Do you ever have déjà vu? ~ Bravely Default

This entry contains plot spoilers.

I originally started Bravely Default in March of 2014 after a friend of mine graciously let me borrow it once he'd run through it, having maxed out at level 99 at 80-some hours of game time. After seeing his stats, I couldn't imagine I'd be coming anywhere close to that, especially after having spent a decent chunk of time on its predecessor, Matrix Software's Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light. Despite beginning development as a direct sequel to that title, Bravely Default (with new developer Silicon Studios at the helm) is only tangentially connected to it. Its mechanics and systems are overhauled and expanded and in fact shares more in common with Final Fantasy V than The 4 Heroes of Light. This is no doubt due to the mixed reviews The 4 Heroes of Light received--which is ultimately an engaging game marred by a series of poor design choices. In fact, the two games share that trait in common.

The 4 Heroes of Light combat

After grappling with frustration and mixed feelings over The 4 Heroes of Light, I went into Bravely Default with a fresh perspective, ready to embrace the game for improving on its predecessor in every way. I could tell immediately that the presentation, music, and the graphics were all much improved. Despite retaining that same simplistic art style, Bravely Default is a very pretty game, particularly where the hand-drawn backdrops in the game's various towns are concerned. The melodramatic, often neoclassical rock soundtrack is also quite memorable, far eclipsing the monotonous bleeps and bloops of 4 Heroes. The combat system, too, seems to be a great step up. The archaic auto-targeting is gone and job classes can now be mixed and matched to your heart's content, ala Final Fantasy V.

In most ways, Bravely Default seemed like a great step forward--but for whatever reason, I wasn't latching on to the experience like I imagined I would. Maybe I was just burned out after spending so much time on the game that came before it, but as mentioned previously, the two titles are only tangentially connected. At its heart, Bravely Default is a much different experience. What really made the transition awkward was the game's early over-reliance on storytelling. Of course, I'd normally not consider this a bad thing at all, but I was not at all impressed by the game's early attempts at characterization, and the voice acting's poor quality stuck out to me like a sore thumb. Agnès's whisper-soft lines sound painfully overdone and the majority of Edea's lines are delivered as if her words are being forced out of her by a swift kick to the behind, regardless of the situation at hand. Ringabel's lines are more tolerable, but man, what a name. Of course his name is a pun because he's lost his memory--but come on. And then the name of our protagonist and fearless leader is. . .Tiz. He also sounds suspiciously like another Final Fantasy protagonist, Tidus.

Bravely Default combat

Suffice to say, it took me some time to warm to the game's characters. Bear in mind, of course, that I'd had no particular attachment to 4 Heroes' Brandt, Jusqua, Yunita, and Aire either, so in all honesty Bravely's characters are a step forward. Of course, I was still disappointed because I'd built the game up too much at this point. I let the game sit for two years, which is pretty unlike me. I generally try to play games through to completion once I've started them, even if I don't particularly like them at first. For reference, I played all the way through Final Fantasy Dimensions, another Matrix Software job-class RPG in the interim--and it's just as chock-full of flaws as 4 Heroes. It's not clear why I decided to wait so long to return to Bravely Default--but I think I know why. Because it is a game that made a big splash on release and received a lot of critical acclaim, I learned a lot about it despite playing for only 10 hours or so. I didn't know about crucial plot points, but I knew that something was coming in the latter half of the game that I wouldn't like and was almost universally reviled by the JRPG community.

I dreaded playing through the game and reaching a point at which I would be forced to grind away tediously, I moved on to many, many other titles and was forced to do just that in games like Disgaea D2, Final Fantasy Dimensions, the entire Etrian Odyssey series, and even Fire Emblem Fates. After plowing through my considerable handheld backlog (which to this day still contains another acclaimed Square-Enix JRPG, The World Ends with You), I was left with Bravely Default still sitting there, staring me in the face. Bravely Second just came out recently and I'm a sucker for sequels--and I never play sequels without finishing the game before first, so I decided to finally tackle Bravely Default for real, despite my misgivings.

