Topic: Bravely Default II (Nintendo Switch)

@kyleforrester87
I really like how the monsters look. In fact I was actually impressed by how good they look. When I first saw the wasp the very first thought that popped into my mind was how I felt when I first saw a zinger in DKC as a kid, and the emotional response felt the same as back then. It was such an amazing looking game at the time and how good the monsters look here made me feel exactly the same way.

I get that people grow attached to the older systems such as the slider but things have to evolve. You got to enjoy two games with that system. There comes a point in time where the series has to take a step forward- we can’t stay in random battle land forever. And for every person who likes the random battles there’s five people who would rather have enemies you can see. Hence why games are moving in that direction, because that’s what most people like nowadays (myself included). There’s still items that can repel enemies so if you want to “turn off the slider”, I’m sure those items will have the same effect. Anything in between can be achieved by how often you choose to battle.

And yeah, they definitely need to add a little bar at the top of the HUD that shows turn order. That I’m 100% on board with.

Not sure about the city movement. It might just be an illusion due to the perspective of the camera. Mechanically it feels the same to me. But that seems like a very minor gripe. As long as there’s not delay or lag, I’m good.

Ha!

I didn’t know you could turn the camera out in the desert. Idk how I didn’t try that before. This whole time I’ve been thinking some secrets were hidden by perspective. Wth... And, you can spin the camera behind you with the right analog stick. That’s awesome.

@kyleforrester87
Also, I would like to be able to skip the battle into too. But that’s a very small, bottom of the barrel nitpick. The fact they give you so much control over the speed of the battles more than compensates. I like the middle speed. Really fast but not insanely so. It makes the normal speed feel way too slow in comparison.

I’m not sure if the demo has a glitch, but I mastered all my jobs, yet my black mage hasn’t gained any special abilities. Everyone else has 2 or 3.

I am fine with most of the things in this game. One of the very few things I think needs changes/improvements is the battle turn system. Not knowing when the enemy is going to attack can put one at disadvantage due to the turns being like in Octopath Traveler. Another option would be that they put the turns like in the previous two Bravely games.

While I'm happy that the ethers are more affordable than in the previous games, now the equipment is very expensive. But I hope that this was just for the demo version to give us more time to experiment with the jobs.

P.S: They need to slow the talking speed of Elvis. I can't keep up with what he is saying XD

@JaxonH it’s the little details in the originals which made it stand out, so it is disappointing to see them regressing (even if it is something as minor as not being able to skip the battle intros.)

But that’s why they released this demo, and if it’s anything like Octopath they will no doubt listen to this sort of feedback so I am not worried.

I bet it won’t be out until late October at the earliest, and might even delay into next year.

I have actually already bought all the best equipment for all of my characters from the shop.

When I first started playing this game it was insanely difficult. Tough as nails. But now I’m starting to get really powerful and enemies are running away from me. It’s too adorable watching these enemies turn around and run with the little fear tear animations over their heads lol. I’m almost level 17, and I can’t express how rewarding it feels to have gotten so powerful when I felt so helpless not that long ago.

One of the things that was turning me off from continuing to play the demo is how that wasp destroyed my entire entourage. But now that I’ve leveled up quite a bit, and bought better equipment for everyone, and purchased accessories that provide immunity to silence or blindness or poison... have mastered jobs and started working on mastering new jobs for everybody... it just feels so amazing.

There are some really great attributes that I’m vying for all my team mates. In particular are the ones that provide MP restoration when doing damage, and the ones that decrease damage when defaulting. So white mage and vanguard are absolutely musts for every party member, just for the skill sets they provide. Once everyone has mastered those two jobs I’ll probably change them back to their original assignments. But right now I want to ensure every party member has those skills.

This argument genuinely baffles me. The demo is all we have to go on! I'm obviously not making some hard prediction that every track in the game will suck (if nothing else, the main theme of the game is nice). But, so far, we've heard the random encounter theme (which you'll hear a LOT), the overworld music (which you'll hear a LOT), asterisk boss music (will show up multiple times in-game), and town music (this will likely differ from town to town, though). We've gone from a game where 90%+ of the in-game tracks were amazing to hearing a decent selection of music from the sequel and none of it really landing.

A major aspect of BD's appeal, as I said, is in the music, just like a lot of FF's appeal are the Uematsu scores. So 'good enough' doesn't really cut it.

