Bravely Default, the most disappointing game I’ve played
[This article contains all sorts of spoilers for the first Bravely Default game]
When someone describes a bad game, it’s usually related to things like bugs, a boring story, bad controls or graphics, or in some specially horrible cases, the sum of all these factors.
These days it’s easy to know beforehand what games aren’t that good, thanks to the huge amount of reviews a person can find, so when we play something bad, we’re at least somewhat prepared.
But then there are those games that aren’t necessarily bad, and that had the potential to be amazing, but end up doing something so unforgivable that the disappointment is huge.
It’s on this category of “this could be one of the best games I played, why did this happen and ruin all the experience?” that Bravely Default (3DS) exists for me.
Breaking the fourth turn
Before we start, I wanna point out that Bravely Default (I’m just gonna abbreviate the name to BD from now on), is an extremely well made game.
During the 40 or more hours of game, 35 of them were really fun, so don’t think this analysis is a hate letter to the game or something like that. On the contrary, it’s a analysis of all the potential the game had and how it just threw all that in the thrash. Ok? Ok.
BD can be quickly summed as a homage to the Final Fantasies of old: developed by Squareenix, it’s a JRPG where four heroes of light need to restore crystals that represent the four elements to save the world while a evil empire ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzz….
Yeah, it’s the same story from 30 years ago, with turn based battles and a improved job system to the ones used on Final Fantasy III and V: your characters can choose between several classes and gain skills from these jobs, that can be mixed with other classes to create really strong characters.
Even though the basics are very same-y to classic FF, the game’s more complex system make it very interesting. There’s a mechanic, which names the game, called Brave-Default, which basically allows the player to manipulate the flow of combat.
When you use Brave, a character can act several times in a single turn (up to a max of four actions), but after that said character gets negative turns, being unable to act for the amount of turns you used.
When you use Default, your character doesn’t attack, blocks a portion of incoming damage and “saves” a turn (also up to a max of four), that can be used to Brave without getting negative actions.
This mechanic is amazing and super fun to explore: you can basically trivialize most of the random battles on the game, just Brave with all your four characters and BAM, 16 actions on the first turn will likely kill everything.
Besides that, the game gives the player a degree of customization that more JRPGS should take a page from. You can change the game’s difficult and opt to increase or decrease the frequency of random battles on the options menu. Its even possible to turn off all random battles, and, on easy difficult, finish the game just fighting bosses!
But more than being a cool twist on traditional turn based combat, the Brave-Default mechanic has something to say about the game itself and RPGs in general.
What is a “turn”? Why do the characters fight like this? Attacking four times with a character on the same turn is the equivalent of the game breaking a mechanical fourth wall, like its saying to the player: “yeah, this thing where heroes are standing still on one side and the monsters on the other politely taking damage and waiting for their time to strike back is pretty stupid, let’s add some chaos, change the rules and see if it gets any better”. And boy it gets better.
Subverting Final Fantasy
But the most interesting aspect of BD is by far it’s story. That boring summary on the beginning of the article is just the surface. During almost the whole playthrough, there’s this feeling that “something is wrong about all of this”.
One example is that to obtain new jobs, your characters need an item called Asterisk. And how do you get a Asterisk? By killing someone that has that job.
That’s a very messed up thing for the “warriors of light” to do, and the game makes it clear that the heroes are killing the “villains” that chase them and using their powers to get strong, but hey, you as a player and your happy party are doing the right thing, so it’s all good.
Sure, a good portion of the villains are indeed evil people: for example, the red mage De Rosa kidnaps women, making love potions to hypnotize them, and god knows what he does with them, and the salve maker Quada creates the equivalent of an atomic bomb in the middle of a war.
But many of your enemies, such as the emperor and the mysterious black knight are sensible people that make you question if your heroes are really doing the right thing.
To make sense of these moral questions, it’s important to take a look at our protagonists first.
Tiz is the nice guy that had his village destroyed by a catastrophe number #39876348. From the hole where his village used to exist, Airy, a little fairy that accompanies the group, gives some tips here and there and is not relevant to the plot at all (wink, wink) appears; Agnès, a priestess with the mission to save the world; Ringabel (what a name) is crazy for women, lost his memory and carries with him a mysterious journal that can spoil the entire game if you wanna read it, and Edea, the daughter of the emperor, who betrays her father and joins you to save the world.
