At its heart, Bravely Default game is a throwback to earlier Final Fantasy games: it has a world map, turn-based battles, a job system, a story about crystals, light, and darkness, etc. This game improves on some of these areas and leaves some alone, and this sometimes works in the game's favor and sometimes is just really annoying.
I'll start with the worst.
The story is terrible. It takes no risks, is bland and boring, and it literally pains me sometimes at how many cliches it turns out. Middle-ages setting? Check. Battle of light and dark? Check. Journey starts with main character boy rescuing a soft-spoken girl? Check. And I could go on. This game has voice acting, which is usually good because it pulls you in, but you don't want to pulled into the story because, if you favor any kind of originality, it will annoy you endlessly. I ended up just turning off the voices because reading about how the mage-inclined, female martyr character wants to sacrifice herself for the good of humanity is slightly more tolerable than listening to her soft-spoken voice say it.
But she isn't the worst character. That would be Ringabel, the ladies-man "comic relief" character. I have comic relief in quotes because I get the feeling he's supposed to be funny, but to be funny there has to an element of surprise, and he is literally a stock character that's been used a thousand times over in every genre of fiction, and it stopped being funny after women's rights became a thing. Everything he says is so predictable and mind-meltingly unoriginal that it would probably be worth skipping over his speech entirely since you don't actually need to understand the story since the game gives you objective markers. But I haven't gotten to that level of frustration yet.
The other two main characters are slightly more bearable. The other male is a fairly typical main character: he wants to save shit. He's not quite as horrible as the aforementioned, though. He has some softness to him that balances out his trite heroicism, and he isn't a martyr, which is sublime. The other girl character is the best of a bad foursome of stereotypes. She is energetic, but she likes swords, and she's kind of the leader of the group even though she isn't the main male character. She makes the cast just bearable enough.
So yeah, the story is an annoying piece of garbage. It makes practically no attempt at humor or drama, but can fool you into it because of how many cutscenes there are. It has a more present story and cast of characters, which is more than can be said for its spiritual predecessor, but it honestly takes way from it because of how bad it is.
The game's saving grace, however, is everything else.
The setting is pretty good-looking. It makes really great usage of the 3D feature with its cities as they are in this flat, paper-ish, story book style, but putting the 3D on makes them come to life. It also makes the dungeons that much more pretty and engaging. Exploring in this game is honestly very fun because the dungeon layouts are twisty and have plenty of nestled treasures, and the environments are lush, alebit dark because most of them have ceilings. The cities are beautiful and imaginative. They aren't very big, though. The art style is worse than its predecessor, however, as Bravely Default trades style for realism. But that comes down to personal taste in the end (I'm not a fan of realism in games).
The game has a world map, and while I'm not a fan of world maps, it's something I can tolerate. It gives the game a sense of explorability, but sacrifices continuity. And it doesn't help that the world map is nothing new in terms of style or biomes. It has grasses, it has forests, it has deserts, etc. And there's nothing to distinguish the world from any other world map in other Final Fantasies. It ties back into how the story is so bland. The story is bland and unoriginal and therefore the world is bland and unoriginal. But mostly the world map. Most other things are interesting and nice to look at.
The music is pretty good. I'm fairly big on game music, and I can say that at least this game's music isn't as bland as its story. Its most common themes - battle, world map, some dungeons - are typical and not fun to listen to for long periods of time, but overall the music is decent. The softer tracks tend to stand out as much more interesting and original, but this is supposed to be a big, exciting RPG, so there are fewer of those :[
Now for the good part.
The gameplay and battle system are this game's saving grace, by far. They achieve two feats that very few other JRPGs have accomplished: making a party of characters be largely customizable, and putting an engaging spin on a turn-based battle system. There is a job system in this game, which I love (I am a huge fan of job systems). You can switch jobs from the main menu, and it changes the characters' looks, stats, and equipment affinities. But you can also use a skillset from any other job along with your current job, so it really lets you make interesting character playstyles while still having the feel of a JRPG. There are also plenty of jobs to choose from, and each has enough skills to have a distinct playstyle, but not too many to where it feels pointless.
The battle system is mostly a plain turnbased system. But what makes it interesting is the "Brave" and "Default" options. Choosing Default for a character lets them go into defensive and save up a turn, while choosing Brave spends up to four turns at a time, and a character must spend saved up turns or future turns in return. It's simple enough, but gives the game a good amount of original strategy while still keeping the old turn-based goodness of older RPGs.
Other than that, the game keeps equipment, random encounters, items, magic, and many other elements similar to other older Final Fantasies, and for the most part they are at their best. They also give the player a lot of extra settings to make the game even more playable, such as the ability to change the encounter rate at any time, or the speed of battle animations. I like this a lot because it caters to hardcore RPGers who like to grind, and it takes some annoyance out of the random encounters when you just want to explore a dungeon again looking for a chest you missed.
Overall this game has elements that are the best of what JRPGs should be, but its brought down by how completely terrible and unoriginal its story and partially its setting is. Square really defined its older FF gameplay and turned out something fresh and fun. I just hope that in newer iterations it takes even one risk with its story because Bravely Default game might be better if you just skipped all the cutscenes altogether. Square just hasn't hit the right combo of story and gameplay since its FFVII - FFX era, but Bravely Default comes close. I would have given the game a 7.5, but I rounded up since I know it will keep me occupied simply because of the gameplay.