PROOF YOU CAN’T JUDGE A GAME BY ITS TITLE
Bravely Default 2 (Switch, £49.99)
Verdict: Old-school fantasy ★★★★✩
Kill It With Fire (Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, mobile, £13.49)
Verdict: Eight-legged entertainment ★★★★✩
THEY say that if you let a monkey bash away at a typewriter for ever, it will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. But surely no number of monkeys and typewriters could ever serve up a combination of words as singular as Bravely Default 2.
I shall decipher it, starting with the ‘two’. This game is a sequel to 2012’s Bravely Default — there were some intervening releases, if you’re counting — but it is a stand-alone story with a new cast. You don’t need to have played any of the earlier games.
What Bravely Default 2 does share with its predecessors is a misty-eyed passion for the Japanese role-playing classics of the 1990s, in which heroes with big swords and bigger hair would battle monster after monster, making some friends along the way. It is a throwback to those simpler times and pleasures. There’s a lot of basic talk about kingdoms and magic crystals.
Yet it is also a modernisation. The graphics of Bravely Default 2 may stir up memories for those who spent their childhoods playing Final Fantasy IV, but they are actually far more detailed than the old games ever managed. Each scene is a little threedimensional diorama that you long to cup in your hands.
Then there’s the fighting system, from which Bravely Default 2 gets its name.
When coming up against yet another horned beastie, your characters can choose to either be ‘ brave’ (which is to say, bring forward some of their attacks from future rounds) or to ‘default’ (defend themselves and save up some of those attacks).
This is a small innovation but it makes the combat more tactical than it would otherwise be — and compensates for some of the game’s repetitiveness. Consider it just the right amount of thinking for the tired, final months of lockdown. Enough to feel superior to those monkeys at their typewriters.
A POLLING company recently asked people what they do when they find spiders in their home. A fifth responded: kill them. This game is for those people.
But I’m among the two fifths who would carry the spider outside, and I still had a blast playing Kill It With Fire. So perhaps it’s also for me — and you.
The idea is simple: open drawers, peer behind bookcases and liquidate any spiders that come skittering out. But the whole thing is pulled off with such panache (thanks, in particular, to the soundtrack) that it’s more art than arachnophobia.