The nature of such developments is unknown, but signs point towards a remaster of the first game. In October 2022, Asano said it would probably be “the best possible thing” for fans, though didn’t outright announce its development.

Bravely Default launched worldwide in 2013 for the Nintendo 3DS and initially intended to follow Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light. It mostly garnered praise for its narrative and combat, though responses to its late-game stages were mixed overall. Check out our review here.

As for Bravely Default 2, it’s available for PC and Nintendo Switch, having crossed 1 million in worldwide shipments and digital sales worldwide in December 2022. Check out our review – we awarded it an 8 out of 10 for the combat mechanics, dungeon design, bosses and soundtrack. However, its graphical style may not be for everyone, and some quality-of-life features from previous games are missing.

＼デフォルト2 祝三周年！／
年末年始企画では多くのメッセージ、
ありがとうございましたm_ _m

今年はブレイブリーシリーズの動きもなんらかお伝えできるはずですので、どうぞご注目くださいませ
浅野P

(イラストは吉浦さんより)#ブレイブリーデフォルト2 は現在セールで50%オフ！※本日2/26まで pic.twitter.com/I1ahF6Abmh

— ブレイブリーデフォルトII公式 (@BDFF_OFFICIAL) February 25, 2024

To celebrate this occasion, the role-playing game is discounted by 30 percent for Switch in Japan (while the PC version receives its discount starting tomorrow). Featuring a brand new story and setting, Bravely Default 2 features four main characters – Seth, Gloria, Elvis and Adelle – traveling the land to retrieve the four Crystals. Combat utilizes the “Brave” and “Default” systems which allows for “banking” actions for later turns.

It also offers a wealth of Jobs from the default Freelancer to Black Mage, White Mage, Swordmaster and much more. As players defeat different bosses, they’ll gain access to new Jobs and their abilities. For more details on Bravely Default 2, check out our review of the Switch version here.

https://twitter.com/BDFF_OFFICIAL/status/1473502228795502592

Bravely Default 2 takes place in Excillant and follows the sailor Seth, who washes ashore one day. His travels lead him to meet Gloria, who looks to stop the theft of the Crystals after the destruction of her kingdom. Eventually, they encounter Elvis and Adelle, the former a scholar and the latter a mercenary as they attempt to decipher a mysterious book.

Thus do the Four Heroes of Light travel across the different kingdoms and save Excillant from destruction. For more details, check out our review here. Bravely Default 2 has sold almost a million copies thus far and while the next title is in the “planning phase,” it will be another three to four years before it releases.

Speaking recently with Famitsu (translated by Nintendo Everything), Asano said that given the success of Bravely Default 2, the development team is hoping to do similar things with another game in the series. That said, though a new game is currently in the planning stages, Asano says that its development will probably take another 3-4 years.

“Bravely Default 2 was well-received by fans and as a result, we’re hoping to continue the series as we feel we can pull it off once again,” he said. “With that said, we’re still in the planning phase, and I suspect development will take another 3-4 years, so we’d appreciate if fans could bear with us.”

It’s not surprising that Square Enix already has ideas floating around for potential new Bravely Default games. Back over a year ago, Asano said that he had some ideas for another instalment in the series that could even be a mobile game. Whether that idea turned into the upcoming iOS and Android title Bravely Default: Brilliant Lights is unknown.

Meanwhile, Team Asano currently has plenty of other irons in the fire as well, including upcoming games such as Project Triangle Strategy and Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake.

Bravely Default 2 is available on Switch, and starting today, on PC as well.

Square Enix announced in a recent press release that Bravely Default 2 has sold nearly a million copies on the Switch since its launch in February- over 950,000 copies, to be exact, which is a pretty solid figure. With the game also coming to PC in just a few days’ time, it seems likely that it will continue to sell pretty well for the foreseeable future.

Bravely Default 2 is currently available on Switch, and launches for PC on September 2. You can read our review for it through here. A mobile game, titled Bravely Default: Brilliant Lights, is also currently in development for iOS and Android devices.