I'd also like to point out that S-E is sending out a demo of the game alongside a survey to get feedback from players and improve the final product. We don't NEED to settle for mediocrity. They want to please their existing fanbase. So, in this specific scenario, unless you really are tickled pink with the music, it's best to voice your complaints.

It's not really about "growing attached" to an older system. It's about the new system being inferior to the old system in terms of customizability and user friendliness. It also, sorry, robs the game of a bit of its identity insofar as it replaces a unique system I've only ever seen in the 3DS Bravely games with a generic JRPG monster encounter system you see in pretty much everything these days.

@Ralizah
Of course it’s all we have to go on, but it’s not enough to go on. So why use it to judge when you know full well it’s not enough to draw any kind of meaningful conclusion?

You know it’s REVO, you know the music and the demo is at least “good”, even if it hasn’t blown your socks off (which, why would it? It’s an insanely small sample size of the full list of tracks).

It’s not about “settling”. I have my own list of criticisms. I’m not “settling” for anything. It’s about poor judgment and jumping to conclusions knowing full well a very capable studio is handling the soundtrack and you haven’t heard more than 1% of what the game has to offer. I repeat, if you hear the full soundtrack from the full game and at that time are not impressed, then by all means speak on it. But to say the soundtrack is disappointing when you haven’t even heard the actual soundtrack is premature at best. Especially when you know the people doing it are good at making soundtracks, and so far it sounds pretty good to me, even if none of the tracks will make the top 10 of all time.

As for the “identity”, lots of franchises used to have random battles as their “identity”... until they didn’t. And that day has come for this series. It’s not inferior in any capacity whatsoever. In fact, random battles are actually inferior. It feels dated and old school and the only reason it was ever used in the first place is because games didn’t have the budget to actually make models for the enemies on the world map or the hardware wasn’t powerful enough to handheld it. There’s a reason that the bigger a game’s budget, and the more powerful the hardware, the higher the likelihood they actually put models in for the enemies and do away with these 30 year old systems.

If you want to talk about generic, random battles are as generic as it gets. There’s a reason the one aspect people praised and agreed upon in Pokemon Let’s Go was the fact they finally joined the rest of the civilized world with actual monsters on the map. This game is a huge leap forward for the series and it would be incredibly regressive to hold it back with random battles. I’m not saying you can’t like random battles, and even I think they’re fun in some games, but to criticize them for not keeping them? That’s not logical. This is something that needed to happen. And kudos to them for doing so.

The enemies on the map are an asset to BD, and I can only imagine how bland and empty it would feel running around in this gorgeous world without a single enemy in sight. Why? Why do that? How in any way is having an empty world better than having a world full of enemies that walk around and chase you and run from you, that actually gives you full control and how much you choose to battle and which enemies you wish to engage with? You lose nothing by doing so and only gain.

@Ralizah
So, I’d like to share a personal story.

Back in 2013, when DKC Tropical Freeze was announced, I was through the roof with excitement. In all my years of watching games be announced I have never been as excited as I was during the 2013 direct. Seeing all these games that I had played as a kid or in previous years brought to life in full HD was more than I could handle. And being younger back then I had lot more emotional variability.

I remember when they announced David Wise was doing the soundtrack. I couldn’t have been any happier. David Wise? THE David Wise? I knew he made great soundtracks and I knew I was in for one of the best ever.

But then, leading up to launch, they started showing some gameplay videos. And in one of these gameplay videos they showed the world 1 boss against the seal. And during that Bossfight the music was completely different than anything I was expecting. In fact, I found it to be downright horrendous. What was this nonsense? I was excited for a proper David Wise soundtrack with all the emotional pull of a full orchestra, and here I was listening to some heavy metal synthesis that sounded like monkeys in a zoo.

I was livid.

I took to Facebook to send a message to retro studios letting them know just how displeased I was. And in that message I really let them have it over how bad I thought the soundtrack was. I’m quite sure they don’t respond to messages as a direct result of what I sent them. Because I had messaged them once before that and actually got positive feedback in return! They never answered me after this message though. Even after apologizing years later.

I was so sure they had ruined the game. I was so sure this masterpiece, this gem of a game, was absolutely ruined.

The thing is, the game released and it turned out to have one of the absolute best soundtracks of any video game I had ever played in my entire life. It was exactly what I was hoping for. And that one stage was the only one that I wasn’t particularly fond of. Sure, there were some better than others but that was the only one that actually gave me a real negative impression. So seeing that gameplay video really mislead me as far as what the end result of the soundtrack was going to be.

