Why I dropped Bravely Default

I will definitely say that I liked what I played of Bravely Default 1 (the only one of the Bravely games I’ve touched) better than Octopath 1. It’s not the worst. I can see how people who are more patient with it can get a lot out of it. I think most of my problems with it mainly come down to pacing. The story takes a long time to go anywhere, and the writing along the way didn’t grab me. (Ringabel’s constant womanizing certainly didn’t help.) You unlock additional jobs slowly. It felt like I had to stop and grind a lot, either to level my jobs or just to have enough gold to buy shit. Compared to the whirlwind pace of the classic FFs it was riffing on, it felt like I was making very little progress during the time I played.

But the thing that really bothered me is that, even in the early game, bosses are massive damage sponges with tons of HP that take forever to fight. My casters would run out of MP halfway through the fight, and because of how rare and expensive ethers were I’d have no way to restore their MP, so I’d just limp along to the end of the fight without magic. It was miserable. Most old school JRPGs are also pretty strict about MP recovery items, sure, but in those games boss fights tend to be MUCH shorter until later in the game, and they’re generally designed so that going in with a full HP/MP party already puts you at an advantage. Those games also have items like tents so that you can restore your party at save points, whereas Bravely seemingly just expects you to turn off encounters and walk all the way back to the nearest inn. These are VERY strange design decisions in a game that’s trying so hard to be accessible and low-friction. This balancing feels like the worst of both worlds when it comes to classic and modern JRPG design.

I can pinpoint the exact moment in the story that was my last straw, though, about six hours into the game. I took a photo of it. It was this:

In a better story, I could roll my eyes at this line and move on. But I was already having a generally unpleasant time, and the story felt like it had barely gone anywhere in six whole hours. (By that point in FF6 you could be nearing the opera!! In Chrono Trigger you’d probably be in Magus’ friggin’ castle!!!!!) So I decided it was time to cut my losses.

I took this as an opportunity to just go and play FF5, rather than a modern game that’s imitating it. I still need to actually beat FF5 someday (I am terrible about finishing long games because ADHD etc. etc.), but god, I loved what I played of it, and it really just highlighted how much better it is than Bravely Default. WAY better story pacing, way better bosses, you unlock the jobs way quicker, the party is way more likeable. It was still a game where I found myself grinding, but in FF5 it felt like I was actively making the choice to invest time in my character builds because I was having fun with those systems, rather than feeling forced to grind for gold or whatever.

TL;DR the moral of this story is that everyone should play FF5