Bravely Default - Been playing a lot of this lately. Currently up to the Miasma Woods, early in chapter 2.
Holy crap this game is polished! It's like they read some sort of wishlish for this. I mean...
-Adjustable difficulty, with Hard Mode being right in that sort of pleasantly challenging area I enjoy
-Encounter rate control
-Ability to control what you gain from battles if you want to grind without gaining certain things (or just want to do a LLG I suppose)
-Instant help and generally good, precise documentation on everything (e.g. Stomp is "do 1.25x damage, defence -25% for two turns" rather than anything vague)
-The ability to see all stats of previously scanned enemies
-Ability to speed up (x2 or x4) or pause battles on the fly.
-Ability to revise earlier choices for PC actions in the round without needing to cancel all subsequent actions. I don't think I've seen another traditional turn-based game do this; it's great.
-Scene skip! And the flipside of it, ability to rewatch scenes as in FFT, etc.
-Autosaving on each floor of a dungeon. Nice if you die (and on HM the game is hard enough to merit this).
-Lots of language and sound options for those of you who care about such things.
Aside from that the game is very much the spiritual successor to FF5. It's hard to find ways the game isn't better than FF5 though, and from a big FF5 fan that says quite a bit. My only real concern is the game's slower pace, but that feels awfully controllable; for now I'm watching all the scenes, doing the optional content (at least that I'm aware of), and reading the encyclopedia a lot... I imagine the game can slim down a lot on replays (which I'm already thinking of; obviously a good sign). The other possible complaint is that traditional turn-based (with somewhat randomised speed) is a bit of a strange choice in 2014, and not one I'm personally a huge fan of... but it's hard to fault the game too much, as the gameplay design is solid and the brave/default system puts a great new twist on the old system. Randoms on hard mode are pretty nasty and generally don't quite roll over and die to a brave rush (unless you spend oodles of MP) so how you approach them does matter, and the bosses... actually, boss design reminds me most of BoF1, just with a very modern/polished spin on it: unusually durable and relatively straightforward, but the game expects you to execute well and use the system against them properly to win.
The game's writing is the best of FF5 and its other successors (FFD and Blue Dragon) which is damning with faint praise to be sure, i.e. it's not a game I'd play for plot but it's not horrible at it. Tiz sucks and generally feels thrown into the game (reminds me of what I've read about Vaan from FF12; "We can't have Agnès be the main! Make some bland yet heroic teenage dude!") but I like the other three PCs. Edea is the favourite because she says the things I am thinking of.
Right now it feels rather transparent that Ringabel is Dim, somehow tossed back into the past bereft of memory, since the diary seems fairly obviously Dim's and the game went painfully out of its way to keep those two from meeting. The main thing that gives me pause on this theory is a post Captain K made last week. Hmm.
Also I am surprised how few shits are given at the PCs committing regicide. I'm sure nothing horrible will happen with that power vacuum we created.
I'm a bit surprised by just how much of a Final Fantasy this game is; all it really lacks is the name. The classes (the first five are Knight, Monk, Black Mage, White Mage, and Thief...), the items, the equipment, the crystals are all pulled straight out of FF. I guess "Flying Fairy" does sound awfully like "Final Fantasy" in Japanese...
I'm generally enjoying the game a lot! Certainly a must-play if you're still into RPGs (unless you really didn't like FF5, i.e. you're Super). If you still don't have a 3DS for some reason go change that because this system keeps getting better and better.
