Bravely Default II devs explain why they dropped the traditional turn-based battle system and went against player requests

Bravely Default II takes a unique approach to its battle system, rather than going for a standard turn-based affair. Turns during battle are now based on things like speed, buffs and debuffs. This makes for more frenetic battles, as they won't play out as a simple back-and-forth.

In an an interview with Kotaku, producer Masashi Takahashi reveals that the game did have a more traditional battle system at first, but this was eventually decided against.

“[It] became clear to us that this would be something you would have to kind of be thinking ahead in and really making sort of complicated guesswork if you had this order of actions display in the game. That would make things more complicated than we than we wanted them to be so we ended up removing that prior to releasing the first demo for the game.”

The team knew that some players would be disappointed about the battle system, and feedback from the demo certainly showed that. Still though, the team decided to push on.

“We were kind of expecting to hear that opinion from people that they would want this order of actions element to be in in the game. We didn’t know how much feedback we would receive about it. We ended up receiving quite a bit, you know, and ended up deciding not to include it based on the reasons I mentioned.”