Blair Loveday
I remember the original Bravely Default launch being something special.
Final Fantasy 13 and 13-2 had shown the direction that the iconic JRPG series was going and some of us craved that classic JRPG turn based action. Bravely Default demonstrated to us that Square Enix was able to evolve Final Fantasy and give us something old at the same time with its launch on the 3DS.
Now thirteen years later Square Enix has released the 3DS port Bravely Default: Flying Fairy HD Remaster to Switch 2.
If you haven’t played Bravely Default before, it’s a banger.
The story follows the warriors of light who need to restore the 4 elemental crystals who have fallen into darkness. Sounds pretty Final Fantasy like right?
Well, the four heroes are all really interesting. Tiz is the sole survivor of a village that got destroyed by one of the corrupted crystals, Ringabel is an amnesiac trying to figure out what’s going on, Edea left an army that was trying to capture Agnes, and Agnes use to live in service to one of the crystals before it became corrupt. In many ways we have four JRPG tropes mashed into one game, and in other ways the mashing together makes it unique.
Anyway, they all need to work together to uncorrupt the crystals. Their journey takes them across the country as the story has some great twists and turns. It is all very classic JRPG and if that is what you are craving, then it is exceptional at it. The gameplay is pretty standard turn based JRPG action, with attacks and magic on your character’s turn. What is fun is that you get BP that allows the characters to do multiple actions in a turn until they run out of BP, you can go into negatives but have to recover if you do that.
This remaster brings a whole lot of upgrades. The whole game has been tidied up to look way better on Switch and the TV. It still retains it’s janky edged look, but with the games upscaling it looks way more stylised. The cut scenes have been given a much bigger upgrade and looks properly good.
This version comes with some fun new features like the game corner. There is a couple of brand new mini games here that use joy cons that can reward you with some stuff. There is a rhythm game and an airship simulator. The games were perfectly fine, but at least add a nice break to the gameplay to do something different. Doing so can earn you some amazing rewards like being able to increase or decrease the random encounters.
Bravely Default: Flying Fairy HD Remaster is one of the best cases for a remaster.
The base game is there and still shines, it looks a whole lot nicer, and there are some new features there to make it worth playing for fans of the original. This is a cracker of a release for the Switch 2 and is well worth checking out for JRPG fans.
Released: June 2025
Rating: PG
Platform reviewed: Nintendo Switch 2
Genre: JRPG
Developer: Cattle Call
Publisher: Square Enix