In 2013 (!), Square Enix released a game in Japan for the 3DS called Bravely Default: Flying Fairy, which (after a modest update) eventually received a Western release as just Bravely Default. At the time, the company had been focusing development resources much more heavily on games it believed would appeal more strongly to Western audiences, and the developers were shocked when fans responded with overwhelming positivity to a release that they expected to flop overseas. Now that a handful of direct and spiritual sequels have since been made, Square Enix returns to where it all began with Bravely Default: Flying Fairy HD Remaster. Though not exactly a comprehensive overhaul, this remaster stands as a solid refresh of this JRPG classic.
Bravely Default takes place in the world of Luxendarc, which sits on the brink of chaos as the four elemental crystals that maintain balance have been consumed by a mysterious darkness. You begin the adventure as a boy named Tiz, whose entire village was destroyed in the devastating cataclysm that followed the crystals falling to darkness, and soon pair up with Agnes and her cutesy flying fairy companion. As a member of the crystal orthodoxy, Agnes shares that she’s on a mission to cleanse the darkness from the crystals and restore balance to the land, kicking off a quest to save the world while evading capture from the forces of the Eternian Duchy.
What begins as a rather rote JRPG plot slowly becomes something much more interesting with the introduction of certain controversial plot twists later in the game. Suffice it to say, the story isn’t what it initially appears to be, and while the execution of those controversial plot elements could have perhaps been done better, I appreciate how the developers sought to upend expectations. It is, at the very least, a memorable plot, which is far more than many ‘inoffensive’ JRPGs can say.
Gameplay in Bravely Default draws heavy inspiration from the classic era of Final Fantasy, but with a dash of modern polish and tweaks to make things flow more smoothly. Case in point, enemy encounters are still random when you’re out in dungeons or the overworld, but you can easily adjust the encounter rate on a variable scale to either double the norm if you want to go all out while grinding or to zero if you just want to explore without being interrupted every few minutes by another gang of mooks.
The blueprint is familiar in that you still explore an overworld, battle enemies in turn-based combat, develop your party, and delve into dungeons for loot and boss fights, yet the developers clearly considered how they could modernise certain aspects of the loop.
The combat system is arguably the most lauded aspect of Bravely Default, largely due to the fun and creative way that it approaches playing with the economy of a standard turn-based battle system. On any character’s turn, you can choose to ‘Brave’ to borrow up to three extra turns (and thus three extra actions) from your character’s future self to utilise right now, but doing so will create a deficit in which that character then spends up to three turns completely idle and open to any enemy retaliation.
On the other end, the standard ‘defend’ option is replaced with the ‘Default’ command, in which your character defends and stores an extra turn action that can then be spent later via Defaulting.
In practice, this leads to a dynamic battle system that rewards careful planning and strategy as you cautiously weave between pressing the attack and falling back on defence. A random encounter with a pack of low-level goons can be easily wiped in one turn by having every character Brave and go all-in on the offensive before your foes even get a chance to respond.
Meanwhile the opening minutes of a boss fight may be best navigated by having your designated healer Default for the first few turns to stock up on extra actions to use later for when the whole party gets damaged by a strong AoE attack. I appreciated the increased agency that this combat system affords, as it leads to much more interesting battles with mightier foes as you carefully balance the turns that each character stores and spends.
Another standout feature here is the Job system, which quickly gives you quite a bit of material to work with for teambuilding. As you progress the story and complete side content, you’ll collect ‘asterisks’ that each grant you a new Job that brings with it a unique blend of new commands, support abilities, equipment aptitude, and stat allocations. Each party member can independently level each of the Jobs, growing their proficiency and unlocking more powerful abilities as they progress.
But the real interesting bit comes in when you realise that you can effectively equip a secondary job to a character, allowing them to mix the skills and abilities between jobs that they’ve gained proficiency in.
For example, the Spiritmaster has an ability that diminishes damage output, but bolsters recovery magic. Pair this with the recovery magic casts of a White Mage, and you can have a designated healer who can punch quite a bit above their weight in terms of the heals they can put out.
The Job system was clearly designed for players to find exploitable synergies like this to abuse, and pairing this with the leeway that the brave and default system offers leads to combat that continuously feels fresh as you find new ways to ‘break’ the game.
As a re-release of a decade-old game, both the best and worst part of Bravely Default HD is probably that not a whole lot has changed about it. Aside from things like the expected visual bumps and some cute new minigames that use the Switch 2’s mouse mode, this is almost exactly the same game that you could play on your 3DS all those years ago.
On one hand, it speaks to its timeless quality that there wasn’t a whole lot the developers felt they needed to change—it was a great game back then and it’s still a great game now. On the other, there’s a lingering feeling that more could’ve been done to make this remaster more of a definitive version, perhaps through the inclusion of something like the extra side story or epilogue Monolith Soft has added to its recent Xenoblade remasters.
Even so, those minigames are kind of cool, and they do a good job of demonstrating some of the Switch 2 mouse controls’ possibilities. The first, Luxencheer Rhythm Catch, acts as a rhythm game in which you control two cursors (one in each hand) that you manoeuvre around the screen to catch beats as they pop up. The other one, Ringabel’s Panic Cruise, places you behind the complicated controls of the airship and challenges you to juggle multiple tasks as you steer the ship, repair occasional damage to various parts, and adjust things like the AC and radio according to party member requests.
Both minigames reminded me a bit of the kind of side content that you’d find in most modern mainline Kirby games—they’re fun, bite-size distractions that offer up a nice palate cleanser from the base game. They clearly aren’t the main draw and there’s a rather limited amount of content to explore here, but they also have more depth than you may initially think and take a fair amount of time to master everything.
Plus, they aren’t totally isolated from the main game—although you can initially jump into the minigames from the title screen, progress in the campaign eventually leads to you unlocking new content in each one. And once you’ve passed a certain point in the story, your performance in these minigames is rewarded with currency you can use to buy special equipment and items.
Visually, Bravely Default HD does a modest job of updating the memorable visuals of the original, although this is hardly a massive overhaul. Everything runs at a smooth frame rate and the bite-sized worlds look great in HD, particularly the richly detailed, painterly look of many towns and dungeons. Yet it’s also clear that the same squat and simplistic character models from the original release were reused here, and they can look a bit basic when blown up on the big screen of even the Switch 2 handheld screen.
Bravely Default HD isn’t an ugly game, but it’s also far from a showcase of the added power of the new Switch 2, and we can’t help but wonder why a version of this remaster couldn’t have been produced for the original Switch.
Conclusion
Bravely Default: Flying Fairy HD Remaster is a solid update of one of Square’s finest modern turn-based RPGs. Its combination of a flexible job system, dynamic combat, and unexpectedly interesting story makes for an adventure that no fans of the JRPG genre will want to miss out on, especially any such fans that enjoyed Team Asano’s more recent work on the Octopath Traveler duology.
That in mind, there isn’t really anything new in this remaster that justifies the price of a double dip—if you already put a lot of time into this one on the 3DS back in the day, I’d caution you to first consider just how badly you want to spend your money on what ultimately amounts to little more than a nice visual bump. All the same, Bravely Default was and still is a great RPG; if you haven’t had the chance to give this one a shot yet, this port is a great way to see what the fuss is about.
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