Bravely Default is the whatever game you want it to be

  There's a subset of gamers who enjoy setting arbitrary challenges for themselves to make some games more like a puzzle-- how, through meta-gaming, can you beat a specific RPG without ever gaining a level, for example.  Most of these playthroughs rely on toughing out the early game before getting to whatever exploitable resource makes the rest of the game a breeze; they're often tests of patience as much as ingenuity.  They also tend to require making sure you run from every fight you can, and keeping most of the party dead at the end of mandatory fights so they don't get XP (until you can get an "XP Sponge" character that goes in, survives the fight, and is never used).  I don't think it would have ever occurred to me to try something like this, much less have the patience to go through with it, and overall it's a pretty rarified gaming style.
  Bravely Default, however, offers several in-game options for players who want to try this sort of thing.  Programming-wise, it's easy enough-- just set a few toggles to zero, and put in an interface for the player to manipulate it, so it's not difficult to implement.  But, it takes a company that's actually paying attention to its players to even think that someone might want the option to stop all XP (or gold, or whatever) gains from fights, to give themselves a special challenge, and especially to allow it to all be custom-manipulated instead of wrapped into a "hard, easy, normal" setup.
  Similarly, though to me a more obvious design choice, in Bravely Default, you can raise or lower random enemy encounters, doubling them, quartering them, even eliminating them entirely, any time.  There's often in-game items with these effects, but most games with them give them to you late in the game, and then you're trading an item slot for it.  I appreciate that the game isn't patronizing about it-- it basically says, "You want this?  Ok, here you go," rather than being more of "you must endure the game the way we made it originally until we decide to allow you a small amount of manipulation, whether you are enjoying this part or not!"  I wish they'd gone a little further with the ability to increase XP, AP, and GP gains, but since those abilities are tied to classes I understand why they didn't (still, it's a bit paternalistic).

  On a side note, one reviewer (I don't care enough to hunt the review down, other than vaguely remembering it as a review on an RPG-dedicated site) complained about the main story of the game, saying it was uninspired and required too much back-and-forth for little reason among towns (absolutely true).  But, he then seemed miffed that the side quests were where all the interesting stuff was-- story-wise, character-wise, and especially gameplay-wise.  So, he was essentially docking the game for not forcing him to play through the side areas.  Even more ridiculous, though, was that he complained also that the game was grind-y in parts; well yes, if you skip all the sidequests and optional content and try to zoom straight through the main quest line, you would be underpowered.  Hey, instead of grinding pointlessly, why not do some of those well-written, rewarding side events that flesh out the main story and give context to everything?  It was a baffling review, especially for being on an RPG specialty site, and was one of the very, very few negative reviews the game got.