Breath of Fire IV (2000)

Pros: -Beautiful graphics -The Fou Lu / Ryu duality is interesting -You can switch characters in-battle

Cons: -Pointless minigames -Luck-based combos -Limited fast travel (Shift)

My experience with Breath of Fire IV was kind of a mixed bag. The basics like story and presentation are fine, but as you dig a bit deeper you begin to see the nasty bits of problems and little annoyances this game has.

For example the combo system is pretty cool: you can combine skills according to their elements and unleash powerful attacks. You then eventually realize that this is a random system and sometimes the combos don't work even if you do everything correctly. I don't know how the heck someone thought this was a good idea.

Then you get a fast travel ability, so you can easily go back to previous towns to buy things or talk to certain NPCs. Ok, excellent! But then the game expects you to visit every place again (by foot) only so you can warp, because you can only use this in towns visited after getting the skill. What???

Slowly but surely the bad stuff starts to add up: unnecesary minigames one after the other, pointless little obstacles like the snake in the swamp area or pushing the levers to move the dam. The last dungeon is a huge confusing mess and dont get me started on the freaking Golden Plains, by far the worst part of the game.

All in all, BoF 4 is still a traditional JRPG, just a tiny bit above average and honestly not that much better than the previous 3 games.

“Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.” ―C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

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With this review of Breath of Fire IV, I have now encircled the entire run of the Breath of Fire series, as far as this writer is concerned. Beyond this point there be monsters.

Yes, there are indeed more Breath of Fire games after IV but Capcom’s answer to Square’s successful Final Fantasy franchise performed the video game equivalent of jumping the shark. Before moving to mobile (often the veritable death of a franchise at least in terms of priority that its creators give to it) the Breath of Fire games were fine representatives of the standards and traditions of JRPGs. While none of the previous games stood out as shining fantasy stars against Final Fantasy, they were at least cohesive and you knew what you were getting when you played a Breath of Fire game. Changes in tone and gameplay which took place in the series from the first game to the third were not drastic.

As I’ve mentioned in my critiques of the previous three games in the series, Breath of Fire was steadfast and stalwart about RPG traditions. Whereas Final Fantasy was frequently about innovation, Breath of Fire never moved too far beyond static turn-based combat, experience grinding, linear storytelling, and random encounters. Oh there are similarities between the two franchises, such as their dedication to recurring names like Cid, Bahamut, and Ultima or Ryu, Nina, and Wyndia.

Each Final Fantasy reinterprets itself and takes us into a new world, the previous game being truly a “last” fantasy adventure in that universe with those characters (though direct sequels have in recent history changed this). With Breath of Fire, the games (at least one through three) have a clear and direct relationship with each other, and this can even be explored to some extent through to this fourth title. It would seem that telling a long, continuous saga spread out across millennia is much more difficult than being allowed the creative freedom to tell new kinds of stories with new characters and new mechanics. Final Fantasy lent itself to being reinterpreted whereas Breath of Fire did not, until Capcom forced it into a new interpretation too far from its roots. Thus Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter seems to have alienated and lost the series’ core fanbase and Capcom’s dragons have never been the same since. Heck, Breath of Fire 6 was never released outside of Japan, anyway.

Click here for the full review... https://thewellredmage.com/2017/12/04/breath-of-fire-iv/