The producer behind the Bravely Default II, Masashi Takahashi, recently sat down with Dengeki Online to talk about the next instalment.
Takahashi touches on the challenges the team faced from going to two screens to one, preserving the art style and how Octopath Traveler’s development helped Bravely Default II.
Was Bravely Default II always slated to be a Nintendo Switch title?
Takahashi: I suppose it was, yeah. We learned a lot developing Octopath Traveler and when thinking about what consoles Bravely Default fans likely own, Switch seemed like the best choice.
Considering that the Nintendo Switch is far more powerful than the Nintendo 3DS, did this help smooth out development at all?
Takahashi: We were able to make great strides in everything from the graphics to the music and characters to make it feel like a true sequel. Even with all the improvements though, we felt it was important to make sure it still resembled the previous titles in some way.
As an example, if you look at the towns in the game, previously we wanted to make create a feeling that players were walking on a painting in a 3D stereoscopic view. To keep the same feeling in this title, we decided to create the town as if it were paper craft. Once we prototyped it, things felt right and we decided to fully embrace the idea.
Additionally, to keep the series’ atmosphere intact, we aimed for something more akin to a model train rather something more realistic when designing the fields. We experimented a lot to make the graphics unique while keeping that “Bravely Default” feel.
I think players will get a good sense of this when they see it in action on a Switch screen rather than looking at screenshots. The “final demo” was also recently released, so for those players who haven’t seen the game in action yet, please give it a try.
Was there anything that you felt was made more difficult because the game is a Nintendo Switch title?
Takahashi: The previous titles were 3DS games which meant we had two screens to work with. This time around, we had to completely remake the UI from scratch. It took a long time to figure out how to fit all the features on a single screen while not having things looked cramped or overly complex.
Bravely Default II is now available for Nintendo Switch.
