![]() ![]() Pantomime-esque villains and all-too-familiar narratives revolving around heroes of light hoping to save the world from calamity. The platform may no longer be handheld, but at its best, that same stage-show appearance is just as fondly smile-inducing as it was almost a decade ago. Returning to the pop-up, picture-book arrangement of locales, as much the simplified, toy-like mannerism of character design, remains as novel a look in Bravely Default II as it was with the original. And with a direct sequel arriving two years later, Bravely Default took pleasure in exercising the staples of 90’s JRPG philosophy - as cliched some of them might have gotten. ![]() Appreciation for the conventions that helped build the genre, but knowledge too on how to keep that approach fresh and surprising. And just like how Acquire’s 2018 hybrid aesthetic of 16-bit, 2D sprites in a 3D voxel world both excited and amazed, Bravely Default was itself a marriage of nostalgia and reinvention. Originally starting as a Final Fantasy spin-off it may have been, the game’s brand of charming presentation and lest we forget, a rather clever subversion on the literal mechanics of turn-based combat (with its ability to store/borrow “turns” of sorts), was what granted it its own unique identity. Perhaps unbeknownst to both fans and maybe Silicon Studio alike, the 3DS outing in a way becoming the catalyst for Square Enix’s realization and secondary motion on catering to long-time fans less-than-excited for the genre’s move away from tradition. Then there’s games like Octopath Traveler and more notably, 2012’s Bravely Default. On one side, you have the less-successful ones varied their aesthetics may be and ambitious with what they hope to present, the output of names like Tokyo RPG Factory especially - now spanning three games over a near half-decade - haven’t quite stuck the landing. Over the past decade, this revisiting of the genre’s roots has offered up titles with wildly-polarized outcomes, to the point you could almost lump them all into two distinct categories. Projects that, while not to the same scale or budget as the more mainstream brands, at least offer a little more of a reconciling with the much-beloved genre’s “golden age.” A period of games that both the former Squaresoft and Enix developers contributed immensely towards. Whatever you think of the varied directions Final Fantasy is going in - not helped by the sheer scale of a back-catalog Dragon Quest has built itself to at current - you can’t fault Square Enix for offering a return to the traditional turn-based format of JRPGs.
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