Bravely Default: Review

I’ve been playing Bravely Default for almost 30 hours now and although I’m nowhere near the end I thought I’d write up a quick review of the game.

Elephant In The Room

I’m going to get this off my chest right from the start, Bravely Default might not carry the Final Fantasy name, but this game is more Final Fantasy than the last two major releases in the series put together. Bravely Default is old school Final Fantasy made with modern game design principles. This has more in common with Final Fantasy I through VI than Final Fantasy XII and any of Fabula Nova Crystallis FFXIII series does.

Four heroes of light reviving the four elemental crystals, you don’t get more final fantasy than that.

Combat

The combat in bravely default is fairly similar to Final Fantasy per Active Time Battle was introduced in Final Fantasy IV, you give each character commands in turn then hit go and they proceed in order of speed. This does feel like a bit of a step backwards, in that the order the characters will execute your commands isn’t immediately obvious (Unless I’m missing something) and it makes it a little difficult to chain their moves. I’ve lost track of the amount of times I’ve had a character use a potion on the wrong character because I got the order of the Phoenix Down and the potion wrong, or at least I would have lost track had I been keeping track.

The combat system does add a novel Brave/Default element, actions take up Brave Points or BP, and you can use the “Brave” command to actually tell a character to use up to 4 BP in a round, allowing them to go into negative BP meaning they will skip turns till they hit a positive amount of BP again. This allows you to quickly pull off a series of moves, such as: a revive followed by a heal, using an ether followed by a spell, or just cast a spell up to 4 times. You can alternatively opt to “Default” which stores up the BP so you can use it in a future and turn and makes the character guard. It’s a fairly elegant system, and it adds a level of strategy as to whether you attack full pelt at the risk of not being able to do anything while the enemy gets 3-4 free turns, or guard to store up the points to attack later.

A Cast of Hundreds

Okay maybe not hundreds, there are four player main characters and there are I assume 23 “boss” characters which you have to defeat in order to get their jobs. The player character are well fleshed out and for the most part likeable despite or because of their flaws.

Tiz: Tiz has literally had the his world turned upside down, his entire village is destroyed in a cataclysm in the opening cut scene of the game. He is ever the optimist and resolves to rebuild it no matter the cost.

Agnes: The slightly naive “Air Vestal” is a priestess who has spent her entire life in a what amounts to a nunnery worshipping and maintaining the Air crystal.

Ringabel: The amnesiac womaniser with a book full of prophetic notes. Ringabel will hit on anything that moves.

Edea: Edea is the turn coat daughter of the leader of the big bad evil empire, she reminds me in a way of Celes from Final Fantasy VI in that respect. She’s compassionate and has a strong sense of right and wrong.

Bravely Brutal

The story is really dark at points, it starts with a entire village being wiped off the map and an entire order of priests dying to protect one person, and it goes on from there. Lots of people die and not in nice ways.

Some of the bad guys you meet are plain evil, and although I’ve yet to meet anyone to rival Kefka, some of them are quite sadistic and I’ve got a way to go yet. The so far the story has covered extorting people for the benefit of industry, government corruption, child labour, the use of chemical weaponry, it’s almost as if Square took a list of stuff that is wrong with the world and decided to use it as a check list.

Jobs Done Right

I’ve always had a love hate relationship with job systems in Final Fantasy games, I like the versatility of allowing my characters to change jobs, but I hate that fact that when a character first switches to a new job that character is crippled for at least half an hour of gameplay while you level up the new job, and that some characters become one trick ponies when you give them a job with an essential skill but only that essential skill.

Bravely Default solves this by allowing you to select one ability from another job the character has levelled up and have that as a secondary ability. The secondary ability is not as effective as it would be if it was your primary ability but it’s still useful and it means that when you convert your level 9 black mage to another class they can actually do something while you level the new class.

You also gain support abilities by levelling up jobs, that you can apply to a character regardless of what job they currently have, this is insanely useful for the “abate” abilities, which allow you to confer a level of resistance to certain elemental attacks, it also makes your characters much more versatile.

There are 24 jobs available, some you get through the main quest and others through side quests, some are useful others seemingly useless unless you want one of their skills. This allows for an amazing level of customization for your characters, as you can equip 576 different primary/secondary job combinations, as well as the choice of a slew of special abilities across the jobs you’ve levelled up.

Bravely Difficult

This game is not easy, but if you find it too easy you can change the difficulty level mid game, I’ve not really played around with this apart from changing the encounter rate, but that in it’s self is a god send. Sick of getting attacked every footstep by irritating enemies? Set the encounter rate to 0 and no more random encounters. Grinding for XP or Job points? Up the encounter rate to double it’s normal value. These effects normally require a special item in Final Fantasy games, but here they are just settings in the config.

You can also opt to not receive experience points, job points or money from battles to make the game a little harder.

