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Bravely Default Brilliant Lights is the mobile entry for the Bravely Default series, released to celebrate its tenth anniversary. As much as I would hope that Square Enix had prepared the servers for the potential flood of people trying the game out, it nonetheless went down for emergency maintenance the day after its launch on 27 January 2022. It’s not having a smooth debut, but well, that’s besides the point.
After doing battle with region lock, how’s the game?
PRESENTATION
When I first saw the preview images, I said it looks like a “simpler” version of Bravely Default II. It basically is the console game, save with new characters, free to play, and has gacha elements. You even start off in some of the same towns from the second game, and the story beats look virtually identical. Heck, even the music from II returns, since you’re not in a new new area. The story isn’t fully voiced, using stock sounds instead. There has been issues doing voice recording in Japan as of late, so if they intend to add those, it likely won’t be for a while yet.
There’s quite a bit of menuing involved so just as well they do look pretty nicely spaced and sorted out, language barrier notwithstanding.
GAMEPLAY
Combat retains the Brave and Default stances, and is turn-based. Default to gain Brave Points, or you’re free to just use 3 Brave actions in a row at the cost of not being able to act until you regain BP. The usual MP is there for any of your spells, and monsters have weaknesses you can exploit to Break them. Brilliant Lights has an actual turn order too!!! You can actually see who or what will act next!!!
The main story moves you from node to node, so there isn’t any exploration unlike the console titles. Hardly surprising, in wanting to keep things relatively simpler for mobile. As far as I can tell, there are only four basic classes for the characters to start, and the four new Heroes of Light will each fill their respective roles.
The earliest way you can improve your characters is by weapons, which can be improved in a number of ways, including raising their base level, star level, giving them additional attributes, what looks like gem sockets, refinement level, duplicates etc. You can get “specialty” weapons, so to speak, that are best suited for a certain character too. There’s an alchemy system that I didn’t really try out, because there’s some issues with that system at time of testing.
For what its worth, it feels like a somewhat watered down version of Bravely Default II, to me.
GACHA
Characters can be bought from the shop, at 2000 currency a pop. The gacha is for equipment, where you get a whopping 10% chance to obtain a R10 (the highest quality) weapon. That said, there’s still a lot of work to do to make a weapon really good, so it’s not Super generous per se. After 100 draws, you can exchange for a ticket to select an applicable weapon or artifact (accessory).
CLOSING THOUGHTS
There’s nothing wrong with Bravely Default Brilliant Lights per se. Maybe because it’s a mobile title, the simultaneous relative simplification of systems and the foreseeable grind for that equipment, that simply doesn’t appeal to me. I can’t speak for the story because I can’t judge something I don’t understand, which is a shame.
Perhaps, I would have preferred this as a full console title instead.
