Developer-Claytechworks

Publisher-Nintendo

Format-Switch

Release-Out now

F

or a while, the third Bravely Default game is as confounding as its title. We’re loath ever to say of a game “it gets good after 20 hours” – anything that takes that long to find its feet probably isn’t worth persevering with – but suffice it to say for the first two chapters it’s a bit of a slog. That its story largely covers well-trodden ground hardly helps: it begins with a shipwrecked amnesiac washing up on the shore of a strange kingdom before moving onto elemental crystals and heroes of light destined to save the world from a terrible fate. And since the two 3DS entries we’ve had Octopath Traveller, another throwback to JRPGs of yesteryear, but one whose battles carried a sense of visual drama that’s severely lacking here.

It’s a dawdler, too. One of the joys of the original and its equally fine, if less celebrated, successor was the way it streamlined the typical genre grind, letting you quickly amass job points to diversify your party’s skill set, ushering in a startling range of tactical possibilities. You can still chain encounters with the right item, but they’re no longer random; rather, you need to seek out and strike (or bump into) enemies in the field or within dungeons. Each represents a group of opponents, but there’s no telling how many you’ll face: you might encounter one or two relatively easy foes, but it could just as easily be six tough ones. We have enemies sprint in our direction – suggesting they fancy their chances against us – that we send packing within one turn, and groups of six turn tail and flee as we approach (further sapping our will to pursue the grind) only to put up a fight, enough to make us glad we stocked up on Phoenix Downs. It hardly helps that it seems to betray its own rules. Attack an enemy in a dungeon, you’re told, and you’ll start with the advantage. Yet sometimes they’re arbitrarily allowed to get in a couple of free hits first.