Bravely Default

After witnessing earlier this summer just how far off the rails the Final Fantasy series has gone, it was nice to settle down with Bravely Default, an old-school JRPG designed for modern handheld gaming. Turn-based combat, job classes, fetch quests, grind-fests - this game had it all, and if it had been released a few years ago and was called Final Fantasy III, I'm not sure anyone in America would have complained. (Seriously. That game was awful.)

For real though, Bravely Default had everything you could want in an old-fashioned JRPG and it seemed to do everything right, right up to a certain point. New spins that the game put on the genre allowed for features like "summon friends," where you could call on people you had tagged with to help you out in battle. (Thanks, Webber and B-Town!) You could raise or lower - even turn off entirely - the random encounter rate, depending on if you wanted to grind for experience or just complete a fetch quest quickly. A weapon-producing mini-game even made it a benefit to close your 3DS in sleep mode without pressing pause or going to the home screen. The story was generic as hell - four heroes need to reawaken four elemental crystals in order to save the world - but the characters were fleshed out and fully realized and the world was varied and interesting enough to overshadow the mundanities of the plot.

All of this brings us to a point right about forty hours into the game. All four crystals have been awakened and you're off to face the final boss. Except, you know it won't really be that easy, because you know the game is eight chapters long and you're only at the end of chapter four. All the same, off you go. You beat the boss, something weird and spoiler-y happens, and all of a sudden... you're right back at the beginning of the game! Your characters all agree that something weird is up. You still have all of your experience levels and job class skills, but sure enough, the four crystals are dormant again, and you need to go back and reawaken all four. But here's the thing.

You have to do this entire process four more times.

It's not actually that bad. Again, this tipping point came around forty hours into the game for me, and finishing things off, even four more times, only took another ten or fifteen hours. So it's not as if, forty hours in, you're only one fifth done with the game. But... still. JRPGs are notorious for padding their lengths, but this is far and away the worst abuse of reusable maps and bosses I've ever seen. It's not some kind of Bizarro world, either. And the bosses are exactly the same - just stronger and stronger each time. No, the game literally takes you right up to the ending and says, "hey, cool, go back and do that four more times."

Plot-wise, it works. I mean, four times was excessive - why not twice more, with three times being the charm? - but there's something interesting going on and a few twists that I'll admit I didn't see coming. And again, it wasn't really all that terrible a game-padder in the scheme of things. Still, imagine going through the same five or six dungeons five times on one playthrough. It all got very boring very quickly for me, and I imagine I'm not alone in that regard. Bravely Default didn't need to do this, at all. That it did can only be held against it, which is a real shame, since up until that weird "let's do it again" reveal I was having a blast with this game. It's still good. It's still great, even. But man, that is a major flaw that will be hard to overlook even with the benefit of nostalgic hindsight.