Bravely Default: Demo

Just downloaded it (1867 blocks ~233mb).

It...feels like a legit return of Final Fantasy...lots of classes to figure out & mix(!), art-style & effects, orchestral music, turn-based//random encounters, fixed camera, I've entered two caves & died on the first round of battle. This game was already a pre-order, but now I can believe it.

I almost didn't want to get the demo, and let the game give a full initial impression...but I couldn't help myself.

There are no spoilers to the demo, it's more just a few simple item-quests and town/world-map run. Experience doesn't transfer, yet some items and streetpass stuff does. I may just leave it at a 1-time play and wait for the real thing now.

...anyway, the demo is out now.

I almost forgot! Thanks for the heads up! I'm downloading it right now. :D

Totally forgot about this. Thanks! Looking forward to playing it.

bravely default has the best battle victory tune ever. just sayin is all. :)

I have the full game. good game. well worth a play. the bravely/default system certainly adds an interesting twist to the battles.

I've owned this game since the european launch, but I've only played it for around 2-3 hours. Don't know why, I just can't get the motivation!

I'm playing the full game right now. Its Final Fantasy influences are quite obvious, but I like it a lot so far.

I've got it preordered. I never download demos of games simply because I don't like having sections of gameplay spoiled for me. Instead, I do research online to find out what its strengths and weaknesses are. And Bravely Default looks to be right up my alley, hence the preorder.

Except that the demo has nothing to do with the game and rewards you with exclusive content.

So you're going to want to research more

I love this game. I thought it was going to be a call back to traditional JRPGs, which it is, but I didn't realize how smartly designed it would be.

They basically removed all of the arbitrary, annoying hurdles of those games and added all of the things you always wanted but never got. Maybe the story progression still has some dumb parts, I don't know, but the core design of the combat and job systems is pretty awesome.

I was planning on buying this game when it came out but wasn't too excited about it.... now I can't wait.

I got the demo, but have yet to get around to playing it. Loving Ys Origin too much to bother with it right now. I will check it out before I buy the game though.

The demo is awesome. I love the job system and the Brave/Default mechanics are a nice touch. I just wish I lived in a more "lively" area so I could Streetpass. My area is barren of Streetpass players.

Well I sucked at the game because I didn't get a grip of the battle system and died two battles in.

And those graphics are so... awful.

Going into the city side view for the first time was really jarring, but I think the rest of the game looks great. The throne room and battle screens look awesome, mostly due to the great 3D effect. The overworld and dungeons look fine. The low res city looks bad, but I guess they really wanted to be able to pull the camera out to show the whole thing at once, which probably wouldn't have been possible with higher res textures.

The demo throws you in with a lot of options off the bat, but your characters are all classless and next to naked. Once you take a few minutes to set up their classes and abilities and equip them sufficiently, the initial battles should be a breeze.

The demo is pretty good, I like how it has the old school rpg feel tho it has something fresh in the mix. The text is however pretty small. Still playing to get the rest of the exclusive content i can pass on to the official title.

This game is already out in my country. I just downloaded the demo just now, and played for 1 hour. Got to level 4. I liked how I was getting my ass handed to me immediately lol. Had to go back and actually think about my items, etc.

I might actually go buy this on the weekend :) Got a good and addicting vibe from the game.

I tried the demo the other night, but I lost interest pretty quickly. The graphics are o-k, but they really don't look much different than what I'd seen in Final Fantasy: The Four Heroes of Light on the DS. The first couple minutes of the demo, I was relentlessly attacked by pop-up instructions. That wasn't a good start, in my book. Then the game wanted me to go get quests from people, but tbh, I'm really not in the mood for doing quests and I just wanted to go see how the battle system was.

I class changed all of the freelancers to something else - a black mage, white mage, performer and a ninja, I believe. I equipped everyone as best I could with their default weapons, and proceeded. Little did I realize, you also have to equip your magic and abilities at that point, which I had forgotten to do.

I went into a battle and fought two giant worm things in the desert. The battle screen looks, imho, kind of awful. It scrunches all four characters together on the right side of the screen, overlapping them and making them look like a sideways human centipede. The characters are not all spaced out like in most other FF games, and the camera doesn't constantly move around. So you get the same angle of them 90% of the time, huddled together in a line.

