Bravery Network Online Looks Set To Compete With Pokemon – Preview
A new team-based brawler, Bravery Network Online, steps up to battle.
Two teams of characters enter a giant stadium, surrounded by blinding lights, the passionate chants of fans in the crowd and casters documenting their movement. One member from each team steps onto the stage and readies themselves for combat, taking turns whacking, striking and intimidating their foes to knock them out. As one faints, another jumps in, pecking, tackling and exploding their target.
Despite the similarities, this isn’t a scene from the football-staged gym battles in the upcoming Pokemon Sword and Shield – it’s from a new turn-based RPG brawler that aims to be its competitor.
Bravery Network Online is described as an alternative to Pokemon, boasting a funky comic and anime-inspired visual aesthetic, a lovable roster of fighters and balanced gameplay that improves on the competitive frustrations of Nintendo’s popular RPG franchise. Much like a Pokemon trainer, you play an AI coach in charge of a team of Bravery fighters – a brutal MMA-style sport that sees futuristic characters fight in big broadcasted stages with the goal to make the other team forfeit, by any means necessary.
While there’s an interesting story and world crafted here, Bravery Network Online’s biggest sell is the potential it has in being the next big online fighter.
When Damian Sommer, writer and game designer at developer Gloam, was a child, he craved everything Pokemon. Being able to build a team from a roster of characters and fight in turn-based, intensely focused one on one battles, felt especially cool – unlike anything else.
But, as he grew older, he began to notice the flaws in its design. Effects rely on the random chance of a die roll and feel “harsh,” the standard type matches in single player are “wickedly unbalanced,” and Pokemon have too many Power Points (PP) in their moves for competitive play.
Smogon, a site dedicated to creating a standard set of rules for competitive play to make things more balanced, can only do so much when it’s not officially part of the game’s battle mechanics. Thus, he set out to make his own truly balanced Pokemon-like experience, creating a game that he says is a blend of Hearthstone and card game Yomi.
Instead of a type chart and PP, your fighters will use special skills called ‘uses,’ each one with their own unique animation and action, and the chance to cause ‘feelings,’ the equivalent of a status effect. From there, you can make a character hungry, slowly taking damage and growing clumsier, or guilty, which causes the afflicted party to forfeit as soon as another team does. A dizzy effect will slow down your enemies and leave them unable to parry, while making them angry will restrict them to attacks in a heated rate. If you’re excited, you’ll slowly gain health over time.
To make Bravery Network Online balanced, you’ll only be able to use some of these abilities once or twice per battle, shuffling between a deck of moves equipped to each character. Every fighter begins with only a few moves they’re comfortable using and a bunch they’re not comfortable using. As you equip a single uncomfortable move for each fighter at a time, they will slowly grow accustomed to it, keeping your battle strategies evolving with each game. Instead of relying on the random chance of a die roll, you’ll be able to expend a resource called ‘charge’ to deal critical hits, make an enemy’s moves miss and other special tricks.
“Boiled down, this is kind of how competitive play in BNO feels like to me,” explains Sommer. “You and your foe are maneuvering around, trying to gain an advantageous position. When one of you does, the other should be aiming to mitigate losses, and getting momentum back into their favour as fast as possible.”
“All this needs to be balanced by the fact that every decision you make ripples through the whole match and can lead to victory or downfall in ways that are hard to predict. On top of that, you’re trying to get a read on your opponent: what’s their gameplan, how did they set up their fighters, are they following any sort of pattern you can exploit, are they calling out moves that you’re doing. Playing Bravery is easy, but playing it well is a whole other matter.”
Even further, Bravery Network Online’s world of characters is infectiously lovable and groovy. Created in collaboration with Guillaume Singelin, the popular character artist and comic illustrator behind First Second’s PTSD graphic novel, it feels like a combination of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure’s funky camp aesthetic, My Hero Academia’s superhero teens and the comic book punk tone of Scott Pilgrim. It’s a real treat.
In single-player, you’ll be able to experience some of its characters’ stories in individual episodes treated like vignettes in a comic book anthology. We follow one character’s journey in starting up their own fanclub to outstage their brother, and another’s quest to uncover the mystery behind Bravery’s weird pasty-white smiling referee, Jeffree.
In our demo, we had the chance to experience a match against an AI and choose one of three premade teams of fighters, each with iconic captains with unique abilities commanding their five-man army.
Arsonists are a team of misfits led by Fel, a “removed, artsy type,” who if fully charged, explodes into a violent rampage, regaining all their health and dealing critical blows. Bruise Buddies are a group of kind-hearted fighters led by Seyla, a “small and young fighter trying to prove herself,” who hits back harder than people expect and grants a buff to her teammates that heals them whenever they deal great amounts of damage. Then, there’s Slow Riot, a gang of slow brutes under the thumb of the amazingly-dressed punk called Tazu. As Sommer puts it, “she’s all about playing with power, making folks feel powerless [and] putting herself into submissive situations.” If she’s your captain and you get hit first in a round, your attacks hit harder.
With moves like a quick kiss on the cheek imitated by giant lips smacking an enemy sideways, and firework explosions worthy of the X-Men’s Jubilee, it’s hard not to see the charm and love for pop culture oozing from Bravery Network Online’s character designs and battle system. There’s a lot of promise in its design and goal to be an authentic competitor to Pokemon’s battles and the intricate layers involved in creating your own roster of fighters with unique movesets, accompanied by complex status effects and your champion’s special passive abilities, means it’s likely we’ll be seeing a lot more of BNO in the competitive and streaming communities.
Currently, there’s no true competitor to Pokemon in the team-oriented battle system genre. Since it debuted with Pokemon Red and Blue in 1996, GameFreak and The Pokemon Company coined and dominated the genre, but from what Gloam tells us about Bravery Network Online, and if they hold true to their plans for seasonal events, DLC and continued support, we might have the first proper online originally compelling contender in our hands. And, if our short hands-on time with the game is anything to go by, it’s a lot of fun.