Square Enix announced Bravely Default 2 at the 2019 Game Awards Thursday night, confusingly the third game in the throwback JRPG saga after Bravely Default and Bravely Second: End Layer, both released for the Nintendo 3DS.
Bravely Default 2 is coming to the Switch sometime in 2020. It’s being created by Square’s Team Asano, who also produced the original Bravely default as well as fellow Switch JRPG Octopath Traveler. In a follow-up to the announcement, Nintendo of America tweeted that players can expect to take the latest incarnation of the Heroes of Light to a new world in search of the legendary four crystals in the newest Bravely game
The team behind the Bravely series & Octopath Traveler return with #BravelyDefault II, coming exclusively to #NintendoSwitch in 2020! Expect a brand-new world, new Heroes of Light, and music from Revo in this successor to the original Bravely Default. https://t.co/N21DTjz7GO pic.twitter.com/BV3oitqMvB
— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) December 13, 2019
Bravely Default was a traditional top-down, turn-based JRPG in the vein of early Final Fantasy games. It innovated, though, with the use of “brave points” in combat. In addition to the regular attack, magic, run, and item commands, players could choose to default, which acted like defending and accumulated brave points for players. By spending points accumulated through defaulting and those earned each turn, players could take multiple turns in a row, executing combos and racking up damage. Players could also elect to spend brave points into the negative, but if they did so, that character would be unable to act again until they had returned to the positive.
Bravely Default was released for 3DS in 2012 and took place in Luxendarc. It is 2016 (2015 in Japan) sequel was a direct continuation of the Bravely Default storyline occurring two years later and featuring returning characters from the first game. Outside of the main series, Square also put out a free-to-play mobile game in 2017 called Bravely Default: Fairy’s Effect. All three games in the series so far were created as a collaboration between Square and Silicon Studio, but the latter’s involvement hasn’t been confirmed yet for Bravely Default 2.