Bravely Default 2 is a brand new entry in the series and see the Four Heroes of Light – Seth, Gloria, Adelle and Elvis – traversing Excillant in search of the Crystals. Along with a gorgeous visual style, the RPG features new Jobs with the ability to assign one as the primary and another as secondary to benefit from mixed skill sets. This is in addition to the traditional Brave and Default combat system.

Bravely Default 2 will retail for $60 but PC players can pick it up at a 10 percent discount on Steam until September 13th. For more details on the game and its story, check out our official review for the Nintendo Switch version here.

Though the aesthetic most closely resembles Bravely Default 2, Brilliant Lights is an original story which sees several worlds throughout the series crossing over. Of course, along with familiar characters, players can also expect some new ones to also appear. The combat system has also been described as optimized for smartphones but more details have yet to be revealed.

Square Enix also confirmed in its press release that the Bravely Default series has crossed three million shipments and digital sales worldwide since the first game launched in 2012. A release window for Bravely Default: Brilliant Lights hasn’t been provided yet so stay tuned for more details in the coming months.

The original Bravely Default opened the industry’s eyes to the fact that there was a lot of demand for classic, old-school, turn based JRPGs, and though games that have followed in its footsteps certainly lack the novelty factor, they have continued to prove that there’s a market for them. The most recent, Bravely Default 2, launched for the Switch recently, and it’s been quite well received by most who have played it.

To highlight some of the critical praise the game has enjoyed of late, Square Enix have released an accolades trailer. It’s a pretty short one, showing bits and pieces of the story and gameplay, while highlighting praise for its combat system, above all. Check it out below.

Bravely Default 2 is available exclusively on Nintendo Switch. In our own review of the game, we awarded it a score of 8/10, praising its mechanics, dungeon design, combat, and more, and calling it a “a well made, mechanically expansive, JRPG.” You can read our full review through here.

Famitsu has released last week’s data for video game software and hardware sales in Japan. On the software front, there were a couple of major new releases, and the top 2 positions have been taken by games making their debuts in the charts. In first place is Marvelous’ life sim Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town, which sold over 202,000 units on its debut.

Meanwhile, Square Enix’s Switch exclusive Bravely Default 2 comes in at second place, selling over 93,000 units within the first three days of it launch. Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury, which has been a strong performer in the charts ever since it launched a few weeks back, is in third place, with sales of over 74,000 units.

On the hardware front, the Switch leads the pack once again, to little surprise, selling over 78,000 units. The PS5 also sees a noticeable jump in its sales, having moved over 33,000 units in Japan throughout last week.

You can check out the full software and hardware charts for the week ending February 28 below.

Software sales (followed by lifetime sales):

1. [NSW] Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town – 202,396 (New)
2. [NSW] Bravely Default II – 93,061 (New)
3. [NSW] Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury – 74,811 (422,784)
4.[NSW] Momotaro Dentetsu: Showa, Heisei, Reiwa mo Teiban! – 40,610 (1,974,795)
5. [NSW] Ring Fit Adventure – 19,032 (2,413,077)
6. [NSW] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 13,575 (3,699,547)
7. [NSW] Animal Crossing: New Horizons – 13,332 (6,668,414)
8. [NSW] Uta no Prince-sama Debut for Nintendo Switch – 10,588 (New)
9. [NSW] Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – 9,957 (4,175,273)
10. [NSW] Minecraft – 9,386 (1,834,873)

Hardware sales (followed by last week’s sales):

Nintendo Switch – 78,049 (74,298)
PS5 – 33,838 (25,037)
PS4 – 3,217 (2,949)
Xbox Series X/S – 1,487 (230)
3DS – 673 (827)

[Via ResetEra]

Which was why the more I played Bravely Default II, and the more it won me over, the more surprised I was at just how thoroughly it was subverting my expectations and pre-conceived notions. Bravely Default II is not the next Persona 5, it’s not the new great landmark JRPG that sets a new milestone for the genre. What it is, and what it’s interested in being, is a straightforward turn based JRPG, that fans of the genre’s 16- and 32-bit heyday will instantly take to and embrace. If you grew up playing Final Fantasy 4, 6, 7, or 9, then Bravely Default II will feel like a warm, comforting homecoming of sorts. It represents something we used to get so much of, but don’t anymore – a mid-budget JRPG that is neither interested in cutting costs and pandering to the lowest common denominator, nor in being cutting edge, or pushing the boundaries of what a JRPG can be. Rather, just on delivering more of the very comfortable same.

