I'd like to say that I'm not a huge RPG person; I enjoy the genre but have not played that many. I don't know if that means maybe I'm not experienced enough to fully appreciate this "parody" (their words, not mine), but my gripes with the game that I would think are valid regardless.
There were certain positives to the game, mainly the battle system. It wasn't super complex but it was enough to make it fairly challenging at parts, but not so much that I had to grind often. It's pretty standard (AFAIK) albeit simple: you have Normal, Tech and Magic attacks with potions to heal HP. New attacks gained by leveling up were fairly unique, though not always useful. Having "Unite" moves that were performed by multiple party members was interesting although it seemed to become less useful not long into the game.
There were some other niceties. The graphics were nice; everything looked good. The dialog was good; not laugh-out-loud funny, but good.
What I didn't really like can mainly be described as the maps and the plot. The maps mostly consist of mazes. Check that: entirely consist of mazes. I didn't mind this for the first half of the game but as it went on, wandering for ages, fighting random battles, trying to find where to go got rather old. This was best exemplified in the last level which looked good, but extremely repetitive. Not only was it easy to get lost, it just got boring. And of course, you are having to fight random battles the majority of the time you're lost; eventually if you fight enough battles in an area, they will stop, but by that time you are already frustrated for not being able to friggin' figure out where to go. When I became leveled enough to easily beat most combinations of enemies, battles consisted of me just mashing Z (on PC) until the enemies were dead and I could keep wandering around. Not exactly compelling gameplay.
A related annoyance I had happen once was this: there are doors scattered all over the world but you only can/need to go through them like once. (Or maybe twice.) All other doors were purely decoration, like a pretty wall; you couldn't interact with them at all. The result was me stumbling around for ages not knowing where to go because for once the door I walked by multiple times actually worked as a door. This was just frustrating; it's one thing if every other door said something like "Locked!" when you interacted with it, but to have all doors in the game except one or two be purely aesthetic? It's just dumb, to me.
I could forgive that easily if they did one of two things: (1) made the world more intractable. The towns were great because there were NPCs to talk to but not long into the game and there is nothing to interact with in the dungeons. It's literally just a maze. And (2) if the plot was compelling. Or even just more compelling. Really it's nonexistant and consists of "go here", "ok now go here", and etc. They don't even tell you the main objective of the game until literally the very end!
I liked it for the battle system, but that's not enough to make a game. At least a 5-6 hour game. The world was nifty and looked good but it was lifeless and really rather tedious. Maybe the idea of wandering mazes for the majority of the gameplay is ok with you, and it would be with me if the developers tried to mix it up a bit from time to time.
I bought Breath of Death VII in a bundle along with Cthulu Saves the World, a 2D RPG by the same company that is very similar but, IMO, vastly better. It's more witty, funny, interesting, and just all around a better time. That's not to say Breath of Death is bad or unplayable, it's just mediocre for me and probably just a 1-play deal. And best played in windowed mode while watching YouTube or Netflix./
