Review: Bravely Default Flying Fairy HD Remaster

Developer — Cattle Call

Publisher — Square Enix

Platforms — Nintendo Switch 2 (Reviewed)

Review Copy provided by Publisher

In my humble opinion, RPGs and handhelds go together like peanut butter and jelly. Enormous adventures filled with loads of battles, quests, and level grinding are perfect on systems that can be taken anywhere. Have some empty time you need to fill? Hop into a magical world for a spell and slay a few goblins! Delightful.

This is exactly the type of fun I was hoping to have with Bravely Default Flying Fairy HD Remaster on the Nintendo Switch 2. As my first RPG on Nintendo’s shiny, new system, I was eager to explore the world of Luxendarc. Unfortunately, despite some strong gameplay systems, this was an adventure I wasn’t often eager to return to. 

I don’t want to upset fans of the original Bravely Default (released back on Nintendo’s 3DS in 2012), so I’ll start with what I enjoyed. As an RPG published by Square Enix, it’s basically a given that this game’s environments and music are fantastic. I never played the original release, but I could plainly see how much love and care was put into the gorgeous, painterly backdrops. Whether you’re in a town, the overworld map, or even the comparatively drab dungeons, the scenery is a constant highlight.

Similarly, the music is pitch perfect. It’s exactly what a classic, medieval adventure filled with magic, bravery, and peril should sound like. It has moments of gentle and mysterious twinkling, and chunks of high-energy accordion playing that make you want to fight for your life. In all honesty, I think the game’s soundtrack is my favorite part of the entire experience.

However, the combat’s not too bad either. It’s a turn-based affair, of course, and it features the titular abilities to either Brave or Default. When you decide to ‘Default’, you’re essentially skipping your turn to give yourself an additional action on your next turn if you choose to ‘Brave’. You can even ‘Default’ multiple times in a row so that, eventually, you can cash in on your defensive investments and unleash a flurry of ‘Brave’ actions in a single turn. 

It’s not the deepest system in the world, but it is an interesting way to give the game’s simple turn-based combat a tad more strategy. Of course, there’s also an immense job system that adds plenty of different combinations and abilities to your battles, but I’m not the biggest fan of job systems.

On one hand, they’re a great way to give you loads of creative freedom in how you battle. Bravely Default Flying Fairy HD Remaster does this very well with a whopping 24 different jobs to discover and master. 

On the other hand, mastering that many different jobs would be an enormous investment of one’s time. I did what I always do when job systems appear, and I only worry about enough to keep my team alive and moving through the game. As much as I love RPGs, I need a deeper reason to grab a shovel and dig deep into the grind than simply watching my stats level up. 

Usually, it’s a game’s story or characters that inspire me to crawl through every dungeon and tackle every optional challenge. Bravely Default Flying Fairy HD Remaster had nothing for me in either department. The grand journey to gather four elemental crystals is painfully generic and bland. There’s this intangible sense of dreary boredom I couldn’t shake that would appear any time the plot’s critical points cropped up. Hell, the game’s “shocking” twist was done with such unenthusiastic simplicity that I feel uninterested to even bring it up.  

While towns are loaded with personality thanks to the visuals and music, their citizens are all expressionless, uninteresting, and vague. A pretty-looking and sounding world is nice, but I never felt compelled to actually save it because it was such a dull place to explore.

All of this might sound harsh, but I have saved my harshest words for the game’s playable characters. Oh, how I despise them. Your primary protagonist, Tiz, has the personality equivalent of the flavor of water. Similarly, Agnés, Ringabel, and Edea are La Croix flavored water in that they’re almost indiscernible from normal water. Each one of them feels like a textbook example of how to create two-dimensional characters. In that sense, I think all aspiring story writers should play Bravely Default Flying Fairy HD Remaster so that they know what not to do. 

For the life of me, I could never understand why the game so regularly wants to interrupt you by encouraging you to engage in the optional side conversations with your party. In these little chats, the characters use a thesaurus to rephrase and repeat plot points that were just barely introduced. These conversations, and the overall plot itself, are all tell and no show. How do we know a character is sad or determined? Don’t worry! They’ll tell you roughly 18 times before you can travel to the next town. 

I definitely think that hardcore RPG fans will find a lot to enjoy with this game. For fans of the series, it might be worth revisiting as well. The jump to HD might appeal to some, however, there’s something to be said about the loss of the game’s nostalgic, chunky pixels on the 3DS. I looked up various pieces of gameplay for comparison’s sake, and character models look significantly worse in HD thanks to their rough polygons that were made for a specific system.

Then again, longtime fans might love to see the game they know so well in a new light! As a newcomer myself, I wasn’t terribly impressed. While the combat is just fine and the job system offers neat combinations, I found the story and its characters so crushingly uninteresting that I started to dread picking up my Switch 2 to continue the journey. Thankfully, the gorgeous music is available for streaming, as I don’t plan to revisit Luxendarc anytime soon.