If You Build It They Will Come

The game starts off with the town one of the characters lives in being wiped off the face of the planet by a cataclysm, you are the sole survivor of your village and you get to rebuild it through the game. Final Fantasy games usually have this kind of side quest/mini game, but rebuilding Norende is quite a good touch, you upgrade shops which in turn allow you to buy better items, the shops will also periodically give you gifts of the items they sell which is always nice.

Your city is rebuilt by an ever expanding populace which you get by Street Passing other players who are also playing bravely default, or by checking the internet once a day to get up to 4 extra people.

Social Features

Bravely Default makes use of the 3DS’ Street Pass system to populate the town of Norende, every time you Street Pass another player who’s played Bravely default you get an extra citizen in Norende, which in turn means you can rebuild the town faster.

The town is also menaced by Nemesis, which are big bad boss type monsters that are sent over from other players, which you can in turn send on or fight. I’ve been swamped with level 99 monsters for a while which is a bit irritating, but they get replaced over time as you street pass other people, and they have a chance to drop items which pump your characters’ stats, which is nice, as well as offering a generous amount of XP and Job points.

You can also link your friends characters to your own characters in something that is called AB Link, which as far as I can tell allows you to use skills that your characters don’t have, but that your friend’s version of that character does.

Lastly you can summon a friends character into battle to aid you, this is really good if you are in a pinch and your friends are higher level than you, but a bit useless otherwise, I’ve seen characters do anywhere from 3 damage to 9,999 by doing this. The other player does get to pick what moves they send you though which is nice.

Side Quests

So far each chapter I’ve played has had two side quests which you can optionally play through to gain extra jobs. Though the side quests are optional they are tied into the story and are the kind of quest in another game would have actually been part of the main story. One of them had me deposing the monarch of a nation!

The side quest locations are highlighted on the map so you don’t have to worry about missing them, although sometimes it is a case of being at the right place at the right time, for example: I’ve already run into two which are only available at night.

Graphics

I don’t normally care too much about graphics, especially not in a handheld game, so long as it’s not butt ugly I tend not to mind, that aside, the graphics in Bravely Default are nothing short of stunning. Everything is rendered in 3D and the way the camera pans in and out on the field or in cities is amazing. I’ve noticed the odd glitch or JPEG artefacts in the FMV, but for a hand held console this is more than acceptable.

Unaceptable!

There is very little I didn’t like about the game, I personally found the English voice acting a tad annoying, but I’ve switched it over to Japanese and that is much better. I’m quite happy reading subtitles, so I’m happy.

Worth it?

So far this is one of the best JRPGs I’ve played in a long time, I’m really hoping it holds up. I heartily recommend this game to anyone with a 3DS.

I leave you with this:

Final Fantasy ATB: Possibly the Worst Game Ever Created

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If I pitched this game to you right I could see you thinking this was a game with tons of potential.
Play through a streamlined Final Fantasy game on you iPhone!
Fast paced combat featuring up to 40 characters at a time!
Unlock your favourite characters from the Final Fantasy universe!
It sounds good doesn’t it? Well it’s not… This game is a steaming pile of horse manure dressed up as a game, and the costume department is t even that good.
Final Fantasy ATB consists of battle after battle with enemies from various FF games, and you do, technically, get to control up to 40 characters… Only by control I mean furiously rub the screen with no semblance of thought or strategy.
You control an increasing number and variety of FF archetypes and presumably when you unlock them named characters from the FF universe. Tap a character to attack, and the. The character has to wait a little while to attack again. Any character who gets hit is immediately eliminated.
You might start by tapping, you’ll soon discover that you can just as easily just run your finger over the screen to achieve the same if not a more effective result. Your characters will one by one die and you’ll have wait for them to to revive which happens at a rate of one every 3 minutes.
That’s it. That is the gameplay. You essentially masturbate your phone to kill enemies.
Oh and you can spend money to get more characters. It’s like Squeenix didn’t even bother trying, they aren’t phoning in this performance, they are are making a collect call to their canvass and asking them to phone it in for them.
Do you want a particular character? Too bad the character you get when you spend money is RANDOMIZED! It’s like those gumball capsule toy vending machines.
This is extortion plain and simple, there is no game here just some animated pixel art and a means for FF fans to give Squeenjx money for nothing.
The worrying thing is that this game has over 100 five star reviews on the iTunes App Store.

Is Microsoft Saying Fuck-You to Multi Gamer Households?

According to Edge Microsoft’s next X-Box console is going to require an always on connection to play games and games may be linked to a gamer tag to stop people reselling their games.

I don’t really care about the resell market, I’ve got games that I’ve had for over 20 years, and I don’t think I’ve ever sold a game. I’ve bought second hand games before, but I guess I’ll live without that.

Sure I’ll be a little annoyed that I can’t get classic titles that are out of print any more, I recently got my other half K.O.T.O.R. 1 and 2 for the X-Box and she loved them.

