Bravely Default Flying Fairy HD Remaster TLDR Battle Card Review
The Switch 2 launch is here and with it, a long awaited remaster of the original Bravely Default game (for me, at least). I started with Bravely Default II on Switch because I never had a DS and missed out on the beginning of the franchise, so I’d been hoping for this chance to go back to where it all started.
For the most part, Bravely Default Flying Fairy HD Remaster is a very straightforward and faithful remaster of the original game from well over a decade ago. The visuals have been touched up, but the majority of the work went into adapting the DS UI and elements along with some nice quality of life changes like a 2-4x turbo mode for battles, auto-battle options, savable job/gear sets for your party, and streamlined progression elements for the Norende reconstruction project (which runs passively even when your system is in rest mode and villagers will show up regardless of your online friend status in the game). All that is to say that for an early 2010s JRPG, the experience is pretty frictionless (but under the hood, it’s still an early 2010s JRPG).
Now, from a visual perspective, the art style is beautiful but potentially divisive. Speaking personally, the chibi look of the characters was something that I initially had to overcome when deciding to play BDII a handful of years ago, but man am I glad I did. Not only do the characters in each of these games always inevitably grow on me, the cities and dungeons and other locations have beautiful hand-drawn artwork that the camera will zoom out to show in full when you idle. The music is also a vibe, and despite everything about the audio-visual presentation being pretty and whimsical - the stories here are surprisingly dark at times with some great twists and turns, but nicely punctuated by moments of levity throughout.
The main draw is the gameplay though. Brave/Default is quite literally the name of the game as you can either “brave” to spend up to four turns worth of actions per character or default to bank your turn for the next round. Going into the negative turn numbers can leave a character defenseless, but taking quick, aggressive action can win you battles before enemies even know what’s happening. It’s a great risk/reward mechanic, and it’s all wrapped around a wonderful job class system inherited straight out of the franchise’s Final Fantasy roots. Mages, knights, thieves, monks and a whole lot more - you’ve got a wide array of jobs to find, master, and combine to build your crew.
However, while any JRPG fan can play this game, it’s probably true that only *JRPG FANS* will want to finish it. It’s not just the grind inherent to all classically styled JRPGs, and it’s not even just the looping, repetitive structure of the second half of the game’s chapters. It’s the insane difficulty spikes near the end of the game that may halt all but the most prepared players dead in their tracks - forcing you to grind, change up your whole build that was working up until now, and look up cheese strats just to survive these last-hour boss battles - with the most egregious example coming in at almost the very end of the game. I’ve played a lot of JRPGs, including a lot of Team Asano (aka the Bravely and Octopath team) JRPGs - and even I found myself completely stonewalled, leading me to grind out a new job setup in the final dungeon.
I don’t want to belabor the point too much and let one or two unbalanced boss encounters in the late game leave a bitter taste in my mouth, but I would be remiss not to mention at least. Overall, Bravely Default was a wonderful experience that fed my JRPG job meta addiction - and I would definitely recommend it to fans of Team Asano or any hardcore JRPG lover. But buyer be warned - there are some challenging elements to both the game’s second half repetitive structure and late game boss fights. Luckily, I think this dev has learned with each iteration of the formula - leading to an ongoing legacy of increasing quality with Bravely Default II, Octopath/the HD2D games, and hopefully still so much more to come.
