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baconpal · 4 years

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Bravely Default and BD2

Here it is, the partially prompted bravely default rant/retrospective/whatever the fuck!

With the announcement and demo of bravely default 2 out now for a bigger market than the original game ever had, I feel that as a massive fan of the original I should put some amount of effort into explaining what the appeal of the original is, why bravely second missed a lot of the appeal, and why bravely default 2 has been very, very worrying so far.

If you care about any of that, come on in and I'll try to actually avoid spoilers this time and make this a more legitimate recommendation of a game than usual.

THE APPEAL OF BRAVELY DEFAULT The games obviously have a beautiful art style, especially when it comes to the backgrounds. Every city is like a painting, a beautifully composed shot that you see from just one direction to give you one very strong impression. While the overworld and dungeons are fully 3d and do not have as strong of an artistic impact, they are still very competent and have good colors and cohesive elements. The character design, including the job outfits, the monsters, and all the villains are just top notch. Simple, evocative designs that make the most of the 3DS' limited hardware and build upon the teams skill in making handheld games look good. (its the same team that did the ff3 remake and 4 heroes of light, which looks absolutely kino on original DS) The music is also consistently excellent, with great use of motifing, a full and varied orchestra, and many good slow paced tracks for most of the non-combat segments. Shit like "Conflict's Chime" being the main battle theme, "Infiltrating Hostile Territory" being a common dungeon theme, and "That person's name is" as the rival boss themes makes even the seemingly repetitive songs a constant joy to listen to.

The story is pretty decent, it's not the best part of the game, and there are definitely some aspects of the story some people loathe, but the characters (specifically ringabel fuckin love him) are pretty good and the make for an enjoyable experience. The side material like D's journal are really well done and integrate into the main narrative well for how tucked away and ignored it is.

The gameplay and systems are also some of the best of any RPG I've played, and I've played far too many. The job system from ff3 and 5 is brought to an even greater depth with the addition of universal job abilities, allowing any character of any job make use of another jobs features to create an endless depth to strategy. The way various jobs can mingle together, and how no job is completely perfect on its own makes for very compelling team composition and unit design. The extensive amount of jobs helps as well for replay value and for assuring that no easy winning strategy is found by all players.

The BP system makes battles take on a very unique pacing as the player and enemies can choose to save up turns or blow them all at once to make more complicated strategies possible, or to make the most of an enemies vulnerabilities. This powerful option gives the player a meaningful way to capitalize on their knowledge of the game, while also allowing them to make truly detrimental mistakes. That may sound not good if you're a fucking baby, but nobody wants an RPG you cant lose, but losing because you fucked up is much better than losing because the enemies are just stronger than you or anything to that effect.

But the single greatest part of bravely defaults, which creates the games wonderful balance and unique design philosophy, is that the player is expected to hit the level cap long before finishing the game. Reaching level 99 should occur somewhere just after the middle of the game, at the point where the player has access to almost every job and has encountered almost every type of threat. Reaching level 99 brings with it a certain security, the implication that from then on, all enemies will also be level 99, and that any failure to defeat an enemy will be a result of a bad strategy or the players own mistakes. The game is not easy, and is certainly intended for veteran final fantasy players used to the games with job systems and changing up your entire party to combat a single encounter. Leveling up is not a slow grind part of the game, as you have a lot of control over the speed and frequency of battles, and it is not difficult to keep up with the games level curve.

The other layer to this unique design is that the game expects you to "cheat", or use strategies that would be overpowered and frowned upon in most other games. Bravely default easily expects you to know or discover strategies such as: applying a status to all enemies and killing every enemy with that status using another spell, cycling a counter move over and over to have a nearly invincible party member, applying a healing attribute to a self-damaging character to get huge damage at little cost, casting reflect and dangerous spells on your own party to bounce them at the enemy, or duplicating a move that does maximum damage 15 times in a row. The game builds all of its encounters with the knowledge that your team will be the maximum level and that you will be using the most vile tactics you can come up with, and the game will do the same. Bosses and even common enemies will employ equally vile tactics using the exact same moves that you have access to, meaning you can learn from your enemies or quickly grasp the enemies strategy through your own experiences. One of the late game dungeons is entirely optional, but involves several fights against parties of 4 just like your, using the same jobs and skills you have gained during the game as a perfect test of your ability to develop counter-strategies, instead of relying on your own overpowered tactics. This type of design is really not something you find in many games due to the prominence of grinding or the lack testing strategies, and it is the most true appeal of bravely default to me.