Since I forgot to equip magic, my white mage and black mage were nearly worthless, and I don't know what the performer's weapon of choice is but it sure shouldn't be a broadsword. The ninja was the only really useful class in that situation, and did impress with a flurry of katana slices. Everyone in my party got poisoned by the worms, and at the end of the battle only my black mage remained standing. I just felt kind of bored by it all. And quite honestly, I guess I was expecting something much better with all of the hype surrounding this game.

@Ovirew: You played one battle with a gimped team and decided you were bored? Equip everyone properly and go back to it, leveling up at least one job class, then you'll be able to make a clear judgment about it.

If you don't like JRPGs, then you won't like Bravely Default. But I think if you like them at all, you should give it more of a chance.

Are the items you can carry over any good? I've been hearing mixed things.

Haven't jumped into the demo yet myself, but I'm curious if it's worth sticking with for those items.

@JordanElek:

I love RPGs, but... Idk, the brief time I spent with the demo really wasn't impressing me. Maybe I will go back and give it a second look, and maybe I'll see if the 3D adds anything to battles since I seem to recall I had it turned off last time. But just because you like one RPG doesn't mean you will like all of them.

just went through the whole thing. i absolutely adored it. the job system reminded me of final fantasy tactics advance (another game i love), the combat system took some getting used to, but after learning the shortcuts to brave and default, and getting some nice class combos going on (swordmaster/knight and red mage/ninja are really fun), it was the most fun i've had with turn based combat in a long, LONG time. and the best part is that if you just want to grind or are in a hurry between places, you can breeze through fights against weaker mobs, so while the combat is deep and strategic, it's flexible enough that you can just steamroll the irrelevant stuff without cololateral damage (radiant historia, i'm looking at you)

my only annoyance was the time gated stuff on that village you can build yourself. thankfully, the demo has an exploit that lets you easily get as many villagers as you need (i stopped at 20), so i managed to build most of the stuff i wanted, enough to give me good gear to fight the dragon boss at the end. i don't think i'll ever streetpass a person that actually has the game, so transferring villagers from the demo is a godsend.

OH and i HATE how a party member won't get exp if it's dead. i just hate when JRPGs do it (and only JRPGs do it). it's like, i'm owning this boss, then he kills one of my characters on his barrage, and because of the turn order, i kill the boss before the character is resurrected. had to redo the minotaur like 3 times before i got all 4 members through, and not because i was having a hard time.

The 3D effect adds a lot to everything. The battles are multilayered and look awesome. When I first saw screens and even footage of the battles in this game, I thought they looked really awkward, too. But when I saw them on my own 3DS in full 3D, I thought they looked great.

Go back to the throne room in 3D, too. That place is particularly impressive. It makes me really excited to see the environments in the full game.

Is anyone going to get the Collector's Edition? It does not seem worth it to me, not for $15 extra.

@Sora278: This feels like a complete package, the Collectors edition. I'm digging the real-extras, and the AR cards are intriguing.

I hate to say it, but-also, maybe if S~E notices a fanbase for the oldstyle, they may still drive the FF~franchise in the right direction...so I'll be voting in that regard. (They didn't skip a beat for the DS... ...4:Heroes was a very solid game despite the cutesy factor.)

This demo is still delivering...I'm now left wondering if the demo transfer-stuff, transfers to the cart, or just the downloaded version.

Either way, this game has a lot of promise for the RPG genre...something the 3DS is currently lacking a tad.

This is the worst feeling possible when defeating a boss...

@gargungulunk: the sole reason I'm anticipating BD so much is because 4 Heroes of Light was so solid. It had quite a few flaws, but the job system was awesome. I'm hoping BD improves upon the foundation established with 4 Heroes.

Also hell yeah, colelctor's edition FTW. It's released February 7th around where I live. Can't wait.

Seems like a really sweet game, judging by the demo. Pretty graphics and complex gameplay. A bit too complex for me right now, as I'm still a Monster Hunter junkie. I can only take one big ass game at a time.