Hand-drawn backdrops

I'd forgotten a lot of details about Bravely Default's plot but I didn't relish the thought of starting completely over, so I decided to just pick up precisely where I'd left off. Fortunately, it wasn't difficult to get the general idea of what was going on, thanks in no small part to the party's helpful (and painfully annoying) fairy companion, Airy, who is generally available on the 3DS touch screen to let you know what you need to do next. (There we go again with the stellar character names. There are also characters named Datz and Zatz.) What I relearned about the game is that Tiz, the bland protagonist, hails from a town called Norende, which is swallowed up at the very beginning of the game by a gaping chasm for reasons involving four elemental crystals (ala classic Final Fantasy). These crystals need to be reawakened by the Vestal of Wind, Agnès Oblige, another of the Bravely Default party members. According to spunky cryst-fairy, Airy, Agnès is now the only one who can perform the task of awakening because the other vestals have met various untimely fates. In Ancheim, the wind has stopped, the waters have turned putrid in the sea, and the city of Hartschild is choked on all sides by boiling lava. Once all the crystals have been reawakened, the world will supposedly be saved, and the Great Chasm that has swallowed up Norende will be closed off for good.

Along the way, Tiz and Agnès also recruit Edea, who hails from the snowy northern country of Eternia, and Ringabel, the dashing amnesiac womanizer who bears a mysterious journal that seems to detail events that happen in the future. As the game progresses, you learn more about the characters' pasts, although Tiz remains (perhaps purposefully) bland for the majority of the game's running time. I have reason to suspect that Tiz essentially serves as a stand-in for the player and certain events in the game's conclusion go far in reinforcing that.

The job system

What sets Bravely Default from other class-based JRPGs are its titular mechanics, Braving and Defaulting. Characters can expend Brave Points to take multiple turns at once in exchange for going into a deficit that prevents them from acting later. Similarly, Defaulting allows characters to guard and store up an additional future action, although this can only be done once per turn. Braving is generally useful to take advantage of windows of power. For instance, if you debuff a boss's physical defense for two turns, you can take one turn to cast spells increasing your party's statistics and then spend the following turn going all-out on the offensive, while perhaps leaving your healer on standby for maintenance after the fact if you don't manage to defeat the boss in that turn. The mechanics behind Braving and Defaulting become more interesting as you unlock more classes and abilities. The final Performer ability, My Hero grants 1 BP to the entire party, for instance, and the Time Mage passive, Hasten World causes all allies and enemies to gain an additional BP per turn. It is possible to spend much less time in deficit when taking advantage of these abilities.

Bravely Default's gameplay is honestly where it shines the most and where it improves most significantly on The 4 Heroes of Light. The majority of the game's classes are worthwhile in one way or the other, even if only for certain passive abilities that can be passed on to other classes. The Ranger class falls off significantly late game, but its passive abilities, Hawkeye and Precision are useful for any class that wants to attack physically. It is especially deadly when combined with Ninja's Frenetic Fighting, which raises the cap of physical attacks per combat action from 16 to 32. (Hawkeye raises accuracy by 100% and Precision increases damage by 3% for every attack that lands.) On the other hand, Valkyrie is useful in the mid-game for grinding with use of its area attack, Crescent Moon, even though it's far eclipsed by classes available later on.

Ringabel is quite the womanizer

Up until chapter 4, Bravely Default is a solid, engaging JRPG with minor flaws. In fact, if the game were structured a little differently and some sequences were extended, the game could end right at the conclusion of chapter 4 and I'd still think it was a great game, if a little short. (Although 30 hour RPGs are a breath of fresh air, if you ask me.) However, the game does not end at chapter 4 and in fact it continues on for a very long time after chapter 4. It is at this point that you reach the dreaded latter half of Bravely Default, which has received a considerable amount of criticism for very good reasons.

Have you ever felt cheated by a movie, TV show, or game that trivializes everything on which it was built by introducing a twist at the end that, surprise!--it was all a dream? Imagine that situation and the frustration and disappointment you feel, and then imagine that happening five times in a row. Then, to add further insult to injury, imagine being given the impression that everything that has led up to the conclusion has not only been a waste, but it's been the absolute opposite of what you were intending to do. This is what happens in Bravely Default. Instead of saving the world by awakening the crystals, our brave adventurers have instead been sealing its fate--and not only that, but it's required to do it over and over again to get the game's true ending, where a plot point is revealed that could be seen coming from light years away. There is no real option to outsmart the game and get ahead of it, however. If you choose to do that, you get an ending, yes, but not the real one. You don't even get to fight the true final boss. In order to reach the true ending, you're required to essentially repeat the same actions you've taken in chapter 4 an additional four times. The bosses keep getting harder and in some cases team up for challenging group encounters, but they're the same bosses over and over. It's like a nightmarish video game version of Groundhog Day, except without the invaluable Bill Murray to keep your spirits up. It's dumbfounding to me why Silicon Studios decided to take the game in this direction. It's like they just started running out of ideas after they'd gotten to chapter 4 and felt they needed to dramatically extend the length of the game without actually coming up with new content.