The two most interesting characters are Edea and Ringabel. The first because of the way she sees the world: “there’s no grey in any situation, there’s only black and white”.
She trully believes that there’s a good and a bad side, and that, after joining your party, she is on the good side. If she has to face and kill her own father to save the world, so be it.
Edea is, in a way, a criticism to the many RPGs characters that blindly go save the world, without any care for the consequences of their actions, because they are always on the right side.
Ringabel is the exact opposite of Edea, being sure that there are shades of grey at every turn. Even though he is the game’s “comic relief”, with his lame flirting and beating that he takes from women because of it (specially from Edea), he knows something is wrong on this journey, and the final pages of his journal, that during the whole adventure proves to be always correct, point to a tragic and enigmatic end.
Interesting fact #1: Ringabel’s journal is actually an in-game item, so you can read it at any moment until the end, and know a lot of things that are going to happen in the game, although in a vague way.
But this ending can be avoided, and that’s when I discovered that BD was for a moment one of the most brilliant games I’ve ever played.
PRESS X
All of this that I just pointed out, in a way, is ignored throughout the game. You notice weird stuff, but move on with your journey.
Every time you finish a dungeon to purify one of the crystals, a very boring thing happens: Airy, the fairy, tells Agnès that as a priestess she needs to pray to restore the crystal. But she can only pray the right amount (not sure how that works), if she prays too much, the crystal might break.
And this, to the player, translates into a quick time event where a “PRESS X” prompt appears on the screen. You mash x on your 3DS while Airy shouts encouraging words, and when she says to stop, the prompt desappears, you stop the mashing, the crystal shines and everyone is happy.
When all four crystals are finally restored, a pillar of light appears on the ocean. Airy says that when we enter it, the world will be saved. Our heroes go through the pillar and…nothing apparently happens. The crystals have been tainted by darkness again, but this world seems different…
You go through the same four dungeons again, pressing X while Airy says. When she says stop, you stop the mashing, the prompt desappears, the crystal shines and everyone is happy.
When all four crystals are finally restored, a pillar of light appears on the ocean. Airy says that when we enter it the world will be saved. Our heroes go through the pillar and…nothing apparently happens, again. The crystals have been tainted by darkness again, but this world seems different…
This time, doing some quests through the world, your heroes discover that, when they cross a pillar, they are indeed going to a different world from their original, where the crystals haven’t been purified.
Airy keeps telling everyone that the only thing to do is move ahead by these worlds, purifying the crystals and see where the pillar of light takes everyone.
At this point, you and your heroes start getting tired of the repetition. Ringabel calls Tiz for a talk one night and says that Airy is tricking the party, and what he says next changes everything: “Take a look at her wings. There’s a number that changes everytime we cross a pillar”.
The scene ended and I immediately open the game’s menu, where it’s possible to see Airy’s full body, and saw the number 3 on her wing. And that’s when it hit me.
On the next dungeon (number 13 or 14), I kill the boss and Agnès starts praying to purify the crystal.
I mashed X on my 3DS while Airy encouraged me. When she tells me to stop, I ignore her and keep mashing, way after the “Press X” prompt disappeared.
The crystal starts shining, more and more intense; Airy starts questioning what I was doing, begging me to stop.
Finally, the crystal breaks. The group turns around to Airy and calls her a liar, and she finally reveals her true form: a hideous monster, whose purpose was to revive a god that would destroy all worlds. To do this, she needed the crystals of all the words to be active.
And everytime your heroes passed through the pillar of light, going to a new world, The village of that Tiz’s reality was destroyed. When the game starts and the Tiz we control meets Airy leaving the hole, she had just killed the last version of our heroes from some other world, because they found out the truth. The only one who escapes is Ringabel, memory missing, but journal intact.
Airy’s words when she finally reveals who she is are more directed to the player then to the characters:
“And you made it so easy. A fine pack of puppets, you lot. Not a thought of your own, so eager to obey. Because obeying is so easy, hmm? You’re never responsible when you’re only following orders. And who would deny what seems so obvious? Who bears the courage to disobey? Precious few. Not one human in a thousand”.
Wow. What a moment, and what a brilliant line. Andrew Ryan would be proud. During the game, and on most games we play, all we do is follow orders, clear goals, follow the glowing point on the minimap, without a second thought.
We save worlds almost in a state of autopilot. What matters is the reward we’re gonna get, not the good we did or the feeling we are being part of an experience that personally enriches us.