BRAVELY SECOND EXISTS I GUESS So bravely second, a direct sequel to bravely default, definitely is a video game. It uses the original game as a base to generate more content, but completely misses the appeal of the original, and the new content added makes the experience even less focused. Overall, it's still a fairly alright RPG, but it fails to follow up on bravely default in a meaningful way or to provide as compelling of a gameplay experience. Here's some of the things it fucked up.

The game reuses almost everything the original game had, including the same music, world map, and most of the original's towns and dungeons, while adding a few of it's own. Going through areas you've been before never feels good, and the new areas lack the quality or brevity of the original game, leading to uninteresting areas that overstay their welcome, despite being the only break from repetitively reused content.

This extends to the classes but in an even worse sense. One important trait of the original jobs is that they were not perfect by themselves. While every job provided some useful abilities to be shared with other classes, or provided a good base with which to make a character, no class was without flaws. The new classes in bravely second are a lot of the opposite, they are closed loops that think of everything they could have to make a good standalone character. The 4 starter classes you get in bravely second are all brand new, and there's almost no reason to use any class besides those 4 as they are just insanely good. The priest and magician specifically augment magic in a way that makes spells infinity scalable into the end game, completely trampling on any other magic classes territory without needing the extra effort of grinding a new class out. Many of the new job concepts are actually really interesting, like going back in time to return to a healthier state, or a class that changes the stats and attributes of all units in a battle, allowing for all new kinds of strategies; but these classes lack any opportunity to be used to their full potential since they don't mesh well with other jobs and are limited by their self-centered design.

Another completely missed aspect of the original is the level curve discussed before. Bravely second only really requires you get somewhere in the ballpark of level 60-70 to comfortably beat the final boss, and getting too leveled up is really hard to avoid if you are plan to try out various jobs.

Second also fails to account for how many incredibly strong strategies the player can come up with, and even introduces some of its own strategies that it has no way to counteract, such as halfsies (the first skill the first class gets) pretty much splitting the game in two by tripling the value of items like phoenix downs, and allowing for fool-proof strategies by making 1 character focus entirely on defense, effectively making the party unkillable. Essentially, if you play second after having played the original (like any sane person would) then you will absolutely destroy the game with no sense of satisfaction.

The story is also a large step down, enough to become an annoyance, as the writing style changes to a strange romantic comedy situation with, for lack of a better term please forgive my sin, anime writing, but like bad anime writing, ya know the kind of shit that makes people write off all anime cus a lot of it is awkward and unpleasant to listen to. The story tries to mess with some big concepts like "what if new game + was a real thing???" and time travel and shit like that but it doesn't mesh with the tone the rest of the game has and that tone doesn't mesh with the world or art style and it's just a mess.

BRAVELY DEFAULT 2 SEEMS KINDA POOPIE SO FAR So unfortunately, the big appeal of bravely default being part of it's end game makes it hard to judge how 2 is gonna go given we only have a demo of the beginning, but given that the original team behind bravely default has slowly been stripped out of the series as it goes on, the outlook is bleek.

Most immediately obvious is that the artstyle has made a horrible transition from handheld to console, somehow even worse than pokemon. The areas are all fully 3d and lack the style or compositional excellence of bravely default, and the outside environment look like asset store products. The small proportioned characters with simple features to be readable on a small screen have been replaced with identically proportioned characters with excessive detail and ugly features, and look horrible up close on a big screen. Only the negatives of the art style have made it over, and everything good has been made unsavory. The character and enemy design overall is much worse as a result, everything is messy, unclear, and clashes with everything else. It's an absolutely shocking downgrade.

The characters themselves are overly hammy and feel like shallow attempts to have a similar party dynamic to the original without having identical character types, and the writing as a whole doesn't seem to have improved from second, which was already quite a step down from the original.