And ever since, I have learned my lesson quite well when it comes to judging a soundtrack prematurely. So when I hear people bashing a game, saying the soundtrack is a disappointment, saying it’s not what they had hoped for, despite going off limited information and knowing the composer has historically delivered, gives me flashbacks to my own experience and my poor judgment in jumping to conclusions with DKC.

And hopefully, this story sheds some light into where I stand on this.

It's enough to go on for the demo, which is all we have to sample and discuss. What's the point of even posting on a forum about it if you're going to police what people can or can't extrapolate from it?

Moreover, it's much more rational to speculate based on available evidence than it is to insist that everything will be alright in the final product when that runs counter to the quality of the available sample.

And you keep insisting how it's a tiny sample, but you know as well as I do that probably 30%+ of the game, at least, will be spent hearing the random battle and overworld exploration music. Which makes the quality of the available sample even more important.

As I said, you'll be hearing the random battle and overworld exploration themes a lot, so that "1% of the music" statement is just laughably wrong when it comes to the in-game experience.

Anyway, it's still in development, so they can and should change the music we heard in the demo to tracks that are of a higher quality. And they likely will if people actually respond candidly to the survey instead of automatically adopting an irrational bias toward positivity.

It's like you're being deliberately obtuse. Nobody is talking about normal random battles, where you randomly get assaulted with enemy encounters with no say over the encounter rate. But BD's system, which gives you full customizability over the random encounter rate, objectively gives the player more control over how often they encounter enemies. It saves time when grinding. If you need to run through a dungeon in order to obtain an item you missed, it lets you do so without having to dodge large enemies in cramped hallways, which, sorry, can be almost as annoying as normal random encounters.

It's fine to not like the system, but sacrificing a more versatile, user friendly system in order to see a bunch of enemy icons stumbling around the world map is NOT a step forward for the series for a lot of Bravely fans.

@Ralizah
deliberately obtuse

I could say the same for you.

There’s no circumstance or argument that can be made that can convince me having an empty world and empty dungeons with old school random encounters is a better system. You have nearly the same level of control now. You can’t turn encounters all the way off but I’m sure there’s items in game that will do that. And you can out run 95% of enemies if you want so it’s not really an issue anyways. And even if there’s not the sacrifice in the overall experience just so that you can have encounters turned off once in a blue moon... doesn’t even remotely compare.

And they’re not just “enemy icons stumbling around”. That’s deliberately misrepresenting the game to try to further your argument. They are actual in game models with AI that roam the world, chase you, run from you, etc. it’s an amazing improvement. How would you like Persona 5 to go to random battles, or Final Fantasy? After all, it gives “more control”, right? After all, they’re just “enemy icons stumbling around”, right?

much more rational to speculate based on available evidence than it is to insist that everything will be alright

Except that’s the exact opposite of reality. The reality is you’re insisting it’s garbage while I am simply proposing that we wait to have more information before jumping to conclusions. I’m not insisting everything is all right- I said three freaking times that I don’t know how it’s going to turn out. But I think it’s worth waiting and seeing before writing it off.

@JaxonH Persona 5's implementation of enemy encounters on the map is much more skillfully done. So, no, I wouldn't prefer it.

As to the Final Fantasy game? It honestly depends. Some FF games are designed with random encounters in mind, and play better as a result. Some, like FFXII, would be unthinkable with random encounters.

It depends on the game. Not every game needs to adopt the exact same enemy encounter system.

Anyway, I get it: you'd prefer to see enemy models mill around the map or in dungeons rather than to have more control over the encounter rate. And that's fine. Lots of people prefer aesthetics to functionality (even if I happen to think the enemy models don't look great on the overworld map, especially blown out of an appropriate scale). Those enemy models did become obnoxious in the one in-game dungeon, however, and I doubt that would change in the proper game.

The person misrepresenting the available options, however, is definitely yourself. You know as well as I do that I'm not arguing of vanilla random battles.

Anyway, you're putting words in my mouth. I never said the music "was garbage." It's not. It's just not at the level of quality that I think it should be. Based on the way you're skirting around talking about the actual music we've heard in the demo, I'm guessing you feel similarly. It's... OK. Decent. Not something you'll be humming to yourself later.

