Bravely Default 2 Producers On Bravely Second’s Influence, Artstyle, OST

Iyane Agossah April 14, 2020 10:34 AM EST

Bravely Default 2 Producers Tomoya Asano and Masashi Takahashi stressed out they won't repeat the mistakes of Bravely Second.

Famitsu published an interview with Bravely Default 2 Producers Tomoya Asano and Masashi Takahashi. The duo previously worked together on the Bravely Series and on Octopath Traveler. The interview focuses on how past games of these series influenced Bravely Default 2‘s development.

Note that as I’m writing this, Famitsu only published online an excerpt of the interview. As a preview. The full version of the interview will be published in Famitsu magazine releasing on April 16 (officially titled Weekly Famitsu Magazine April 30, 2020 Issue). We might update this article or publish brand new ones when the full interview is available.

Tomoya Asano started the interview by apologizing about Bravely Second:

Tomoya Asano: “Before explaining more about Bravely Default II’s name in this interview, I’d like to apologize to the fans about Bravely Second. There were parts of that game that didn’t meet the many expectations fans had. The development team deeply reflected on Bravely Second‘s problems and it showed in all our following projects.”

Asano continued, mentioning how this influenced the development of the 2018 released Octopath Traevler as well. Back then, he thought the future of the Bravely Series was pretty bleak. However, their mobile development team was given the opportunity to make a new Bravely game, the 2017 released Bravely Default: Fairy’s Effect. That game was pretty popular, and was the tailwind the franchise needed, leading to the development of Bravely Default II.

Producer Takahashi also explained the game’s title. He mentioned they needed a name displaying how Bravely Default II is a departure from past games, with brand new characters, story and a new outlook. This means anyone can grab it, even if they haven’t played the series before. The rest of his explanation was omitted from the preview.

As for the illustrations: We also learned via this interview that Octopath Traveler‘s Naoki Ikushima is the sole character designer working on Bravely Default II. Naoki Ikushima did all the Jobs’ designs. This was quite an hard task, doing everything alone. Asano explained they took this decision to give Bravely Default II a better sense of unity. Tactics Ogre‘s Akihiko Yoshida isn’t returning from Bravely Default. The rest was omitted, but this part focuses on the game systems and the Job system.

As for the music in Bravely Default II, it’s still handled by Sound Horizon’s Revo. According to Takahashi, unlike the previous games, the OST of Bravely Default 2 is more mature and has painful, lonely feelings encompassed within it. The two producers also didn’t give particular indications to Revo for what they want for the game, only giving him a document with all the details on the characters, the scenario etc. As such, they believe the OST will 100% reflect Revo’s feelings of the game.

Bravely Default 2 will be out exclusively on Nintendo Switch in 2020. A demo is available. Producer Asano previously shared more comments you can read here.