The concept of Bravely Default: Flying Fairy is heavily centered around its gameplay, Square Enix producer, Tomoya Asano, mentions in a recent Iwata Asks interview with Nintendo’s president. Key features of the system include the four-character setup and the job system.
However, instead of keeping gameplay and writing separate, Asano and Naotaka Hayashi, a scenario writer from MAGES who wrote Steins;Gate, decided to mesh the two together.
They started with the characters, which they felt was one of the most important aspects of Bravely Default. One of their main goals was to create characters—even villains—that would be loved. Additionally, the dialogue would be lively and interesting, and the game’s world would be crafted to create as interesting a setup as the characters needed.
With regard to characters, the two developer reveal that each of the four main characters in Bravely Default is intricately linked to a key aspect of both the game and the plot. For example, one of goals of Tiz is to rebuild a village.
Doing this alone would take an extremely long period of time, but by using the StreetPass function, you can recruit more and more villagers to your village, and they can all help with the rebuilding. Two villagers would cut the time in half. Four, into fourths, and so on.
Another character is Agnes, the girl who appeared in the original AR demo for the game and has been Bravely Default’s most frequently seen character thus far. Her background in the game involves searching for the four crystals, and as such, she is also the one most connected to the main plot of the game.
A second female character, Edea, who is the daughter of one of the villains, is in charge of the sub-quests and the job class system. Finally, the last character in your party is Lingabel, an amnesiac boy who keeps a memo that has events from the future written in it. The memo can be read at any time during the game.
All of these characters are not only linked to facets of the main story, but also with different aspects of the game. Iwata responds by pointing out that one of the many reasons that makes an RPG interesting is uniqueness in the way its system and plot are set up.