The gameplay also has not done anything different or interesting yet, and seems to be selling itself to people haven't heard of or gotten enough of the BP system. Enemies being on the overworld as opposed to random encounters shows they have dropped the player agency over encounter frequency, which is dumb. The battles lack any of the flow the original had, especially when using the battle speed option, as the camera does not present everything very well and changes position often as a result. Overall, I have not enjoyed the bravely default 2 demo and feel it shows nothing but a continued decline in the series that likely should have just been a single game. With the release date being set for sometime this year, I feel there is no chance any amount of player feedback could save the game or even begin to pull it in the right direction, as it seems to be fundamentally flawed with an inescapable feeling of shovelware.

SO WHAT? Basically, all I wanted to say here is that the original bravely default is a very unique experience I think every RPG fan should give a good chance (and just do all the optional stuff during the "repetitive" part of the game, it's where all the best content is you bozo) and that the sequels are NOT the same experience. I guess it's kind of mean to just say "hey don't buy or like this new thing cus its not like the old thing" but people should know why there's a bravely default 2 in the first place, and should fight for what made the original great. I worry that BD goes down the same sad path that FF did, becoming a completely hollow, middling series that strayed so far from it's home that a whole new series had to be made to give the fans of the old style a place to go.

Thanks for reading, and hope you got something out of it.

#bravely default #bravely series #bravely default 2 #juvenile rant #vote now for the next rant! including things such as The Great Ace Attorney and why it's kino #or why i think arms is a really well designed game even tho i'm fucking shit at it #very exciting topics indeed #or ya know whatever other shit you think i have a lot to say about

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bikechatter · 6 years

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Meet the BikeCrafters: Makeshifter Canvas Works, Velo Gioielli, and Filmed by Bike

In case you haven’t heard, Portland’s bike-centric holiday gift fair is back! BikeCraft 2017 is December 15-17 at the Bike Farm (1810 NE 1st Ave.)

This year our friends (and BikeCraft veterans) at Microcosm Publishing have taken over the reins and it’s sure to be one of the best ever.

If you’re new to all this, BikeCraft was a simple idea I had back in 2005 to bring people together and celebrate Portlanders who make bicycle-inspired arts and crafts. Seeing so many beautiful, fun and talented people come together on a cold winter night that first year remains one of my fondest memories.

12 years later I couldn’t be happier that one of my most trusted friends and former colleagues, Elly Blue, is co-organizing the event along with veteran BikeCrafter Brian Echerer (see below) and Microcosm Publishing founder Joe Biel. You probably know Elly from The Portland Society, her writing and publishing, or her two dozen successful Kickstarter projects. Elly is currently co-owner and marketing director at Microcosm.

With just over a month until the big event, we want to introduce you to this year’s vendors. Elly has written up short interviews and we’ll be posting 3-4 at a time. Here’s the first roundup featuring: Becky Newman of Makeshifter Canvas Works, Brian Echerer of Velo Gioielli, and Ayleen Crotty of Filmed by Bike.

Makeshifter Canvas Works (website)

Becky Newman is a first-time BikeCraft vendor based in Portland. She makes colorful canvas bicycle bags and panniers that are beautifully designed and built to take a beating on a long distance tour.

How did you get started? I taught myself to sew in high school, and for years I up-cycled clothing and outdoor gear I found at thrift stores. When I started bike touring a few years ago, I didn’t find any bike bags that matched the style and function I was looking for, so I experimented with making my own bags, and toured with them down the Oregon coast and on the Oregon Outback. I started making bags for friends, and friends of friends, and business took off from there.

Why is making bicycle bags important to you? Making bike gear is my way of making a a small but meaningful dent in the bike industry–a dent that combats the racer-centric, male-dominated elitist culture that is pervasive in most of the industry. Ultimately I think riding bikes is good for communities, the environment, and personal wellness, and in offering everyday bike gear I hope to encourage people to ride more and to feel more welcome in the bike world. The materials and the design of my bags are meant to say hey, riding a bike is fun, you can carry whatever you want with you and look stylish doing it–you don’t need the fastest/lightest/newest whatever to ride a bike. It’s okay to ride slow and have a pretty, colorful bag.

What do you love about this work, and what are your goals with it? I love working with my hands, and challenging myself to learn new things, and also riding bikes and using my gear, which is essential to my job. My favorite thing about my work is that it’s so multi-faceted, so I can throw myself into a task like sewing, and then switch to bookkeeping, or sketching and designing, or market research. I never get bored. Currently I’m writing a business plan and chasing down resources so that I can move Makeshifter out of my home, and expand to a workspace where I can also offer workshops and community bike events. My long-term goal is to grow Makeshifter to impart its greatest positive impact on the bike world while maintaining its identity as a small and thoughtful company.

