Final Fantasy 9's 3DS Offspring
I picked up my 3DS after 6 years.
Loaded my Bravely Second save 94 hours in and after 52 more hours and two New Game+'s, I completed the first arc of the Bravely franchise.
After 250+ hours between the two games, I now see that Bravely Default and Bravely Second are the true heirs to the traditional Final Fantasy throne and the JRPG series you need to play if you find yourself rushing to get the last drops of 3DS juice out of the system before your battery explodes.
Contents
To show you why this is the perfect 3DS game for those of us complaining that Square Enix hasn’t made a good Final Fantasy since X, I am going to cover 5 elements that echo games like Final Fantasy (1-5 and 9).
Setting
Gameplay
Tone
Themes
Meta
Before we get started
This is not a beat-for-beat comparison to FF9 or any Final Fantasy.
This is a showcase of my experience playing Bravely Second and why this lesser mentioned sequel is worth your time if you are like me and regret not being able to buy the Uniqlo x final fantasy 35th anniversary collaboration FFIX shirt.
Spoiler Warning
There will be spoilers.
I am talking about the overarching themes of Bravely Second, so if you haven’t played Bravely Default, I would highly recommend doing that.
Other than that, I have restricted the heavy spoilers to the last two sections, Themes and Meta, but there are some set reveals in the setting section, obviously.
I will put a warning before we get to those sections if you want to skip them and go straight to the conclusion.
Ok, with that out of the way, Let’s start with the most obvious high fantasy element, the setting.
Setting
As I am sure you are aware, Bravely Default and Second take place in the fantasy world of Luxendarc. As I am also sure you know, traditional Final Fantasy games also have fantasy settings. Gaia for Final Fantasy IX, World A for Final Fantasy 1 and … The Earth for FF4.
The game opens on the new-for-the-sequel port city of Gathlatio. Layers rich with detail flooded my retinas in double vision as I adjusted the 3d slider on my 3ds.
And you can tell that the silicon studio knows how to make the 3ds look good, as Celmps said in his Bravely Default review, “even the game devs think it looks good as the camera zooms out when you idle.”
And each town is unique and pleasing in its own right, assuming you have your 3D setting set to the perfect level.
Florem with all of the leafy herbage of a rainforest cafe without the midday DisneyWorld wait times.
Sagitta with a small fraction of the giant guns of the surrounding Orlando area.
And although each town does feel a bit sparse, the level of character that they bring makes the world feel like it is a storybook brought to life to help move the characters in the correct narrative direction.
If you can play with the 3D on, the layer effects are mesmerizing.
On to the second most obvious echo of Final Fantasy.
Gameplay
Being a JRPG named Bravely Default means the connective tissue with tradition is going to be dense. The gameplay is no exception.
Combat
The combat in Bravely Second is identical to the combat in Bravely Default.
Which itself is a shining extension of the combat found in JRPGs of tradition.
It is turn-based but with quality of life updates that feel like Bravely Second takes into account the people playing it.
You can Default to gain Battle Points (BP), or spend BP to Brave.
You can speed up battles up by 2x or 4x by pressing the right button on the d-pad.
And each character can use any Asterisk and associated skills. Let’s pin this for one second as I gush about how enjoyable the combat is.
These simple mechanics make the slog of random battles feel fresh as you can Brave your way to single turn win unlocking the option for a follow-up fight with booted pg (the currency of the game), EXP, and Job Points (JP).
Grinding
This combines with the option to turn off encounter or double the encounter rate to make grinding a play style that is only required when you want it to be.
Allowing the player, in this case, me, Bryan, @JRPGdad on twitter, to enjoy the story when I had the time and grind while listening to Neverwhere read by the author on Libby.
Even the experience of grinding is strategic as you have to execute one-turn sweeps in succession to keep the chain going while managing your BP in a way that doesn't leave you vulnerable to getting wiped in the final battle.
This is where using your job skills is vital.
Jobs
So let’s talk about Jobs.
Bravely Default offered 24 job classes, count 'em 24!
Each with its active skills (skills and spells that you can use in combat, such as the black mage spell Fira, steal, etc), and passive skills (skills like the ninja’s ability to dual wield).
Additionally, you assign a secondary set of skills to be used in combat, and you can choose any of the passive skills that you have previously mastered from any class.
Giving you a nearly infinite number of possible play styles.
In Bravely Second you can get 30 jobs. About half of the are from the first game and the other half are new.
