4/5 ★ – jprott's review of Bravely Default.

The story of Bravely Default is one about perspective and challenging your preconceived notions as you learn more about the world. In the beginning, it is simple to assume that the crystals going dormant causes the world to be thrown into chaos and that you should side with Agnes on her quest to restore them. However, as the game goes on, you learn that perhaps there is some merit to those who question the teachings of crystalology. In terms of gameplay, this is your classic turn-based JRPG but with a twist of the brave system. With this system, you can brave to add an extra attack to your turn or default to store up your BP. If you save 3 BP, you can use an extra 3 abilities in one turn and then follow it up with another 3 extra while going into BP debt. This allows you to huge attacks and clear enemies very quickly. Because of this combat system, there is a lot of menu actions that you have to take for each battle. Fortunately -- and this is one of the things I loved most about the game -- there are a plethora of quality of life features that enable you to play through some of the more tedious aspects of JRPGs more quickly. There is the auto battle system which remembers the moves you did last and repeats them, a toggle to speed up battles from 0x to 2x to 4x, and a way to enable or disable random encounters in the world. These were all fantastic for times that I wanted to grind and times I wanted to just progress through the story. Another aspect of the gameplay I enjoyed was the job system. Any character can be changed to any job at any time, and you level up jobs alongside your characters experience bar. Once you have learned a passive ability for a job, you can choose to use that ability even when you switch to another class. This leads to an almost infinite number of builds you can do and figuring out which jobs worked well together was one of the best parts of the game. For example, by the end, I was using abilities from ranger, ninja, and monk to form a physical damage powerhouse that could dish out max damage every turn. The only thing preventing me from having this game as one of my favorites of all time is the end game. [SPOILER] When you awaken all 4 crystals and go to the pillar of light, instead of restoring the world, it takes you to a parallel world where you have to do it all over again. To get the true ending, you have to do this FIVE times before you finally break the cycle and see the true ending. I couldn't help but feel like this ending could have been streamlined a bit better so it didn't feel so time-waste-y. Despite the end game and conclusion to the story, this was one of the better JRPGs I have played with an incredible combat and job system. I give it a 7.9 -- just below a great game but one that I would still recommend.