I wrote this to explain why I don’t like Bravely Default, but it has a lot of utility outside of that, so I hope people like it.

Level design seems to take a low priority in general for games criticism, especially for RPGs; it isn’t the only thing to talk about, obviously, and the script often rightly takes priority in many writers’ minds. That being said, I am less forgiving that discussion of level design is almost always overshadowed by discussion of battle design, because no matter how flashy and cool battle design is, it’s the pacing and level design that makes the difference between making a game tedious or fun! Maybe, just maybe, the interestingness of the turn-to-turn decisions of a JRPG are directly proportional to the pacing of those encounters and it might actually be possible that you can design a fascinating system and then immediately grind it into dust by forcing a player to do the same thing nine billion times in a row. Or, to be more specific, because no JRPG doesn’t make you do the same thing nine billion times in a row: pacing and level design are important because they are what make the combat-to-combat sequence variable and interesting such that the same encounters actually become meaningfully different from each other, and not tedious.

Bravely Default, like a lot of other JRPGs, specifically your Final Fantasies and specifically your Final Fantasies with outrageously permissive character building, is much more about the plan you set up for combat than your turn-to-turn decisions in combat. These systems are traditionally good matches for tedious games, because permissive character building systems are all about finding the least tedious way to play it. “If I get to level 30, I can unlock this spell, and that’ll let me wipe a random encounter in two turns instead of three, and therefore…” etc. It’s Candy Box, but because it doesn’t do the math for you, you get to be the one creating the most efficient encounter clearing machine, and so it feels like you did it yourself, and so you feel like a genius. It is the sort of system that often is described as “broken” even though in actuality it’s explicitly designed to be broken! Games like this are at their best when you feel like you’re getting away with something you shouldn’t, and Bravely Default is quite great at that.

Same for the “Brave” and “Default” system, which adds some of these qualities to turn-to-turn combat as well, and part of what makes Bravely Default’s system feel more exciting than games with excellent character building but few interesting in-combat decisions. “Brave” allows characters to basically take out a loan on future turns by acting multiple times in a row on your first turn if you’re fine losing your next four, and “Default” lets you defend while stocking up on a turn for later. When you realize that you can turn your whole party into Black Mages and have everyone Brave four times, then spam an all-targeting magic spell, clearing encounters in seconds and never having to pay up on you loaned turns, it feels like cheating, and it feels great! That’s the point.

With a system like this, all Bravely Default needs to do is not be completely unbearable, but it can’t quite do it! Why? What’s the problem? It’s this: