One of the best role-playing games on the Nintendo 3DS was Bravely Default, a unique little game that’s now remastered on the Switch 2, but not without its faults.
The original game was full of charm and adorable character designs by Akihiko Yoshida. The functional premise of the game had you either Default (guard) for each turn or Brave multiple attacks that would put you at a disadvantage on the subsequent turn.
It was a fascinating risk-reward setup that played with the turn-based nature of most modern role-playing games. Coupled with the lovely art style, Bravely Default had a real charm to it that is sadly quite rare these days.
So, to have Bravely Default updated in HD for the Switch 2 was great news. While the stereoscopic 3D elements of the original 3DS game would be lost, you’d still have an updated version available for an even larger audience.
That would be true if more care had been taken with the game.
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This is not to say the game is bad, far from it. It plays beautifully, and the main characters still look good in their new HD format, but sadly, most of the other enemies are not so impressive.
This is because the original Bravely Default was developed for the 3DS, with all the graphical restrictions that entail.
In that the polygon count for the main characters and enemies was very restrictive, doubly so because the game had to support the 3D gimmick of the 3DS, effectively doubling up the rendering passes.
All of this is entirely fine for the 3DS, but when you come to something like the Switch 2, which has an enormous graphical capacity relative to the 3DS, you need to do some more work on the characters and enemies to compensate.
Unfortunately, despite this game being a Switch 2 launch title, not enough time and care were taken in increasing the graphical fidelity of the enemies and some of the main characters.
While the backgrounds look lovely and most of the main characters look decent, the enemies are very basic, and it is sadly overly jarring.
One of the big elements of Bravely Default’s charm was its portrayal of its characters. With the game originally released on the 3DS, the art style leaned into those graphical limitations, and it worked wonderfully.
Here, though, it just really feels off, doubly so when Bravely Default II on the Switch had a really high level of graphical fidelity, especially compared to this release.
So while this new HD version of Bravely Default plays as good as its 3DS forebear, it looks a lot worse than the last Switch entry in the series.
Which, for a launch Switch 2 game, is deeply unfortunate. If only more time and money had been spent on updating the game models to something closer to Bravely Default II or even further than that, then this could have been a very special release.
While, on the one hand, it’s great that Bravely Default is widely available again, on the other hand, it does feel underwhelming when it comes to the HD execution.
Overall, Bravely Default: Flying Fairy HD Remaster is still a solid game in terms of how it plays, but it needed more time and money to really make this a proper HD remaster. As such, this feels like a lost opportunity and something that should have been treated with more care.
Bravely Default: Flying Fairy HD Remaster
Platform: Nintendo Switch 2
Developer: Cattle Call
Publisher: Square Enix
Released: 5th June 2025
Price: $39.99
Score: 7/10
Disclosure: Square Enix sent me a copy of this game for the purposes of this review.
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