Sometimes, there’s nothing quite so reassuring as a good old JRPG. This is a comfort blanket of a genre for players of a certain age, games that happily consume entire lazy afternoons curled up on a sofa as you slowly push numbers ever upwards. They don’t come much more comforting than those producer Tomoya Asano and his team have made an art of in recent years; dipping into Square Enix’s remarkable history of evocative greats, they’ve given us modern takes on the classic JRPG formula such as 2018’s Octopath Traveler and 2012’s Bravely Default.
Such was the success of the original Bravely Default that it saw a small number of follow-ups, though this being the convoluted world of JRPG titling it’s only now we’re getting a Bravely Default 2 – that number denoting a clean break from prior games in the same way that each new Final Fantasy presents an entirely new world, characters and story. It’s a new studio working in tandem with Asano and team at Square Enix too, with Clay Tech Studios having veterans of Bravely Default and Bravely Second developer Silicon Studio among its number.
Plenty is familiar, though, as you’d expect from a game whose main currency is nostalgia. There’s your party that takes in the amnesiac hero, an exiled princess, a roguish scholar and a stern mercenary all united on a quest for four crystals that takes them across the kingdoms of Excillant, stopping by on towns found out in the overworld and getting involved in cutesy busywork.
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