The ever helpful Airy

After cycling through what is essentially the same content five times in a row, there is a dramatic twist and you are finally, mercifully, pitted against the game's true final boss, hulking monstrosity that it is. It is an otherworldly field capable of destroying entire worlds with a gesture, seemingly impossible to destroy. The cast of Bravely Default must call on the assistance of everyone they have met along the journey as well as on the assistance of the player himself and tens of thousands of other worlds to finally vanquish this ultimate foe. In the tradition of classic Final Fantasy, the Big Bad's motivations are quite simple--absolute power and total domination. There is a certain charm to the villain's simple evil but after what the game put me through to reach that point, I couldn't help but feel bitter and resentful about the payoff, even despite some startling and exciting features baked into the final conflict. Even so, I felt reasonably satisfied after finally ending the battle, but full of mixed feelings. It leaves me feeling cautiously optimistic about Bravely Second because I feel reasonably sure Silicon Studios won't repeat the same mistakes they made with Bravely Default.

Not just Pokemon through a new lens ~ Yo-Kai Watch

Yo-Kai Watch is a quirky RPG developed by Level-5, known previously for Dragon Quest VIII, Ni No Kuni, and the Professor Layton series. Its similarities with Pokemon cannot be dismissed, but clone it is most certainly not. It has more than enough content that sets it apart from its more established cousin, although these differences are of course both good and bad.

Yo-Kai Watch was originally released in Japan in 2013 and it performed really well, winning a score of 36/40 from Famitsu and outpacing any of Level-5's sales expectations by selling over seven million units in Japan alone. Of course, in its initial year of release, it was heavily outpaced by Pokemon X and Y which came out that same year. Since then, however, Yo-Kai Watch has steadily gained in sales figures (thanks in no small part to the Yo-Kai Watch anime which proved popular with Japanese children) until the release of Yo-Kai Watch 2 (in two versions this time, Ganso and Honke), which actually eclipsed the sales figures of Game Freak's Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. It's worth noting that Yo-Kai Watch 2 is a new game in that franchise whereas ORAS was a remake, but the numbers are impressive all the same.

So far, there's little evidence to suggest that Yo-Kai Watch has sold well in North America. The nonexistence of sales figures for it speaks volumes. As such, its future as a franchise in English is unclear. It is perhaps not surprising that a game so steeped in Japanese lore and mythology may not be as runaway a hit in North America as it proved to be in Japan--but that is not to say that it's a poorly designed game or even that it fails to live up to Pokemon's legacy. Although its inspiration is obvious, it differentiates itself from Pokemon in a lot of important ways.

Whisper the Yo-kai

Players assume the role of an elementary school-age boy or girl (whose names are Nate and Katie according to the anime, but can be given a name of your choosing) and stumble across their first mythical Yo-Kai in the woods north of Springdale. It is the Yo-kai Whisper who calls to mind images of Casper the friendly ghost mixed with a pompous British butler. He is your guide in the early stages of the game and explains to you the game's various mechanics, including how to befriend other Yo-kai, like the enigmatic Cadin, the cicada swordsman or Jibanyan, the ghostly cat with a vendetta against oncoming traffic.

Whisper explains that Yo-kai are all around us and are secretly responsible for many daily inconveniences, such as the amorphous blob-like Dismarelda provoking arguments about nothing and the creepy floating hat-creature Wazzat causing others to spontaneously forget what they were doing. It is up to the player to seek out and befriend these Yo-kai, not just for the purpose of battling other Yo-kai, but to help out the citizens of Springdale, as well. Of course, the citizens themselves can't see the Yo-kai are there because they are not in possession of the titular Yo-Kai Watch, which reveals these spirits through the use of its glowing lens. As the game progresses, you're afforded with the opportunity to further upgrade the watch's capabilities at Blossom Heights' Timers & More--although not before performing various tasks for its proprietor, Mortimer Goodsight.

The wheel

Players will find themselves performing a lot of mundane tasks for residents of the city of Springdale. It is a surprisingly sprawling city in which the entirety of the game takes place. Unlike Pokemon, in which players travel from town to town across a larger region, Yo-Kai Watch has you traversing a single city dotted with hidden passageways and back alleys, as well as an underground waterway. It's an interesting and fresh perspective on this genre of game but I'll admit to finding myself hopelessly lost on more than one occasion. Many side quests in the game require you to travel from one end of Springdale to another in an effort to find a particular Yo-kai, item, or character--and there are a huge amount of side quests to undertake, many of which are just too mundane for their own good. The ability to teleport to various regions of the city is unlocked later in the game, but there's no hint that it's coming and when it's available you've already been subjected to a lot of traveling to reach the game's various quest objectives.

