"ONWARD, COMRADES, TO PURIFY ALL THE CRYSTALS AND FIGHT ALL THE ASTERISK-HOLDERS ALL OVER AGAIN FOUR FUCKING TIMES!" Apart from being just incredibly cool in itself, making strong use of the 3DS' gyro-sensor, it's probably the best sequel hook I've ever seen. It all culminates in the after credits video. I really appreciate the way that elements from the sequel were sprinkled throughout the game, in sometimes subtle ways. What really gets me is how much it has me invested in the sequel already. Hitting Caldisla for the first time really made me take a step back. The background art is really where it's at, though. The main characters are a real highlight. While some of the job costumes are more funny than cool, a lot of the character designs are really suited to the game. The art and design really did it for me, as well. Giving each character their own theme which plays when they use a limit break (and tying it into the mechanics) was a fantastic decision, and made their use in the final phase of The Serpent that Devours the Horizon a kind of massive pay-off.
Not just in terms of composition, though Revo and Linked Horizon knocked it out of the park with a number of the tracks, but also in terms of usage. It kind of makes me wish that the party chats were voiced, honestly. Koshimizu Ami acts the hell out of Agnes. I played the game in Japanese (thank you based Silicon Studio) and while I picked up some incongruence with the subtitles, I was really impressed by the voice work. The performances are really good as well. The game never quite escapes its own black and white morality play, but it makes a courageous attempt at times. Kamiizumi in the first world is particularly great: Edea's noble teacher, who longs for the challenge of heroic warfare, only for his invasion to cause atrocity and mayhem. I could really get into the heads of some of the characters, too. With their own motivations and feelings, sometimes conflicting, and needing to be teased out over a long period of time, they were really lively. The huge cast is a highlight in terms of storytelling, too. Particularly, I really loved the more mundane material in the opening chapters, such as the price gouging in Anchiem and the Civil War in Eisenberg. Airy's betrayal is not a new concept, and certainly it isn't a first in Final Fantasy to have the player party contributing to some nefarious end, but I felt it was executed well. The willingness of the player to discard their own agency to achieve objectives for seemingly no reason was covered in Bioshock, for example.
It was quiet note that underscored the huge cost involved in settling things with Ouroboros, and highlighted how not everything could be set right. I think the only Eternians to come out of that first world unscathed are Praline and Alternis. Particularly for Edea given that in the course of that first loop she ends up killing just about everyone she knows, including Kamiizumi and Einheria, and crippling her own dad. I particularly liked that the game ended with the party returning to first (second) world, which is by far the most bitter. I can say that when I started the game that I didn't expect to finish up on the far end of a chain of parallel worlds grappling with a closed time loop. Framing itself as a very simple, classic Final Fantasy plot, with four crystals and a darkness to dispel, it ends up telling a fascinating and at times thoroughly modern story both in terms of its concepts and its characterisation. It's not without its flaws - while at times effective in terms of storytelling, the groundhog day loop can be a real slog which means a lot of its content can be hard to get to - but I think it did something pretty special. From there I was in a good position to continue playing, and I finished the game last night in a marathon race against my own battery. Recently when I was in Sydney with a friend (who was playing a Japanese copy of Bravely Second) I started back up, did some grinding, and got my last Asterisk. So I got into Bravely Default when it was basically new, but for various reasons I stalled in chapter 6 for a long time.
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