Bravely Default II

Bravely Default II follows on from the pair of games on the Nintendo 3DS, but tells an entirely new story in the land of Excillant, where sailor Seth washes ashore after a shipwreck and, together with a kingdomless princess, a scholar and a mercenary, sets out to find four stolen crystals. The premise is deliberately old-fashioned, a tribute to classic 1990s Final Fantasy, yet delivered with its own identity: hand-painted watercolor-style backdrops, paper-cutout towns, and big-headed characters that feel like animated figurines from a tabletop game.

At the heart of the game remains a combat system built around the paired Brave and Default commands. A character can hold back their turn and defend, banking up actions, or instead borrow up to three turns in advance and unleash them all at once — at the cost of standing there defenseless and taking hits for several turns afterward. This creates a gambling-like rhythm found nowhere else in the genre: every boss is a puzzle of when to go all-in and when to hold back. On top of that sits an extensive job system gained by defeating holders of so-called Asterisks, with each character combining a main and sub job along with its passive abilities. The room for building your own party setups is enormous, and some bosses practically demand a specific counter-strategy.

On Switch, the game runs stably and is visually among the prettiest turn-based RPGs on the platform, though some players minded the blurry backgrounds in handheld mode. The music is orchestrally performed, and the battle themes rank among the best the series has offered. Reception was good, with reservations about higher difficulty than previous entries and a story pace that flows slowly, especially in the first half. Today it's a solid roughly fifty hours of classic Japanese RPG for a player who wants to tinker with stats and party building. Thanks mainly to the Brave and Default system, it remains one of the few turn-based games where even an ordinary battle demands a decision that can come back to bite you.