This warm, comfortable feeling isn’t actually apparent from the get go. Indeed, Bravely Default II actually makes a remarkably poor first impression, one that serves to reinforce a lot of the misgivings I had about the game. The storytelling feels juvenile, low-stakes, rushed, and tropey, the mechanics feel restrictive and overly tutorialized, and the graphics can take a while to get used to. However, it actually doesn’t take long for the game to begin sinking its hooks into you, and to start opening up in ways that belie the opening hours. The good news is that in under an hour, Bravely Default II is already getting into the swing of things, and it starts doing things that impress, paradoxically in all the same ways that its opening bits may have suggested disappointment.

"The more I played Bravely Default II, and the more it won me over, the more surprised I was at just how thoroughly it was subverting my expectations and pre-conceived notions."

The most immediate and striking of these is actually the graphics. While the visuals in the overworld, and during cutscenes zooming in on the chibi models, throw the divisive graphical style into sharp relief, the moment you enter a town or even a dungeon, the game shines. Hand-drawn backdrops give towns and cities a gorgeous and distinct look, and very honestly, with no exaggeration, if the entire game had looked as good as it does in cities, it would rank as among the best looking JRPGs ever. As it stands, just how good it looks in cities manages to make the contrast with the overworld and cutscene segments even more unfortunate, but simultaneously, it also helps you slowly acclimatize to the game’s visual palette.

This gradual easing into the game’s world is also reflected in other aspects – for example, where the game’s story and storytelling can come off as low-stakes and juvenile at first, it settles into a fairly epic scope, if on well trodden ground involving crystals and an impending apocalypse, pretty quickly, and outlines the parameters of the journey you will be taking through the game’s world with distinct clarity, while also introducing a boisterous cast for you to get attached to, with some generally good voice acting (though NPC voice acting ranges from middling to bad, at least in English).

Bravely Default II’s story never ends up being as self important as most modern Square Enix games, and it retains a remarkable clarity of vision and simplicity of purpose, which makes it refreshing. It gives you enough to chew on and invest in, it gives you enough context to provide a framework for your hero’s journey, but otherwise, it doesn’t beat you over the head with obnoxious made-up words, ridiculous characters, and cutscenes that can give Hideo Kojima a run for his money. In other words, Bravely Default II isn’t interested in impressing you with its story, it’s interested in pulling you into its world – and that, again, helps it resemble those games of a bygone era it is emulating in more good ways than one.

Much like its predecessors, Bravely Default II does break from said classic JRPGs when it comes to mechanics, however. Shortly after the initial hours, the game’s mechanics open up, allowing for a range of player expression that modern JRPGs seldom manage. Bravely Default II, which retains the battle system from the previous games in the series, includes an immense amount of mechanical complexity, both in combat, and out-of-battle character and party composition meta-builds.

"Shortly after the initial hours, the game’s mechanics open up, allowing for a range of player expression that modern JRPGs seldom manage. "

Battles themselves will be familiar to anyone who’s played either of the two previous Bravely games – how many actions per turn you can perform is governed by how many Brave Points you have. You get 1 Brave Point per turn, and you can bank Brave Points (up to three) to be able to perform multiple actions on a later turn, at the cost of doing nothing but defending on your current turn. Conversely, you can also “borrow” Brave Points against future turns (again, up to three) to be able to perform multiple actions on your current one even if you didn’t have any Brave Points banked – at the cost of being immobile for as many turns as Brave Points you borrowed.

