Breath of Fire (1993)

Ugh...Fond childish memories of this game could not prepare me for how much of a slog this game is. Time has not been kind to this one. 😕

The plot is paper thin and the character dialog is repetitive by even early 90s JRPG standards, esp. the meandering villager NPCs. I'd like to say that some of them are at least good at giving hints, but I'm not sure even that is really true. By the time I got to those two towns separated by the dry river, I was using a game guide to remember who I had to talk to, and ignored everyone else.

The exploration and combat side of things is not much better. Your characters move slowly, the encounter rate is ridiculous, the combat is repetitive and the dungeons are really not varied at all.

Additionally, there are a lot of strange technical limitations that other contemporary games from that period didn't have - For instance, the game doesn't tell you how much experience remains before the next level (your just have to grind till it happens, or look online) and every item is abbreviated to 8 characters or less - My favorite is the boomerang, which was comically named the "Rang".

I got as far a Agua, and then just put it down. Unless your a long-time fan of JRPGs in the style of the original Dragon Warrior games for the NES, you're not going to find much nostalgia or excitement here.

I played this game back in the 90s by renting but did not finish it until many years later. I started it on emulator sometime around 2007 and played roughly half way through the game until stopping for an unknown reason. Several years later I picked up where I left off and 100% completed the game, using a guide to make sure I got everything.

My preferred party was Ryu, Bo, Ox and Karn (Gobi underwater though). This was for normal battles. For bosses I kept Ox and swapped the others for the girls; it was all about conserving the girls' mp for bosses. At end game the party was Karn's ultimate transformation Puka, Ryu, Bleu and last Mogu for random battles and Nina for bosses; Mogu does a little better attack damage. All party members were at least level 30, with the hero being 31, Nina being 39 and Bleu 41. Everyone had top equipment, including all of the dragon gear for Ryu.

This game has considerable nostalgia for me. Though it is not quite as good as FF4, FF6 and Chrono Trigger it is still one of my top RPGs and SNES games overall. The story, setting, characters, music and overall gameplay are all excellent. I particularly like how each character has a unique ability, the variety in tactics from who you use in battle and the general lack of bench warming (at least I do not remember characters lagging behind in xp). The only thing I did not like were the short text strings for names of characters, items and equipment.

Against my better judgment and not so great memories, I decided to give Breath of Fire another play through. And you know what? It’s way better than I remembered!

So this title came out spring of 1993, and I got it for Christmas of that year. I guess this means I was just about 9 years old when I played it. It’s amazing what clarity a couple decades can bring. :)

Then, I thought the game was hard, grindy, slow paced, and confusing. I've learned over the past two weeks, it’s really not quite any of those things. Here are some off-the-top-of-my-head observations, there are probably spoilers, depending on what you consider spoiling a 26 year old game.

1. It’s actually quite easy. You barely need to level at all.
2. Leveling is weird, they don’t tell you how much exp to the next level, and despite using everyone fairly consistently, I ended the game with Ox at level 30 and Bleu at level 46. I'm sure I could have beaten the game with everyone ten or more levels lower.
3. Spell/ability and equipment pacing/usage are weird. In the end game, I was inundated with equipment, particular for the women, and a lot of it was side- or downgrades. You can access Karn’s best weapon and Ryu’s best armor (or pretty close to them) not even halfway through the game. I didn’t use most of Nina’s spells. None of my characters, minus Karn's fusions, has enough HP to ever warrant the existence of Cura4 and barely Cura3.
4. Is there a point to the Gold Dragon? I can’t think of any undead boss fights between learning that and Rudra, rendering it basically useless.
5. The Rudra and Doof transformations come way too late in the game. I suppose I used Rudra for a couple bosses. Agni and Puka come WAY too soon after those. Really, the only point of Doof is to move dressers to get to Puka. Maybe I'm wrong, but I saw no reason for Debo to exist - no content takes place underwater once you learn the fusion, so I didn’t even use it.
6. Speaking of unused things, poor Mogu.
7. The music is cool, and I like how the changes in overworld and battle music helps give freshness throughout the game.
8. I thought the battle graphics were nice for 1993.
9. I remember being incredibly confused by the story as a kid. Turns out, it’s all pretty clear and you just have to pay attention. I wish there was a bit more character development, for both good and bad guys.
10. This is one of those games where you have to talk to everyone to find the one person who gets some event to trigger, and unfortunately, many if not most townsfolk all say the same damn thing. It's not always clear where you are and where you need to go next.
11. Why is Zog the only dark dragon who is a dragon?
12. Thank goodness for hindsight because the shit with Tyr and Agni and triggering the “good” ending is still super confusing. Hidden clue, the clue is bad, random location that you probably forgot about a long time ago, use said ability at a certain time. I know in my childhood years play through, I had the bad ending and left it that way for a long time until Nintendo Power or something had information about it.
13. Having Agni is required for the ending, but also makes all end game content worthlessly easy. This is not great planning on the devs part.