I found myself enjoying the game a lot more when I stuck to the main line of quests, because they are consistently charming and memorable--and perhaps more importantly, feature combat against boss characters. The combat system in Yo-Kai Watch is very interesting and is perhaps what most differentiates it from Pokemon. Although I was initially turned off by not being able to assign orders to my Yo-kai directly, I quickly became enamored with the strategy involved in boss battles. You're required to target specific locations on bosses to succeed--and frequent switching in and out of various members of your party is required in order to purify the various status ailments these bosses inflict. Each of your six Yo-kai are positioned on a wheel, although only three are in combat at any given time. However, rotating the wheel will bring up the next Yo-kai in line, effectively switching out the Yo-kai at the end of the list. Rotating the wheel can be done at any time and is essential in combat strategy. It can be helpful to rotate the wheel in encounters when a particular Yo-kai is in danger and needs to be healed, but it can also be done just to invoke a certain bonus (such as having several of the same Tribe in combat at once, which imparts bonuses to speed, strength, etc) or to use a Soultimate special move when a benched Yo-kai's soul gauge has filled. Purifying ailments is done in a similar way to how you'll unleash Yo-kai Soultimate special moves--by inputting various commands on the touch screen, such as rubbing, tabbing, and tracing patterns.

Paws of Fury!!

Although Yo-Kai Watch is steeped in Japanese mythology, it is also much more whimsical in tone than Pokemon. There were several times the game made me laugh out loud, but just as many times where it made me groan, especially when it comes to such charming Yo-kai as Snotsolong and Cheeksqueak, which legitimately has a butt for a face. Alternatively, many Yo-kai have cute and memorable designs, and even the more bizarre ones like the human-faced dog Manjimutt have quirky origin stories that make them more interesting than they might first appear. 

Yo-Kai Watch is a game that borrows elements from Pokemon but shares traits with the Shin Megami Tensei series as well. It has more than enough features to differentiate itself from either and stands on its own as a unique and worthwhile experience. I'd be eager to see how Level-5 evolves the format in Yo-Kai Watch 2, but of course there's no guarantee that they'll decide to localize it for a North American release, considering their silence on their debut title's reception here. I'd be disappointed if it never received an English language release, but with Pokemon Sun and Moon releasing later this year, I'm sure I'll find some way to get over it.

Yeah, Manjimutt creeps me out.

The time has come, Awakener - Trails of Cold Steel

When I heard The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel was coming out shortly after the long-awaited Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter, I was eager to jump on it right away. Unlike Second Chapter, Trails of Cold Steel came out relatively recently in Japan and as such is much more modern in terms of graphics and presentation. This is not to say that I'm averse to a more classic style of presentation--far from it--but the prospect of seeing the Trails gameplay I'd come to love translated into a new style was exciting, all the same.

Now in 3D!

The Trails in the Sky trilogy (the third of which has no confirmed release date here so far...) takes place in the country of Liberl. Although characters from other locales make appearances, at no point in these games do you set foot on another country's soil. For this reason, it was exciting to me that Trails of Cold Steel takes place entirely in the northern country of Erebonia, from which the Trails in the Sky character Olivier hails. Of course, the premise for Cold Steel is a little different because the do-good mercenary group known as the Bracer Guild is nowhere to be seen in Erebonia--or at least, not anymore. Instead, young protagonist Rean is a newly enrolled member of a military academy called Thors, and part of the recently established Class VII--which, as it turns out, regularly embarks on "field studies" that strongly resemble the work Liberlian bracers might perform... Of course, that is not to say that the premise is the same. In addition to these field studies, Rean and his classmates go about performing tasks associated with their day-to-day life in the military academy.

The initial roster

Thors is a renowned military academy in Erebonia, although its faculty is far from the dour, taciturn lot you'd expect from the description. In fact, the colorful cast of characters inhabiting Thors are more akin to what you'd expect from a Persona game--and the influence from that series is pretty obvious here. There's even a system in place in which you spend time with your fellow classmates and grow closer to them, strengthening your bonds both in terms of the plot and in combat as well. As you grow closer, you'll unlock new abilities that allow your characters to participate more effectively in battle, much like a similar mechanic from Persona 4. The similarities don't end there, though, because the game is structured in days and months and as such begins to fall into a predictable rhythm. There are field studies in which the students embark on trips to various cities every month, but before they do, they'll typically end up with a few free days in Thors and the surrounding town of Trista where Rean has the opportunity to spend time with classmates and perform duties for the student council. These quests flesh out the game's characters and reveal more information about the game's world and about Thors itself.