But what will make me think twice about getting an X-Box 720 if they do this is that I live in a two gamer household, with two X-Box 360s and I don’t buy games just for me to play, I buy them so I can play them as well as my other half. I already find it really irritating that we have to decide who gets to activate the DLC code for a game when we buy one, this happened when I decided to give Mass Effect 2 a shot 3 years after my girlfriend completed it: I couldn’t use the online features because she’d used the code on her gamer account.

But if I can’t play the game at all… Screw you Microsoft I’m not even going to buy your console.

Sony have a way around this, they have a parent account and all other user accounts are sub accounts of that account, so I guess if you activate a game for the parent account it would remain active for the sub accounts.

Microsoft don’t, as far as I can tell, do this. They have a family version of X-Box Live Gold which allows you to pay for 4 accounts to be gold for less money, but they don’t have a system of attributing accounts to a household.

To be fair to Microsoft previously they didn’t let you log the same account onto two different consoles without importing it over which would stop it working on the old console, so they recognise the people might own more than one X-Box, but do they recognise that more than one person might “Own” a game?

I’m not averse to buying two copies of a game to play multi-player, I own two copies of Halo 3 and Borderlands 2, both so that we could play multi-player over 2 consoles, but I really object to buying a game twice so that both myself and the person I live with can play a single player game.

Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening Painting

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This has been hanging on my wall for over a year now, it’s a painting by Green Castle Graphics of the final scene in Link’s Awakening. I’ve seen a couple of posts on Reddit that reminded me of it in particular a pearler bead rendition of a scene from Crono Trigger, which has to be my favourite game ever, so I figured I’d finally share this.

I saw this while walking past Green Castle Graphic’s stall at Sloan’s Market in Glasgow, and I had to buy it then and there. Here is the image in Green Castle’s Facebook Gallery before I bought it.

I’m sorely tempted to commission another image by Green Castle I just don’t know what… I have a couple of Ideas though.

FWIW here is the Pearler Bead Chronotrigger image that inspired me to post this:

After two years and 47,096 beads, my girlfriend and I finish this tribute to my favorite game of all time. (OC)

Acid Defender

Acid Defender is a really cool concept game/Audio experiement. Its a synthesizer which a note for each column with the tone depending on where the white box is. Only there are little red “bullets” that fly into the screen and you have to move the notes to dodge them, because if one of the bullets hits a note you lose that beat.

In doing so you change the music, creating a continually changing piece of digital music, and a fun but stressful game.

I’ve only played this on a browser and the site says it only works in Chrome, but I think I game like this would come into it’s own on a tablet PC (iPad,Android whatever).

There is also a “Jam Mode” which allows you to just make music.

Via Prosthetic Knowledge

Perspective: Cool Looking Experimental Platformer

Perspective is very high concept mixing 2D and 3D gaming by the looks of things seamlessly. Think Echochrome meets Portal. You move about a 2D character who looks suspiciously like MegaMan and jump from platform to platform when you get stuck you pause the game and move the camera about like a 3D first person shooter.

It needs a little polish but it’s still quite cool, considering it’s created as a student project by someone at the Digipen Institute, the game isn’t available to download just yet but you can follow the game’s development by visiting the Perspective Facebook page.

Clever Email Marketing From Pizza Express Using HTML

If you use a sensible email client you will probably have noticed that most of your emails will not initially load when images, this is great for the user, it speeds up the process of downloading all your mail and means you can skim through your mail without having to wait ages for images you don’t care about to load.

This isn’t however very good for email marketers who use images to convey information to you. I’m sure you are used to receiving a lot of emails that make no sense because they don’t have any images in them. It seems that Pizza Express (A UK Pizza Restaurant Chain) have cottoned on to the fact that not everyone downloads all the images from their correspondence emails, so they have taken to formatting the emails quite cleverly, this is what an email I received today looks like without the images having loaded:

You can clearly see that it’s someone in a stripy costume holding up their hand to their hair (or maybe a pizza?) Below that there are details of the offer and how to get a voucher code in plain text.

Once you load images this is what the email looks like:

It’s a blonde woman in a stripy swimsuit holding up her hair. Looking at the image it’s obvious that the non image version is based on  this, the graphics in the non table version maybe reminiscent of an Atari 2600 game but they convey the same details as the image version, and they make you stop and think, I wonder what that is supposed to be maybe I’ll download the images.

So I guess their cunning ruse worked. I downloaded their images, I’ve also subjected you to their cunning advertising…

Digital: a Love Story

Digital a Love Story is a game that borrows it’s UI from the days of the Amiga. The Games UI looks like an amiga workbench circa 1988 or so, you have just received a modem and you have to dial into BBS’s to gather information. Eventually you have to hack the phone system to get free long distance calls, all in your quest to do something… I’ve not played this game but I like the retro vibe of the concept.

From the Website:

A Computer Mystery/Romance Set 5 minutes into the Future of 1988.

I can guarantee that at least ONE of the following is a real feature:

  • Discover a vast conspiracy lurking on the internet!
  • Save the world by exploiting a buffer overflow
  • Get away with telephone fraud!
  • HACK THE GIBSON!

It’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Via The Independent Gaming Source.