This makes for a level of customization that can feel overwhelming, but once you get comfortable and start mastering skills, it breathes life into an otherwise tired system of equipping the best weapons for each character class.
I love seeing each character’s costume for each job, and the weapons look great.
Also, there is a secret master skill for each job once you reach level 11(that’s right 11!) It is a bit of a spoiler but if you want to know more look here.
Optional missions
In Bravely Default there were side quests that provided backstory for each of the asterisk holders, and in the direct sequel to unlock the job classes from default, you are given a moral dilemma.
In each morality mission, there is an asterisk holder on either side of an issue, giving you the option to either fight whoever’s asterisk you want more or be a good person and raises taxes on everyone living on Grandship.
I am a softy. I went with my heart.
This meant that I missed some of my favorite job classes, Like the Theif…..UGH, The Jackal why do you have to be sooo pure. I regretted this choice for most of the game, but that is a spoiler that we will come back to later.
The choices, although they don’t affect the gameplay or story outside of your abilities, really did a nice job of spotlighting Edea and the types of choices she will need to make one day should she choose to lead Eternia in her father’s stead.
As well as provide another layer of charm to an already charming main questline.
Mini-games
Speaking of charming, no solid FF entry would be complete without mini-games.
The way they were handled in the game makes them almost completely optional.
I spent waaaayyy too much time on chompcraft and didn’t even discover Chompsire until after I had cleared the secret dungeons, however, the moon town building game made the end layer of the main game a breeze because of unearthly bun farming.
After you beat a certain asterisk holder you can learn the best skills for each class. The best skill of Thieves is to steal unstealable items, which allows you to farm unearthly buns (permanently boost every stat for any character) from the Ba’als on the moon. If your moon town is maxed out you can reduce these Ba’als to level 1 to completely negate their attacks. Steal and run away for hours on end to make the end of the game not interesting! If you want to learn more, check out this unearthly bun guide here.
If you are coming back to the game after 6 years
One last note on the gameplay.
Like I said at the beginning, I stopped playing Bravely Second for 6 years. In the interim, I moved to Japan, got married, had a daughter, and beat Lavos.
Needless to say, a lot happened.
Bravely Second was surprisingly welcoming, with elements that felt as though they were put in place for people to easily get up to speed after taking extended breaks.
Angés is a great example of this, she provides hints throughout the game, but you can view all of these from the menu.
On top of this at its very core, the game is about not giving up and returning to things even if you are not confident, but I will come back to this later, first let’s talk about the tone.
Tone
The tone in Bravely Second is one of light-hearted adventure with darker story streaks accenting the impactful moments. This is another echo of games like FF5 and FF9.
There are no brooding cyberpunk silent protagonists or cars, in their stead are characters that despite the high fantasy setting, come across as modern and 3-dimensional.
I remember when the game was first announced and my best friend Michael Steranka sent me the trailer, he pointed out that the name itself implied a return to form for the Final Fantasy series.
To follow that up, I would add that the secret message contained within Fairy Flies implies their lineage as the further evolution of the fantasy in the Final Fantasy series.
Characters
Just like in Default, and the first 3 final fantasy games, you control a group of four teens (probably?), and just like in Default two of them are Tiz and Edea.
They are joined by two newcomers in Yew, a trust fund baby and current leader of the crystal guard, and Magnolia, a Ba’al buster from the moon.
That joke never gets old (it does).
Spoiler
Although the bonds that the four main characters of Bravely Second share can seem flimsy at times (Yew giving magnolia a flower and suddenly she is your ally, or the astrologist telling Edea to meet Yew) it is pretty easy to put that into the far reaches of disbelief when you see them interact.
The party chat makes a return, as well as new fully voiced acted conversations that take place in a magic tent that was passed down through the Geneolgia lineage.
As in the first entry, these build the atmosphere of friendship and for me, they gave a sense of scope to the length of their adventure as we see developments in their communication with each other over time.
Spoiler
Between each chapter, the opening cutscene will play reminding us how long the character's legs truly are in their fully rendered super-deformed glory, and this contrast between this scene(s) and the in-game graphics heightened my nostalgia for FF9.
Although bravely second lacks the peak swashbuckling melodrama that FF9 delivered, it's these elements that first lead me to draw this comparison.
HEAVY SPOILER
These things all add to the feeling of youthful potential and gallant romance that is housed within every traditional Final Fantasy game.
