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.

“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/