Bravely Default 2

Switch

For a while, the third Bravely Default game is as confounding as its title. We’re loath ever to say of a game “it gets good after 20 hours” – anything that takes that long to find its feet probably isn’t worth persevering with – but suffice it to say for the first two chapters it’s a bit of a slog. That its story largely covers well-trodden ground hardly helps: it begins with a shipwrecked amnesiac washing up on the shore of a strange kingdom before moving onto elemental crystals and heroes of light destined to save the world from a terrible fate. And since the two 3DS entries we’ve had Octopath Traveller, another throwback to JRPGs of yesteryear, but one whose battles carried a sense of visual drama that’s severely lacking here.

It’s a dawdler, too. One of the joys of the original and its equally fine, if less celebrated, successor was the way it streamlined the typical genre grind, letting you quickly amass job points to diversify your party’s skill set, ushering in a startling range of tactical possibilities. You can still chain encounters with the right item, but they’re no longer random; rather, you need to seek out and strike (or bump into) enemies in the field or within dungeons. Each represents a group of opponents, but there’s no telling how many you’ll face: you might encounter one or two relatively easy foes, but it could just as easily be six tough ones. We have enemies sprint in our direction – suggesting they fancy their chances against us – that we send packing within one turn, and groups of six turn tail and flee as we approach (further sapping our will to pursue the grind) only to put up a fight, enough to make us glad we stocked up on Phoenix Downs. It hardly helps that it seems to betray its own rules. Attack an enemy in a dungeon, you’re told, and you’ll start with the advantage. Yet sometimes they’re arbitrarily allowed to get in a couple of free hits first.

That wouldn’t be a problem but for the fact that enemy damage output seems absurdly high in the early game: you might take your first turn with a party member already on their haunches, requiring a potion or a healing spell from a single opening strike. It’s a shift seemingly necessitated by a small but important change. Rather than your party acting at once – whether you Default to store up Brave points, or expend the latter in flurries – each of the four takes their turn individually. This gives you more flexibility in adapting to threats, but that’s only essential because enemies can deal so much punishment. The cost, meanwhile, is the loss of that thrill that came with setting up elaborate single-turn combinations in the first two games. There, you’d calibrate your abilities and loadouts based on your knowledge of each party member’s stats before unleashing the full devastating force of your masterplan to blitz your opponents.

No blitzing here, unfortunately. Not when your best attacks consume so many HP or MP that you’ll need a whole suitcase of ethers and potions to recover. And not with enemies boasting a range of counters that can see you end a turn having taken more damage than you dished out. The boss fights in particular – each one a sharp difficulty spike – feel bizarrely prescriptive, even on the so-called Casual setting (rarely has a difficulty descriptor been so inaccurate). Once you’ve halved their health bar, you’ll regularly find bosses pulling out cheap tricks. The holder of the Red Mage asterisk heals themselves for 2000HP per turn, but worse is a character capable of countering magic and physical attacks with a powerful volley of arrows. Some can even counter self-buffs. And so you retreat to respec, until you have the precise blend of active and passive skills that will allow you to survive. In the case of one battle, we use our Beastmaster job to capture two dozen of a specific enemy, before summoning them one after the other to get it over and done with. Cheap? Sure. But when a single unfortunate miss or critical hit is enough to lose a 15-minute fight, we’ll do whatever it takes.

Still, the diamond-encrusted core of that combat system remains intact. And once we’re a little way in and start gathering in jobs that haven’t featured in previous games – sufficiently levelled to the point where our health meters are no longer drained within seconds – our inner tinkerer is awakened. Suddenly we have a tanky Shieldmaster acting as bodyguard to our Pictomancer, whose daubings and dark magic make him a versatile artist, and handing spare Brave points to our bow-wielding healer, who’s now our strongest attacker, and savvy enough to sidestep counter-attacks. And as the main plot continues to wash over us like the waves lapping against Excilliant’s beaches, the side stories in each new town are more absorbing. A variant on witch trials in a godfearing mountain village is grimly compelling, even if the inexpressive characters undercut the horror. Indeed, the presentation is unconvincing throughout: the character designs that worked well enough on 3DS fails to translate to HD, the painterly environments pretty but lifeless. There’s certainly nothing to explain how sluggishly it runs.

Revo’s lively score (including a coruscating battle theme that delivers an injection of pace from which the rest of the game would benefit) and the nuances of that rewarding, malleable battle system (while lacking Bravely Second’s more delightfully outlandish roles) are just about enough to carry you over the many bumps. Granted, criticising a JRPG for being long and grindy is a bit like complaining that your socks are wet after wading into a river, yet Claytechworks’ threequel never fully recovers from its slow start. Yes, it really does get good after 20 hours, but even then it never lives up to its name – not-so-bravely defaulting to genre convention at almost every turn.

The boss fights in particular – each one a sharp difficulty spike – feel bizarrely prescriptive