I know that sounds like a lot of negative, but honestly, other than the ease of the end game bosses, none of these truly detracted from the game play. BoF is still a fun play through of as classic a 16-bit RPG as you can get. Looking forward to the rest of the series which has been sitting in my backlog for as long as they've existed.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” ―Edmund Burke

Breath of Fire is as traditional as you can get with an RPG, though not all classics are created equal. Big on dungeon crawling and battles but short on innovation, it hasn’t aged as gracefully as its contemporaries, namely the Final Fantasy (IV and VI) games against which it is often contrasted. Breath of Fire feels more as if it belonged on the NES rather than the SNES but this is Capcom’s first attempt at developing a full-fledged RPG after dabbling with role-playing elements in their Game Boy title Gargoyle’s Quest and their Japan-only survival horror RPG Sweet Home.

Created in tandem with Squaresoft who handled the North American release and translation, Breath of Fire was notable as a cooperative effort between Capcom and Square. They ought to have continued that partnership since it might’ve greatly aided the poor translation of Breath of Fire II, which Capcom handled alone, and it might’ve meant even more optimum RPGs in the 90’s and not less. It also might’ve meant that Capcom would not give up on their own intellectual properties so easily, run them into the grave of blandness and then refuse to revive them, e.g. Breath of Fire and Mega Man. That’s why there were so many characters in Marvel vs. Capcom that nobody’d heard of! You have no idea how much I wished for a Breath of Fire character in a Marvel vs. Capcom sequel.

A foundational game which inspired Capcom’s best known RPG franchise, Breath of Fire also served as an introduction to RPGs for a young version of myself. This game was really my first (at least the first RPG I can definitively remember completing on my own) and I appreciate having been able to jump in to the series from the very first game, something which I was too young to do in 1987 with the first Final Fantasy. Truth comes out. In actuality, though my impressions of it aren’t the most favorable, as we shall see, I can respect Breath of Fire as a standard for what traditional RPGs are to be in my view. The game remains an exemplar of RPG traditions for all of their sluggishness and cumbersome mechanisms.

Clearly set in a medieval, swords-and-sorcery world, the game’s prologue opens by asking some heavy philosophical questions. I recall that this blew my mind. Consider I’d been playing typical Nintendo fare up to this point (again, as far as I can recall), so dredging up concepts like the brevity of life and its alleged meaninglessness weren’t concepts I’d been confronted with in Mario or Zelda games.

It should be noted that one of the earmarks of the Breath of Fire series is its loosely interconnected continuity. This has always been one of the most fascinating things about the original game and its sequels. It’s one of the few reasons why I return to play the first game at all. The recurring characters Ryu, Nina, Deis, Myria/Tyr, Ladon the Dragon God, and several others playing out this drama over the span of thousands upon thousands of years of history was fascinating to me. Seeing what happened to the Dragon Clan after the first game millennia later was a great source of interest and up to that point I hadn’t played anything that treated sequels in such a way.

Click here for the full review... https://thewellredmage.wordpress.com/2017/03/20/breath-of-fire/