Is that indicative of every track in the game? Probably not. But if this is the music that we'll be hearing for tens of hours (and IT IS if it doesn't change, because JRPGs like this feature a lot of battles and a lot of overworld exploration), then I'm disappointed by that, and want that to change. And if you feel the same way, you should let them know that in the survey.

@Ralizah
I think, as a suggestion, if people really do want Random Encounters they should ask SE to provide them as an alternate playstyle. In fact I would be totally in favor of that because more options is always better than less. And who knows, I may even find a use for it at some point.

I just don’t want to see it in place of enemies on the map. If it’s a choice between the two I want to see the series progress beyond these relics, these vestiges of dated game design (which, I understand that Bravely Default did do it better with the slider, but it still deprives you of the joy of seeing the enemies and attacking at will).

And yes, I agree the music isn’t anything to hum based on the demo, but I certainly don’t think it’s bad. In fact I think it’s pretty good, just not exceptional. But as I just explained in my trip down memory lane, that’s not necessarily a concern for me... not yet anyways.

I would love to provide my feedback to them, unfortunately they didn’t send me a survey.

This is a stupid game to make this claim on. Bravely Default, by design, BY ITS VERY TITLE, exists to be a counterpoint to the idea that game design from the 90s is dated game design. The title is called that specifically for DEFAULTing to an older style of JRPG, and that is brave to do so when much of the industry doesn't (at least the higher end, expensive side of it).

This would be like if the next Shovel Knight had solid hand drawn characters over a pixel art look, and people defended by saying WELL PIXELS ARE DATED.

And I would absolutely defend Bravely Default by default for doing so, since its attempts and "dated" ideas humilated the last FFXIII game's garbage innovative garbage. Honestly better at things in some regards than the older FF games tbh. Much prefer its combat to ATB. And in fact, the reasons the game lost me is that the characterization was LESS like the old JRPGs and more like a really poor man's Tales of game or something. So it would've been better if it was MORE "dated"

@kkslider5552000
That’s not really true.

The classics can still be reinvented without relying on dated gameplay mechanics. When people buy games reminiscent of times past, they like the basic construct but they want the dated gameplay systems updated.

For example, when people buy games like this, most don’t actually want to not be able to save their game but once an hour. They like to save anywhere. They like auto save points. You can make a game that hearken back to the classics while still updating the game design to the expectations of the modern era.

Which... is exactly what they’ve done.

And, I’ll reiterate what I just said. I am all for an alternate setting in the options. And, if enough people ask for it, maybe they’ll listen.

except the first game proved you can use random battles as long as you give people control on how random they really are. It was honestly exceptionally clever, and I say this as someone who otherwise doesn't particularly like random battles, but by god if they didn't work around that.

@kkslider5552000
I never made the argument you “can’t” do it. Sure, they can. It works. The game can still be fun.

I just don’t think it’s preferable and the fact they’ve moved on from that system means they don’t think it’s preferable for most gamers either.

@JaxonH Well, I'm certainly not going to argue in favor of restricting options. If there was a way for both of us to get what we want, that'd be ideal. And if I liked the rest of the demo, on-screen enemies would be... well, fine. Not my preference, but not a deal-breaker.

And I want to emphasize, since I might be sounding overly harsh: I'm not giving up on the game, or concluding that I definitely won't like it. The developers are clearly seeking feedback, and I'm hoping they'll be receptive to it.

I'm glad you're happy with the demo. It's doubtful any changes made will make it worse, so you'll likely be satisfied with the quality of the game regardless of how little or drastically it's changed.

Did you check your spam folder, btw? Mine was in there.

I disagree. I think it did work quite well and it made it stand out, now that its the norm. I kinda respect that more than just going with the easy, universally accepted idea of what works. Which again...is the point of the series.

Like for example, I don't like the Splinter Cell series. Never got into them, made me uninterested in the stealth genre for ages, not my thing. But the one that made it a bit more action orientated, and came out on the Wii U...I probably would've liked more but I respect that way less. Not like I'm gonna get it regardless, I don't need a Splinter Cell action game. Same here. Even if this appealed to me more, I respect them sticking with the other one better and its not like I'm buying these games anyway, so I don't really want them to appeal to me? (unless they suddenly become great story tellers, I'd like that) And if they even proved me wrong about random encounters, they clearly have something that others don't.

@Ralizah
Ya, I checked all my junk and spam. It’s MIA.

I did find a survey posted on reddit though and filled that out. It was only 1 page though. Not sure if that was the same survey they sent out but, beggars can’t be choosers.