Combined with a clever system of elemental and physical weaknesses and resistances (that borrows a lot from older Final Fantasy games), as well as unique abilities that players get depending on what class their characters are, and “Special” summons style attacks they can unleash upon meeting certain conditions, battles end up being extremely involved, absorbing, and enjoyable affairs. Even fighting regular enemies can be extremely fun, giving you as it does the opportunity to experiment some new strategies and combos you may not want to try for the first time during a bigger boss battle, for example.

Bravely Default II complements these combat mechanics with some ridiculously deep character building options too. Featuring a ridiculously expansive job system, the game allows the option to spec and respec characters based on your current needs while throwing little in the way of penalties. There are dozens of jobs in Bravely Default 2, and the game expects you to be switching among them across all characters at a routine basis (something that it also enables by letting you level up and max out a job extremely quickly). By allowing you to have a main job (which you get experience for and level up) and sub-job (which you retain abilities for, but don’t get EXP for), it lets you create all sorts of crazy broken and overpowered character builds.

In general, the freedom of character builds in Bravely Default II, and how forthcoming the game is with that, is indicative of another admirable tendency: Bravely Default II is also conscious of never wanting to waste the player’s time, something that is apparent in other ways too. Take, for instance, battles. While the options to control the rate of encounter frequency from its predecessors are gone, so are random encounters entirely. Enemies now show up on the overworld, and you know when you are engaging them (choosing to sneak up on and attack them on the overworld gives you the initiative in battle and starts you out with 1BP each, while being ambushed by an enemy does the opposite). In case you are adamant about not wanting to battle at all, the game includes items that repel encounters (with items that attract encounters also available). Or consider the game’s extremely generous difficulty options, which you can switch at any time to your liking.

"In general, the freedom of character builds in Bravely Default II, and how forthcoming the game is with that, is indicative of another admirable tendency: Bravely Default II is also conscious of never wanting to waste the player’s time."

There are some QoL ways, however, that Bravely Default 2 represents a step back from its predecessors. Take, for instance, side quests. These themselves can be of varying quality, but their content aside, tracking them can be a big pain. There appears to be no central log that keeps track of side quests you have taken upon, and though the travelogue map can track them for you, it maxes out at tracking only three active ones at a time – while also not including a list of side quests you have completed. Why there is no consolidated quest tracker (which is a fairly basic ask in an RPG), I don’t know, but here we are. Bravely Default II also lacks an option to save multiple party composition loadouts, something that Bravely Second allowed – which is a damn shame, because, again, the game encourages and expects experimentation with player builds, and while the menus are fairly straightforward and pleasant to use, having some frequently used loadouts saved and instantly accessible would be much preferable to finagling with individual jobs, passives, gear, and weapons, per character, every single time you want to make a change.

On the other hand, in terms of music, Bravely Default II is a very clear winner over both its predecessors, which is no small praise, given how remarkable especially the original Bravely was on this front. In terms of dungeon design, Bravely II is, again, the best of the lot, including some extremely well designed labyrinths that have meaningful substantial branching paths with great loot for the player willing to go off the beaten path, as well as some great visual variety (and some remarkably well designed boss battles with unique, exacting strategies to boot). In terms of the towns and locations you visit, Bravely Default II makes a hell of an impression, delivering some memorable cities, each with their own distinct atmosphere, aesthetic, and some catchy tunes to go along with them to boot.

There’s a lot of Bravely Default II to go through, but through that substantial run time, the quality rarely, if ever, really flags. Unlike the original Bravely Default, the game also manages to sidestep the issues of repetition that plagued those games and kept them from reaching their full potential. Of course, Bravely II never reaches the highs of those games, or even hints at the kind of greatness they did, to begin with, but it delivers an extremely consistent and comfortable JRPG experience of the type that we simply don’t get too much of anymore. If you’re a fan of JRPGs, then Bravely Default II, warts and all, will be right up your alley.

This game was reviewed on Nintendo Switch.