We like to think that if we kill someone in a game, like our characters did to get the Asterisks, it’s because we had no choice and no way it’s our responsibility. And even if it is, it’s just virtual characters in a game, right?
Killing the enemy was a necessity to progress. As Airy points out, we follow the goal and complete it with perfection. But should we really not care about our actions on the games we play? Not only our actions, but how many games force us to take them, to just obey?
BD throws all these question at our faces brilliantly. Airy is an amazing villain, because she is with you from the very start, “helping you”, laying out the rules and goals of the game to the player, and you, without suspecting much on the start and already conditioned from playing so many similar games, follow said rules without giving them much of a thought.
It’s fascinating, and even a little scary, how we as players are susceptible to learn and master the laws and systems of a game without questioning them.
Because obviously, it we don’t do this, the game won’t progress. BD gets this, and turns these laws and systems so familiar to us in the great villain of the game.
And since the start BD sends a message to the player to question things, without us noticing it: every time you use Brave-Default in a fight, it’s like the game saying that, to win, you need to break the rules and patterns that have become natural from playing these kind of games.
“Rebel. Disobey. Think for yourself, question what seems right and obvious”. That’s the message from Bravely Default.
Interesting Fact #2: after beating Airy, the games subtitle, “Where the fairy flies”, lose some letter and become “Airy lies”
So why is BD the most disappointing game I’ve played, if I have been praising it so much until now? Well, because this clever ending, that asks from the player to have agency and think on his own, that combines so well with the Brave-Default mechanic, is the Bad Ending.
YUP
I’m not the type of person who thinks that the end to a work of art defines it’s quality, but in this case the ending is a big deal. Getting the “bad ending” of BD gave me an immense satisfaction (I still didn’t know it wasn’t the “real” ending), made me feel smart, specially because I figured that I had to break a crystal relatively soon and with few clues — the more you advance, the more hints the game gives you to break a crystal.
But if this is the bad ending, how do you get the real ending, you ask? Well, you can’t break a crystal, ever. That means the player and characters have to keep repeating the same dungeons over and over about five times each, making the characters look more stupid in the process by going along with Airy’s plan, and after they activate all crystals, Airy reveals herself and beating her makes the real last boss appear.
When I got to said last boss, I was completely uninvested and didn’t care at all with whatever was happening. The “bad ending” was so good, and it was taken away from me and replaced with a clichê final boss and ending.
What is your point then, Bravely Default? Why tell players to break a crystal if that’s not what you should be doing? Why tell me to break rules while you keep stuck to patterns and clichês?
The “real ending” of BD to me was a big betrayal of everything the game had built until then. At the end of the day, that awesome moment and feeling gave way to frustration, knowing that my intelligence didn’t reward, but punished me, because to really finish the game, all you have to do is obey.
Why did Squareenix decide that the game would be like this? I’m not sure, but my impression is that there was a lack of trust on the game they were making. That is pretty clear when the CEO of the company said he was surprised after seeing BD selling really well.
Yeah, who’d have thought people would buy a classic RPG from a company with the most classic RPGs under their belt? Truly shocking…
I’m almost sure that breaking the crystal (by the way, thinking about the symbology of breaking a crystal in a spiritual successor to Final Fantasy is pretty wild) was supposed to be the real ending.
But I imagine that it would be hard to explain to executives of a company that a player who doesn’t figure this out would waste 20 hours doing the same four dungeons just to get a bad ending where everyone dies would not be accepted, especially considering that BD was this sort of gamble for SE, a game to test the waters if classic JRPGs were a thing the market wanted.
That’s why they followed the safe route in my opinion. The company could have learned a little from the massage of it’s own game, broken the patterns and left the obvious behind. Also, doens’t hurt having faith in the players that we were gonna figure out what to do.
But it is what it is. Instead of a classic, that could have said a lot about how we play games and subverted that, we got a decent RPG that has the worst second half of any game, with a clever commentary lost somewhere.
Do I think Bravely Default is bad game? No, not at all. The fact that it could have been great, but ended up insulting what is brilliant in it and the player’s intelligence, is what disappoints me.
But all things considered, i’m still glad to have played it. Any game that makes me go out of my comfort zone and think deserves some praise. And the fact it sold well made Square create studios to focus on retro style experiences, which is great!
Also, Bravely Default 2 is coming to Switch this year, who knows, maybe this time we will have something very unique in our hands.