The principal character development in the game actually takes place on the field studies. Every month of game time has a field study in which the entire Class VII roster is dispatched to two different cities. The city to which Rean is dispatched is what the game follows. For this reason, the party members at the player's control are constantly changing, which gives you the opportunity to familiarize yourself with characters you might otherwise overlook. These field studies also serve as an opportunity to see different characters interact with each other. The Class VII instructor Sara appears to relish pairing students who are currently at odds with each other.

Trails of Cold Steel boasts an impressive 11-character roster of playable characters as well as a couple of temporary guest characters. Each of the game's characters has a set of unique skills (called Crafts just like in previous Trails titles) and different stat distributions. Elliot and Emma are excellent support characters for instance, while Rean and Laura pack much more of an offensive physical punch. S-Crafts return from previous games in the series and serve as super-powerful moves that can interrupt the turn order to unleash massive damage, provided they've built up at least 100 CP. These attacks feature flashy animations that are seldom boring to watch even over the course of such a long game duration--although Falcom wisely chose to include an option to skip them if you've lost patience.

In combat

What I really enjoy about Cold Steel's battle system is that each character carves out their own strategic niche. Emma has an ability that allows the party to reflect a magical attack. Rean has abilities that interrupt spellcasts or delay an enemy's action. Alisa can buff the party with increased accuracy and CP regeneration, whereas Machias can debuff the enemy's defense and restore the party's EP (which essentially serves as a resource to cast spells). Of course, these traits are not dissimilar to what Trails in the Sky already had to offer. What Cold Steel introduces is the linking system, which I've discussed a little already. Every enemy has susceptibility to different types of attack, whether they fall under the category of slashing, thrusting, piercing, or blunt damage. This susceptibility determines how likely that enemy is to be Unbalanced, which allows linked party members to perform a follow-up attack at the press of a button. New layers of the linking system are unlocked at various points of the game, including the ability to attack all enemies on screen after a successful Unbalance, much like the All-Out-Attacks from the Persona series.

Many of the game's bosses are actually quite challenging, requiring ample preparation and strategy. For those who have lose patience after repeated defeats, there's an option (just like in Trails in the Sky) to retry at a lower difficulty. Of course, I never resorted to that, but it was because I always felt there was a way to better my strategy to make a fight go more smoothly. The game is balanced in such a way that the difficulty never feels unfair--except for maybe one particular 1-on-1 fight later on in the game, anyway. It's important that such a lengthy, dialogue-heavy game has involving gameplay to counterbalance all the time you'll spend reading text scrolling on screen and Cold Steel certainly delivers on that front.

Laura unleashing her S-Craft

The vast majority of the game's running time is spent on character building, whether it be through field studies, exploring the mysterious Old Schoolhouse on the campus grounds, or performing day-to-day class duties. Unlike Liberl, Erebonia is a country with a firmly entrenched class system. Traditionally, Thors segregates commoners and nobles from each other in different classrooms, but the newly established Class VII eschews this idea completely. Therefore, the noble-hating Machias is forced to cooperate with nobles like Laura and Jusis and of course both sides must confront preconceived notions about their disparate classes in order to relate to each other. However, the first hints of plot begin to appear on field studies and it eventually becomes a foregone conclusion that the Big Bad is going to make an appearance at each field study Class VII undertakes. For this reason one could dismiss Trails of Cold Steel as an unfocused game because the primary conflict only really becomes clear in the game's final moments--and when it does, there's little to no resolution, which left me feeling pretty disgruntled considering the 70-some hours of play time I'd spent on the game. Trails of Cold Steel II comes out in about five months and hopefully should serve to resolve a lot of the loose ends from this game, but I'm still more than willing to condemn the first entry into this new trilogy for lacking resolution. After all, Trails in the Sky (the first chapter) ended on a cliffhanger as well but still had a satisfying enough conclusion to stand on its own. I can't say the same for Trails of Cold Steel.

Oh, Laura

Although the ending left me feeling unfulfilled, I can still firmly recommend Trails of Cold Steel. It doesn't stand up to Trails in the Sky as of yet but I could see my opinion changing once I have a better feel for the whole experience. After all, it feels a little incomplete without Trails of Cold Steel II as a companion piece. This was something that was true of the first chapter of Trails of Sky as well, but to a much lesser extent. Cold Steel II has a lot on which to follow up and I'll be anxiously awaiting it over the next few months.