bravely’s StreetPass and online features have been brought over decently into this new version. Rebuilding Norende Village will have you assigning villagers to develop shops around Tiz’s hometown in real time. You’ll gain villagers this time by finding “ghosts” in towns who refresh on a timer, and the more villagers assigned to a shop, the less time it’ll take to restore it. The other main feature is the ability to connect with other players and summon them in battle for you. This works with either 20 random players the game will pull for you, or people on your friends list. Your friends can even be added to your characters with the Abilink feature, appending their job levels onto your characters if you need a boost.
Being able to summon your friends’ overpowered characters into your game might sound overpowered, and it is, but there’s a level of unfairness present in the game’s bosses that I think pushes you to engage with all its mechanics. You’ll be optimizing and grinding battles to get the most Job Points possible, and summoning friends to knock out large amounts of boss health as you’re learning the ropes is a good crutch. Your friends can only help you for so long, though, and eventually, when they stop playing the gam,e you’ll have to focus on your own party. Building them up also means you can send over special moves to your friends, so there’s a collaborative effort in the gameplay loop that I think works well.
As a remaster, I think the minor touch-ups to the original visuals go a long way in cleaning them up for the higher resolution while not losing the 3DS charm. The models look fantastic, and the backgrounds have been cleaned up decently. I saw reports that the backgrounds were AI upscaled, but the result is in line with some of Square’s better 2D background upscaling, like Chrono Cross or SaGa Frontier 2. Especially when playing undocked, any odd upscaling artifact was barely noticeable. Understandably, any of the unique AR camera cutscenes now take place in an isolated 3D realm that breaks the illusion that you are directly involved with the story.
This release is a weird version that combines features from all the different versions and Bravely games, but what I find truly strange is that they cut anything from the story that was introduced in the re-release that was localized for the west, For The Sequel. This revision is how we got a lot of great features that defined the western perspective of what Bravely Default was, but most importantly, it existed as a way to advertise Bravely Second. There was a time freeze mechanic and cutscenes to hint at what was to come. As someone who adores Bravely Second, finds it to be one of the most creative iterations of the Job System of all time, and considers it the best Bravely game, this stung a lot. I can understand the desire to recreate the original 3DS release and have it stand on its own, but even the idea of closing the door on the controversial sequel is pretty disheartening.
What is truly new to this remaster are two minigames: a flight simulator and a rhythm game. These are played with the Joy-Con 2 detached from the system and used in mouse mode. The rhythm game will just have you use both as conductor wands, trying to have notes fall into the line between them, or hit buttons at the right time. As you’d expect, you can customize your character’s outfit and the difficulty of the tracks. The flight simulator has you fiddling with all the nobs and buttons in the pilot seat of the airship, and is actually fun in a stressful way. I would normally find these charming additions in theory, but they’ve locked features from the previous versions behind rewards, which feels like a transparent attempt to add value to the new mode. The 0% encounter rate setting is behind this now, so you’ll have to grind these missions to get enough points to unlock it. Not egregious by any means, but I feel it’s a tad unnecessary.
While not everything comes over smoothly, I think this HD remaster makes some necessary changes to fit modern platforms. Adding extra gimmicks in the form of Joy-Con 2 minigames will maybe hamper this going to further platforms, but it is in spirit with the original duology’s love of gimmick features from the 3DS. I’m not fond of cutting all the added story scenes connecting Bravely Second, but this does a good job bringing back the original game in all its glory. I may not love this game, but I’ve grown to respect it a lot and think it was important in keeping the Job System alive in Square Enix RPGs. This is a solid remaster effort of an enjoyable game, despite some odd choices. The visual upgrades are tasteful, the audio has much less compression than it did on 3DS, and there’s dual audio now. I find more value out of Second for being far more experimental in comparison, but what is here is still unique for the niche these games exist in. There’s a lot here for Switch 2 fans looking for a long RPG from arguably a more experimental era of portable gaming.
Version Tested: Nintendo Switch 2
Review copy provided by Square Enix