Themes
Up until now, I have done my best to keep the spoilers for this game minimal, but to talk about the last two elements, I am going to dive heavily into the late-game story. If you have yet to play Bravely Second and want to remain unspoiled, I recommend jumping to the conclusion.
Still here?
OK, let’s talk about the themes of Bravely Second.
Not Giving Up
At its core Bravely Second has the age-old theme of not giving up. While this may seem like something that every shonen manga has done to death, the way it is delivered in this game resonated with me as a player that was giving this game a second chance.
As I mentioned before, there has been a lot of change in the past 6 years of my life and I had been feeling pretty disconnected from who I had been when I first played this game.
Coming back to it I had no memory of the story and only a vague inclination of who the characters were.
The best option for getting the genuine intended experience of Bravely Second would have been to start the game from the beginning.
However, Soul Hackers 2 was announced and I wanted to play Soul Hackers on my 3DS before that comes out, and I made a pact with myself that I would finish one game before starting another.
So, I pushed through expecting that my memory would come back the more I played.
And boy did it ever.
There is a point in the game where you are asked to start over, but the game tells you exactly what to do to progress, but because of my 6 years lapse in playing, one of the mechanics that I forgot existed was Bravely Second, which is the literal name of the game.
So I played the entire game again which, I see now, had an enormous set of benefits.
Why you should play Bravely Second 3 times
For starters, it helped me fill in all of the moments I had forgotten. I was at such a high level when I started over that it was worth it for me to turn off all battles and just fight bosses.
Another reason was the moral choices. As I mentioned before, I went with my heart on the first play-through, so for the new game+, I had to select all of the asterisks that I missed. Because I am a fool, I couldn’t help but feel stressed about the fact that all of these choices would be set in the timeline of the game even after I completed it.
I felt guilty that I would be leaving this world full of choices that I didn’t believe in.
BUT there is a remedy for that, one that the game provides on its own.
Play it a third time.
If you have gotten passed the second time you fight the kaiser for the first time then you know that you need to bravely second to recall your party members to the battle and continue with the main scenario.
However, if you do this you will be forced to strand the world and people of Luxendarc with all of the morality choices that you did not want to choose on your first playthrough.
So my mistake alleviated my guilt by allowing me a third time to ultimately make the choices that I did believe in the reality for these characters. And I got to experience the morality missions from all three perspectives, The follow your heart path, the opposite of that, and the “I remember everything” path.
In the Japanese release of the Bravely Second, there was even more precedent for this with each choice leading to a bad ending the first playthrough no matter what.
Just a small aside, I also completely forgot about Norende because of how long a break I took between my first attempt and this one, so it was nice that everyone in game did too.
Finding Your Reasons
This theme, common in both Bravely Default and Second and every shonen manga, is a direct echo of FF9’s message of not folding into what society expects you to be.
Yew is a Geniolgia, Denys is a Geniolgia. Both choose to rebel against the society that has placed its faith in the corrupt. Both find their path after casting away the expectations placed on them by the society they now wish to change.
Edea comes to understand what will make her a great ruler after Braev passes the duchy of Eternia onto her after she sees the world for herself and learns from each asterisk holder.
Angés and Tiz are pretty much covered in the first game, but even Magnolia forges her path in the ending of Bravely Second.
This is by no means unique to Square’s flagship series, but it does provide even more connective tissue between BD and FF.
Failure
As I have mentioned throughout this review (retrospective? Is the game that old? Am I that old because this 2016 game seems recent to me?), I have a daughter.
She is younger than this game. She gets frustrated when she can’t do something and gives up. I have been doing my best to teach her the lessons of Bravely Second, I want her to learn the lessons of this game.
Failure is not the end, it is a step on a staircase that is leading to success.
Use your mistakes to learn, we all deserve second chances, or third in my case, to achieve the things we truly believe in.
Time to talk about that ending!
Meta
HEAVY SPOILERS
I will be going into detail in this section, about the ending of both Bravely default and second, as well as Final Fantasy IX, so if you have made it this far but for some reason don't want the rest of the game spoiled, leave now or click here to skip to the ending.
The elements that I would consider the trademark of the bravely series aren't so much a repeat of the meta elements of Final Fantasy 9 but are a true evolution.
In Final Fantasy 9, the ending serves as a conclusion to the final fantasy series with Garland's return and the fusion of terra and Gaia.
