Bravely Default 2 Demo Impressions

Like everyone else with a Switch, I was able to get my hands on the Bravely Default 2 Demo last week and play through it. I liked Bravely Default 1, although I wouldn’t say it converted me into a franchise diehard, and I didn’t play Bravely Second, but I’m moderately jazzed to get my hands on Bravely Default 2 when it comes out later this year. I’d say, in a nutshell, I liked it about as much as Bravely Default 1. In fact, I recall playing the demo for the first Bravely Default before it came out and, as far as I can remember, this demo was basically exactly the same. Let’s get into my impressions of the demo.

The first thing that struck me is that the story remains simplistic. The demo starts you off in a desert town where you pick up quests. There was nothing interesting about the story or the quests. Very standard, stock, generic jRPG stuff. Find this, pick up that, etc.

The character voices seemed fine, except for Elvis’s. Whew boy, let’s talk about Elvis for a second. What a weird mashup of contradicting ideas. He’s a scholar who looks like a British aristocrat with a lowlands Scottish accent named Elvis. None of those pieces really go together. From the name, you’d expect him to be flamboyant. Nope. From the accent you’d expect him to be gruff and maybe kind of impetuous. Nope. From the background you’d expect him to be erudite and maybe a little arrogant. It’s the only thing that doesn’t match perfectly into the generic pudding that makes up the rest of every other story element in the game and it just sort of… doesn’t make sense.

That was my only real story-related takeaway for Bravely Default 2 at all. Everything else was so standard it’s hard to critique or praise. This definitely isn’t a plot-centric game. It’s very “four heroes of light go on a quest to save the world”. All very paint-by-numbers. Everyone is a generic archetype, except for the aforementioned Elvis, who is just an incoherent mashup of random traits.

Graphically, the game looks really good. I really like the art style and the parallax 2.5d background for the town. It’s pretty reminiscent of Square’s other SNES Final Fantasy-lite spinoff titles like Octopath Traveler, Lost Sphear and I Am Setsuna. The character models are very reminiscent of the original Bravely Defaut, as well as the 3d remakes that came out for Final Fantasy 3 and 4 several years ago. Come to think of it, Bravely Default as a series feels a lot like a sequel to Final Fantasy 3’s remake.

The demo is fairly difficult and I would expect a lot of reviews to mention that. I found that somewhat offputting at first, but the more I engaged with it, I think it’s probably integral to what made the demo compelling to me. There’s nothing to latch onto in terms of the story, so this is a jRPG that’s very gameplay-centric. Since turn-based RPG battle systems tend to be all about analytical thinking, that means what makes this experience engaging is optimizing and customizing your characters. The difficulty requires you to do that. It turns a 1 hour story conceit into a 3 hour demo that involves some light head scratching and a little grinding. “Well, hmm, that didn’t work. What if I try making this character a white mage? Bingo, that did it.” It’s very similar to Etrian Odyssey to me.

The battle system oddly feels a bit like a throwback, because Octopath Traveler took the brave/default system or whatever they called it and improved it, and now we’re back to this. It still works, but it has sort of the same problem the original Bravely Default had, which is in a hard battle the best strategy tends to be defending until you have all your turns built up, then unleashing all your turns at once for big burst damage.

The class system is back, of course, which is the real draw of Bravely Default. It’s fun for basically 2 reasons: customizing your party and their outfits, and strategizing which class combos and abilities work well together. I think some of the costume choices were kind of whack. The monk costume doesn’t look very good on most characters, for instance. Still, I was able to dress up most characters in a way that looked cool. The difficulty of the game is slightly at odds with the customization aspect, because it requires you to have an optimal party, which means a Black Mage, White Mage and two tanky physical attackers are pretty much required. I don’t expect the full game to feel that strict, though, since it’ll have a bigger variety of classes.

One thing I really like is Square’s general strategy here of splitting the various Final Fantasy settings into different franchises. Bravely Default is for those who really like Final Fantasies 1, 3 and 5. Octopath Traveler is for fans of Final Fantasy 6, and the main series seems to be taking after Final Fantasy 7. I wonder if they’ll have a special series for Ivalice Alliance fans like they started in the mid 2000s?

Ultimately, it’s difficult to say from the demo that Bravely Default 2 is a must-play. It’s not particularly notable. It’s like a nice microwaved mac and cheese of an RPG. It’s comfortable, it’s satisfying, but it’s not gourmet and you probably wouldn’t tell your friends about it. I’ll probably play it, sure, but it’s not going to make any best games of all time lists.

That about does it for my impressions of the Bravely Default 2 Demo. Be sure to check out the Games Section for more articles like this and click here for Movie/TV Reviews.