Velo Gioielli – Brian Echerer (website)

Brian Echerer is one of our co-organizers for BikeCraft this year. He stepped up to help because his success at the 2009 event is what launched the business that he now runs full time—a genuine BikeCraft success story!

What’s your bike craft? Cycling themed art and jewelry.

How did you get started? I starting making spoke bracelets to help pay for the MeetUp group Butts On Bikes I was running. Soon after I saw a posting for BikeCraft and asked my mom if she wanted to have some fun and make cycling themed jewelry with me as she was making jewelry already. After that first BikeCraft 8 years ago was somewhat of a success, I applied for Portland Saturday Market where I spent the next 5 years honing my skills and wares. This progressed to making upcycled art using bike parts and stained glass.

What’s your favorite thing about what you do? I love seeing bike parts as a medium for art. The more art it becomes the more I can sneak some “bike” into someone’s home as art. I also love to travel and show my work as it’s something I never would have guessed I would ever do. It’s now grown again having a space at Alberta Street Gallery where I can show my work 7 days a week.

What’s your biggest challenge with it? The art business, and having any small business, is a challenge all in of itself. The business deals with all the same challenges as any small business, not enough time, money doesn’t come fast enough and goes out faster than you want. There are positive tradeoffs for these challenges and I always work to stay positive and optimistic.

What does bicycling mean to you? This is a great question! I have asked myself this for a very long time and I never could quite put my finger on why cycling spoke to me. That is until I read Tim Krabbe’s “The Rider”. There was the answer for me, “Oh, to have been a rider then. Because after the finish all the suffering turns to memories of pleasure, and the the greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure. That is Nature’s payback to riders for the homage they pay her by suffering.” There is more to the passage, but this is what spoke to me and why I do it. It is about getting outside of yourself, the challenge, the nature and the reward in a quality of life that a self propelled machine can provide.

Filmed by Bike – Ayleen Crotty (website)

Filmed by Bike has been involved in BikeCraft for many years, touting multi-media cultural collaborations.

What’s your bike craft? Curating the world’s best bike movies and working with filmmakers from all over the world is our jam. Filmed by Bike is touring globally right now and our signature Portland festival isn’t until May. So to tide over all you bike and film lovers, we thought we’d come hang out at Bike Craft with our super-soft t-shirts, film advice, exciting news about what’s to come for 2018 and how to get involved.

How did you get started? I absolutely love that Filmed by Bike is on tour worldwide. We’re able to give our filmmakers a much broader audience and these touring shows are being used as fundraisers for super cool projects, like keeping youth bike programs operating. But Portland is how we got started. The spirit of Portland, our creative bike culture, our city’s try-anything attitude. YES YES! I can’t imagine this festival coming of age in any other city. Thank you, Portland, for 15 awesome years!

What’s your favorite thing about what you do? I love building community through creative projects. It’s pretty incredible to chat with filmmakers who live all the way across the globe and find that, even while we may speak different languages we share a common language around our passion for bikes. I’m often humored by our email exchanges; filmmakers sometimes apologize for not speaking (typing) English well, and I’m so humbled because I can barely speak another language. And really, they’re speaking just fine.

What’s your biggest challenge with it? We want to bring Filmed by Bike to even more cities in 2018! We films toured to about 30 locations in 2017 and we want to double that number in 2018. We know that when bikers tell other bikers about Filmed by Bike the momentum spreads quickly.

What does bicycling mean to you? I am drawn to biking because of the community around it, and that’s a community focused on freedom, health, thriftiness and a respect for the environment. I dig all of that.

I’d also like to ad that I think Bike Craft is such an incredible event that also builds community. I love seeing all the makers come out, admiring their handiwork and chatting with fellow bike people. It’s so rad and the perfect way to spend the winter season!

———

We agree Ayleen! And can’t wait to see you there.

Thank you Elly for these great Q&As. For more details and a full list of vendors, check the official BikeCraft website and stay tuned.

— Jonathan Maus: (503) 706-8804, @jonathan_maus on Twitter and [email protected]

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