Demo Time: Bravely Default II (Final Demo) (NS)

Maybe I should not be writing an article after only playing 09:26 of a game that allows for you to play for five hours?  I mean, I only experienced about 3% of what was available, although I guess you could speed your way through the battles and dialogue to see more than the average person, but what would the point be since you cannot carry over your game from this demo to the main game?  This demo, apparently the Final Demo, lets you play the first five hours of Chapter 1, happening immediately after the prologue, so it does make a bit of sense that what you would have done in the prologue would have in-game consequences to where you are at in Chapter 1.  Too many variables.  But again, for me, I stopped after just under 10 minutes because I felt that I had gotten all I needed to know out of the game.  But please continue to read on because I apparently have more to say.

I at first was not even sure that I wanted to download and play Bravely Default II for reasons that now seem silly on my part.  I knew about Bravely Default and Bravely Second: End Layer when they were released on the 3DS but I never played them for reasons that I think had to do with not wanting to pay full price for a 3DS game at that time.  I think I might have even retained a bit of a sour taste in my mouth from my experience with Final Fantasy: 4 Heroes of Light the same year that Bravely Default was released.  And then I did not consider Bravely Second because I never played the first game.  So when Bravely Default 2 was being announced for the Switch, I was a little confused as to what was being released.  For the longest time, I thought that it was just a port of Bravely Second (forgetting that the second game in the series was not just Bravely Default II).  I was then under the impression, after finding out that this was its own game and not a port, that because I never played either of the two previous  Bravely games that I would be lost by jumping into the middle of a story (and not in the good kind of way that is designed to make sense) with pre-established characters and backstories that I knew nothing about.

So I started Bravely Default II (Final Demo) on the Normal difficulty setting, was told about the five hour time limit, that the game file from the demo will not transfer over to the final game and began my journey from wherever I was to the city I was directed to go to.  I moved my characters around on the overworld map, rotated the camera 360 degrees and engaged in battles with a couple of visible monsters; I think I got into a total of three fights in two ecosystems and fought two different types of enemies.  I was still not 100% sure about the fighting mechanics and what the Brave and Default were in the fight menu, but after reading an article on The Verge, that made a little more sense; I was thinking it was similar to the SP meter in Octopath Traveler (being my only point of reference), but it appears to be a bit different, but I am sure that that will be covered in the as yet unplayed Prologue.  After the three battles, I decided that I had a semi-good-enough feel for combat and headed into the first town I found (being what I think my goal was), watched a conversation between some of the characters that I was not really following, and then called it good.

I feel like I am already familiar with the character art style as it was used in the aforementioned Final Fantasy: 4 Heroes of Light, but the two things design-wise that might take more time getting used to is the naming mechanic for these characters [Seth (??), Gloria (Estefan), Elvis (Presley), Adelle (Adele)].  That might be a bit shallow and I really hope that they do not take on the personality traits of their namesakes, or at least Elvis doesn't because I already do not like the look of Elvis here.  The petty side of me really wants him to tip his fedora at some point to a woman and say "M'lady" just so I can dislike him even more.  This probably means that I will end up liking him if/when I play the full game.  The second thing was the voice acting for the characters I was not sold on.  Sure it is a personal taste thing and nothing against the people who were hired and performed their lines, I just recognize that I am an old person who grew up and was/is used to not having dialogue spoken in RPGs that I play, but there are a number of obvious exceptions like Fire Emblem: Three Houses.  

That is really about it.  I feel like I got enough out of those meager nine-and-a-half minutes that I spent, which was much shorter than the time I have spent writing this article that I am now tracking the price for the physical game on a couple of websites as I am not really in the position to shell out $60 on another JRPG when I already have a few lined up (and I am sitting happily at 18h32m in Final Fantasy XII on the Switch).  Maybe Christmas 2021 I'll have something to ask for, or it will already be added to my spreadsheet on Google Drive, which is sitting happily at just over 2,000 hours.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
The Clinky Noise