I can't say that I'm a huge fan of Bravely Default's story. I think it certainly shows that stuff that works in a visual novel doesn't necessarily also need to work well in an RPG, but calling the writing or the logics awful is way too much. Especially since BD is one of the rare RPGs where the player is supposed to actually use his brain somewhat from the very beginning and come up with his own theories and assumptions for the stuff that's going on in the game. Even though a lot of people seem to completely miss that, since they fail to realize that D's Journal is a vital part of the early game's story and supposed to be read simultaneously to your playthrough.
I know exactly what he's "trying to do" with the story. It doesn't make it any less awful. The writing is bad because it's likes to be long winded without saying anything worthwhile at all, which is a common in Japanese entertainment. It's not limited to visual novels, but obviously when it helps to pad your content with wordswordswords just to make it seem longer, that helps too. That's not good writing, it's clumsy and inefficient. When paired with fully voiced scenes, it just makes everything slower more less tolerable. That's pretty awful.
As for the logic, it's pretty bad. Motivations are very poorly presented, there isn't very good development of the setting that makes the player feel that things were really thought out in detail. There are a lot of words in the game, but quantity is not quality. Nothing is really cohesive or natural. When an entire kingdom is "held random" by a single airship firing cannonballs, and the situation can be resolved by a kid and an unarmed girl simply walking over to it and beating people up, that's just stupid. It doesn't matter if the author has some "point" he wants to make, because making stupid scenarios only to have a point later on doesn't make the scenario any less stupid.
This story does not want the player to use their head, I think it's the reverse, you have to actually not think about most of it to actually enjoy the gameplay. Obviously I've read the journal and I can more or less guess where the story is eventually headed, but with any sort of writing, the execution is more important than the concept, and the execution in the writing is just poor.
You don't have to agree, but don't assume that people who dislike it a lot just "don't get it", because this certainly isn't some paragon of genius writing here.
