Don’t worry, I don’t know any Greek jokes. Let’s move straight to business: I am not enjoying Bravely Default. I’ve played 10 hours, finished all the Ancheim stuff and just entired Miasma Woods. My save data reads 9 hours and 47 minutes. I’m bored. I’m booooored! Maybe I should google some jokes after all.
Problem 1: Story. It’s boring. Crystals, again. Boy, meets girl, barely knows her, is willing to risk his life to protect her regardless. Then these guys come by and they’re supposed to be bad, but I know it’s too early in the game for the real bad guys to show up, so obviously these guys are just killing time until then. I don’t know why we’re bothering.
It’s a standard JRPG story I guess. Maybe the real reason I’m so dissatisfied is because I’ve been playing Tsurugi no Machi and 7th Dragon 2020-II at the same time and neither game has much story to speak of. When you play Tsurugi and it’s snappy-snappy and you play 7th Dragon and it’s snippy-snippy and you play Bravely Default and it’s blah blah blah, blah de blah blah blah, well, I just can’t deal with that.
I can’t deal with fetch-quests and broken bridges and other pointless delay tactics either. We have to do X! But first we need Y, which we have to go fetch from Cave Z! Okay, we’ve done X, now let’s do A! Oh no our ship is broken, we have to do B instead! Aaarrrrghhh, just let me kill some dragons already! Oops, wrong game.
Problem 2: The characters. They’re boring. Tiz is just… Tiz. Generic RPG protagonist guy. Is he really 19? He looks and acts 12. Agnes is… whatever. She whines too much. I don’t like the two leads. Ringabel is gross. All he ever does is talk about women like they’re mere objects for his pleasure. Unacceptable! He’s not cute, he’s not funny and I already don’t care about whatever tragic past he will inevitably end up having. Edea is cool, I like Edea, but she can’t shoulder the whole game by herself. 3 out of 4 is bad.
Problem 3: The battles. They’re boring. ‘Default’ is just another way to say ‘Guard and store up AP’ and Brave is using AP you don’t have at the expense of waiting out a few turns. So you either wait out several turns to get AP or you burn borrowed AP early and end up waiting several turns. Or you go the same old Hit-me-I-hit-you route. Either way I am not excited. I quickly switched the difficulty level down to Easy to make things go by faster. I love the Turn Encounter Off gauge, though. Brilliant idea, but with a system like that it’s more a necessity than a luxury.
There are other problems too, like the screechy, overwrought, overacted voice-acting. And the job classes. I hate job classes. I never know what’s good and what’s not and what’s going to get good abilities down the line and what can be used together with what other class for devastating effect, blah blah blah. I’m just sticking to White Mage, Black Mage and 2 Monks for now. And forever.
Having said all that, I’m not quite ready to drop Bravely Default. I think the poor thing is suffering from being compared to other games which are faster and flashier and just generally more to my taste. I’ve never been much of an FF fan, and BD reminds me of FF3, my least favorite. But still, in order to give it a fair shake, I’m going to try playing something in a completely different genre for a while, like an SRPG or an otome game and then come back later when I’m feeling more RPGish. If I give it 20 hours and still don’t like it, then I’ll just have to… default on playing it? >___< I… I’m sorry. That was terrible. I’ll show myself out.
If you don’t like it now, your probably not going to get too much enjoyment out of it. And if you somehow haven’t dropped it by the time you finish chapter 4, you will when the game makes you repeat dungeons and story sections (and it’s even more obnoxious than it sounds).
Also Tiz does not develop. he starts off an incredibly bland and boring generic hero of ultimate genericness and stays that way. One twist at the very end of the game, which still isn’t enough to make him interesting at all. Quite possibly the worst jrpg lead ever
Ringabelle is still a perv and if anything gets worse with only the vaguest of hint of development at the end of the exceedingly bloated game. I normally detest girls hitting guys as somehow ok, but I was really hoping Edea would punch him during certain scenes, especially when the Bravo Bikini came up.
Agnes has some development, but again it takes a while.
I do think the battles are better than you give them credit, especially the bosses, so turn the difficulty to at least. You’ll get to harder bosses and more abilities to play around with. Though the lame thing about the bosses is they tend to be massive damage sponges with a set loop of attacks, which is going to seem very lame if you’ve got back from something like Persona 4. And there’s a lot of them… and repeats.
So yeah, you might want to quit now and save yourself the bother, because its not going to become less repetitive
Awwright, thanks for the warning! I was going to give it 10 more hours, but now I’ll cut that down to 3. If I get out of Miasma Woods and to the Water Temple and the game still hasn’t picked up then I’m done.
I really, really don’t want to raise the difficulty level though, because I really don’t want to deal with different abilities and stuff. I know that means I’m not giving the battles a fair shake but… I don’t wanna!
I don’t think you’ll be getting much enjoyment out of the game if you don’t enjoy ability building/combinations, that’s basically the best part of the game. Randoms battles are really boring in this game because it’s really really tuned for boss battles where the Brave/Default system makes more sense.
And on a side note, I might write some opinions on the Black version of Fire Emblem soon somewhere.
You imported it? I’m looking forward to reading your thoughts.
would love to read some opinion on it since I got the White version first. It’s still sitting on my desk sealed though…I’ve been playing way too much Toukiden on Steam this week.