This doesn't directly speak to the world of the player but it is a nice treat for all final fantasy fans.
Although the first two entries in the Bravely Series don't call back directly to Final Fantasy with references, what they manage to pull off in a way that feels much less corny, is drawing a connection between the player, the player's world, the JRPG fandom, and the JRPG genre as a whole.
Meta in Bravely Default
This starts at the very beginning, but it isn't fully revealed until the end of Bravely Default. We are beings known as celestials and we are inhabiting the body of Tiz.
This is a blatant commentary on the idea of JRPGs, and games, and have consequences for the characters we are controlling.
Before fully covering this, I want to talk about the most hated part of this series, the multiple plays required to finish the game.
This is polarizing, if not despised.
And I don't need to go into why, as there are a plethora of reviewers and Redditors that will gladly dish it out. Instead, I want to give a perspective on the perspective it gives on the genre as a whole.
This section is no different than grinding.
It is performing the same tasks over and over mindlessly to achieve a goal that the game sets for you.
This is furthered when it is revealed that Airy was manipulating the cast from the beginning, they were following blindly, fighting asterisk holders and awakening crystals ending countless worlds.
To solve this in the ending you must call on the community of bravely default players to overpower the final boss, strengthening the bonds of a fandom that loves the genre flaws and all.
Meta in Bravely Second
Bravely second trends much of the same ground, literally and thematically.
Some moments stood out to me.
First another celestial inhabits Tiz's body, however, it is not the player and because of this, Vega and Altair have a more defined impact on the story.
I will circle back to this in a minute, but first I want to talk about the portion of the game that cost me an additional 20+ hrs.
After reaching the Kaiser's ship and defeating Anne, the Kaiser escapes and Anne destroys the moon using the light of the crystals and her broch.
The game prompts you with a notification about new game plus being available.
At this moment the team mourns their loss and Yew has one last idea. He reaches out to You, the real You, and asks that you return to the moment when they first fought the Kaiser at the beginning of the game.
I did that and lost again. There are hints everywhere, I mean it is the literal title of the game, but I hadn't played for the better part of 6 years and I ignored all of the Bravely Second.
I played through the entire game again.
This was an absolute pleasure and I highly recommend it if you are playing the game for the first time, as I mentioned before.
This direct appeal to the player was a nice touch that gets a nicer call back in the final fight.
I am going to talk about the ending of Bravely Second now, last warning.
In the end, it is revealed that Altair is the one to bring about a disease that eventually leads to the plague that kills half of the population of Luxendarc.
Although the disease was contained within Yoko's body until Greede, yew's father, set it free.
On top of this, the entity that was controlling Anne was using the memories of Vega, Altair's lost love, warped into beings of pure negative emotions to attack Luxendarc.
The reveal of this fell a bit flat for me, but in Providence's final form he reveals even more of the game's meta-commentary.
Providence provokes the cast by telling them they are being controlled by another, spotlighting the fact that the cast is forced to continue fighting even after they fall in battle and that the person controlling them cares not for their wellbeing.
Providence then speaks directly to the player using the same text boxes that the tutorials have used and instructing you to stop playing as Yew and his friends will only suffer more.
This alone is a great call back to MGS2's Solidus Snake, masquerading as the major and telling you to stop playing because you have been playing for too long.
I AM A SUCKER FOR THIS SHIT.
I fell right into the atmosphere it was trying to create as a sense of guilt dripped into my heart.
The screen glitches, in true metal gear solid 2 fashion, and you are forced to navigate the opening menu as providence controllers your cursors and leads you to delete all of your save files.
Yew bursts through the screen encouraging you to not give up and all of the asterisk holders that you have now been able to save give you their blessing and cheer you on, leading to the final defeat of Providence.
This was a welcome expansion on the meta themes introduced in the first bravely game and the final fantasy series as a whole.
It is one of my favorite parts of any JRPG I have ever played and I am looking forward to more meta experiences in the future Bravely releases.
Conclusion
Overall Bravely Second is a worthy successor to Bravely Default, a well-crowned offspring of the traditional Final Fantasy series, and a must play 3DS title for any Final Fantasy fan.
The first two entries into Square Enix’s return to the Default JRPG form are worth your time if you are looking for a series that bravely extends the well-worn elements of the genre into something uniquely modern.
I cannot speak for Bravely Default 2, but I will report back once I have another 146 hours to spare.