Schreier: So there are a lot of different opinions on Japanese RPGs in the West, and people have different feelings about them. Personally, I love the kind of "old school" Japanese RPG feel that a game like Bravely Default has, but there are some people in the west that don't like turn-based gameplay or invisible random encounters. Would you consider making a game without those features? What are your thoughts on how Western audiences look at those traditional Japanese features?

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Asano: Certainly these are rather old game mechanics when you're talking about turn-based combat or random encounters in the field. But we also feel like there's kind of a line of succession here in terms of how the features have been handled in various different games... Bravely Default I feel like is definitely suited for a certain market that likes those features, and those were really the kinds of people that we were thinking of the most when making it.

Schreier: And what do you think is the next evolution for those mechanics, those features in games?

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Asano: I think that we're already seeing here in Bravely Default a bit of an evolution to turn-based combat. For example, if you consider the Brave and Default mechanics, where you can save a turn or spend a turn, this is a certain kind of evolution of turn-based combat, I think. And also in the North American version you have the Bravely Second system which allows you to stop time and act out of turn. And I think that's another idea that is very close to evolving the way we think about turn-based combat. But I would also like to point out that if you change some of these systems too much, they start to lose the classic feel that they're referencing in the first place. So we're very careful to keep that feeling intact.

Schreier: So in Bravely Default there are 24 different jobs. Other Final Fantasy games have different numbers—some have more, some have less—and I'm curious: how do you know how many classes to use for a game like this? How do you know when the number is just right?

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Takahashi: I believe the best way to address this question is to talk about what we did in the case of Bravely Default, and the reason that there are 24 jobs here is actually based on story cues. If you have four crystals and you're talking about a certain number of jobs being associated with each one of those, we get to the number 24. And we also thought about how many jobs we could show on one screen. So there was some UI consideration as well.

Schreier: There are microtransactions in Bravely Default, and that's something that concerns some people. In this game they don't seem to be necessary—you don't need them at all to play, or to beat bosses and difficult battles. But some people are worried that because they exist, they might affect the balance in future games. And I'm wondering how you guys approach these microtransactions without hurting the balance and without making people feel like they have to use them in order to succeed.

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Asano: So I think you're referring to the SP Drinks, when you talk about microtransactions. That's an item that will allow you to charge up SP that allows you to use the Bravely Second system. And normally, you would gain one of these SP per eight hours of inactivity, so you would only expect to be able to use Bravely Second about 2-3 times per 24 hours. And that's the rate around which we were really thinking about the balance of the game when designing encounters and thinking of difficulty.

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It's a very strong move, and doing it about 2-3 times per session in a day felt about right to us. It's very helpful of course, but it's not needed for most players. It's something that can help new players address some difficulty, if they just can't seem to get past one boss. But it's something that also removes the damage cap, so even advanced players might come up with a bit of a meta-game where they try to raise meters to create the largest hit possible.

And so from both perspectives, whether you're a new player or an advanced one, it's something that's there for both fun and comfort in the play experience.

Schreier: Here in North America, the first reaction to the name Bravely Default is "whoa that's a weird name" because it sounds very bizarre in English. Did you guys realize how strange it sounds in English, and did you ever want to change the title in the West because of that?

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Asano: As I mentioned earlier, we were really designing this game with Japanese RPG fans in mind, so the fact that the title might have sounded a little bit strange in English wouldn't have been a problem for us at that time when we were thinking about only Japanese fans as the audience. But when we decided that we would be doing a localized version, we did have a discussion about whether to change the title to something that might sound a little more acceptable in English. But the issue for us was that people in the US already knew about the game because it was so well received in Japan. And they knew it by that title. So we decided to keep that title.

But ultimately I feel like because it is a JRPG and we really are trying to reference some classic feeling from JRPG titles, I think that having a title like this communicates that content pretty well to the market also.