Breath of Fire IV é um clássico do ps1 e amado até hoje pelos fãs do genero, também pode ser uma porta de entrada para fãs novos, difícil chamar de superestimado ou ruim quando você se lembra do esforço que a Capcom teve pra sair um pouco da fórmula repetitiva que a trilogia anterior possuía, mas sem perder a essência do que Breath of Fire realmente é.

História: 5/5

Apesar do conceito de deuses criarem o mundo ou deus ser o vilão ser algo usado de forma repetitiva e as vezes sem criatividade, Breath of Fire IV faz isso muito bem. Deuses (incompletos) como o Ryu tem a capacidade de alterar o destino daqueles ao seu redor, a sua influência é o que guiou Nina e Cray a um objetivo diferente, também houveram participações incluídas nessa influência como Scias e Ursula. Cada vez que se descobre a ligação de Ryu e Fou-lu, a jornada em buscar Elina, as crueldades do Império e o nascimento dos deuses dragões são coisas que se alinham numa só enriquecendo o enredo e conectando todos os pontos sem deixar nenhum arco parecer um filler.

Personagens 4/5:

Os personagens são algo que não deixam a desejar, mas também poderiam ser mais bem elaborados. As vezes eu sentia que Scias e Ursula ficavam muito distintos do quarteto principal, mas a caracterização deles não era ruim, porém eu sei que Scias teve seu lado alcoólatra censurado no ocidente o que explica a falta de personalidade dele em alguns pontos. Ershin é facilmente a melhor personagem desse jogo, e sua dinâmica com Deis mostra diálogos divertidos e reconfortantes, como Nina agora tem uma personalidade mais gentil e um pouco dependente comparada as suas contrapartes anteriores, mas também se mostra valente para fazer o que for preciso em salvar sua irmã junto com Cray.

Gameplay 3/5:

O sistema de combos é algo único no jogo, criando as mais diversas habilidades entre os personagens, o que incentiva mais a não deixar de lado os party members e grindar cada um. Os mestres não é algo super arriscado como BoF III, que você precisa tomar certo cuidado pra colocar um membro da equipe sob treinamento em tal lvl, mas as vezes sinto que há muitos professores inúteis ou facilmente descartáveis, pois algumas habilidades não providenciam combos novos e muitas vezes vocês aprendem coisa bem melhor analisando os monstros mundo afora.

Soundtrack 3/5:

Não falo que ela é ruim, é ótima e bastante relaxante, porém imemoravel em certos pontos e não parecem dar uma identidade pra BoF IV, no máximo apenas a música do mapa mundi e de batalha pois vão ser as coisas que você mais vai escutar na sua gameplay.

Breath of Fire IV is beautiful and has quite a few interesting ideas, but I didn't find the story to be that compelling or coherent and many of the mechanics are disconnected, unexplained, or unimportant.

The characters in your party don't have much connection or reason to be along for the journey and seem to just be character designs thrown together or in the case of Nina and Ryu, exist just because BoF games always have them.
The story is very scattered and complex, but doesn't make a ton of sense. Most of the major player's motivations are arbitrary or unexplained. It is hard to get on board with why the heroes are doing what they are doing because the stakes and objectives are so nebulous and seem to change from scene to scene.

There are a ton of mechanics in this game. You can learn abilities from enemies, take on a master for each party member to learn abilities, perform combo attacks, combine spells in some way, there is a fishing mini game, a town building mini game, and most of the dungeons have a mechanical gimmick you have to overcome. Like the story and the characters, this all feels disjointed. It is as though it was thrown together from a bunch of prototypes. None of it is explained that well and most of it doesn't matter that much or add much to the design or the player experience.
The combat system itself has a very solid foundation that makes battles feel strategic and exciting in a way most jrpgs do not. It is definitely one of the high points in BoF4 and is probably why I stuck with the game at all.
Your whole party is active at once and you can swap who is performing abilities in the front row while the back row recovers their mana. The aforementioned combo system works with this to let you set up full turn combos which almost comes together beautifully, but the rules behind how abilities chain and combine is fairly arbitrary, which hamstrings most of the potential this would otherwise have.

BoF4 looks incredible. The sprite work is expressive and detailed and every enemy and player is unique and cool. The animations especially are very impressive and entertain throughout. There is some 90s style 3d that is serviceable, but stands out all the more for being paired with the beautiful 2d in the rest of the game. Most of these are also in overlong attack cutscenes which are only half skippable. In general, the pace of this game is definitely reflective of its time, with very long, ponderous attacks that manage to eat up a lot of the running time without much value (enemy status attacks, I am looking at you).
The camera is also turned 45 degrees from the grid your character walks on, which makes controlling your character outside of battles a nightmare. Q-bert controls or badly detecting diagonal inputs are the only option. The camera shift doesn't add much to the game and is incredibly frustrating.

Breath of Fire is a beautiful jrpg with a very solid combat system that is trying a ton of unique things, but doesn't pull very much of it (besides the art) off that well. Worth a look only if you are a huge fan, but watch some of the battles on YouTube to check out the sprite work.

Breath of Fire IV continues the adventurous variety of its previous title, but ultimately lacks a soul, feeling more like a rehash recycling III's formula with a less interesting cast of characters and plot. The efforts of the game's writing, featuring two subplots, are wasted in both dissatisfying conclusions, and while the tweaks to mechanics streamline the slight frustration found in Breath of Fire III (including an interesting element combo mechanic), much of everything else falls a little flat. The soundtrack and animations improve upon the sheer quality of III, but the gameplay variety and plot isn't nearly as memorable, despite the effort.

My score for this game is probably a reflection of how subjective tastes can be. There is so much to like about this, but somehow as a whole the game didn't blow me away; I found that while it improved on the previous games in many ways, it was also a noticeable downgrade from BoF 3 in others.

The good:
- The spritework is absolutely stunning.
- The combat was engaging and deep, with the combo system and character switching adding up to what are probably the best combat mechanics of the series.
- The world is vast and colorful.
- The story was effective and haunting, and kept me up at night thinking about it sometimes.

The bad:
- The 3D models didn't age well. Seeing the beautiful character sprites sharing the screen with a 3D-rendered dragon that looks like a giant gummy worm is jarring.
- The music feels slightly bland especially compared to the unique smooth jazz feel of BoF 3.
- The dragon transformation system is a vast downgrade from its predecessor (or even the shamans from BoF 2).
- The lack of an overworld screen made the world seem smaller than it really was. Also, the camera angles made some areas a real chore to navigate.
- There was a lot of padding, especially towards the end. The last 10 hours or so has barely anything happen storyline-wise: you're trying to get to a city, and you just keep running into dungeons along the way that have no reason to exist other than padding the game time.

My rather lengthy list of gripes above makes it seem like I dislike the game, but it had so many cool set-pieces and just plain hard-hitting storyline moments, and the meat of the game (the combat) was very solidly done. Fine margins and matters of subjective taste made this a 'very good' rather than 'excellent' game for me, but I can definitely respect that many consider the best in the series, and I do recommend it to any RPG fan.

What drew me to this game was 100% the art style, which is arguably the best hybrid between super detailed sprites and 3D environments on the PS1, it's just gorgeous. That being said I was glad to see the rest of the game was great too. The writing is pretty standard by JRPG standards, but the colorful cast of characters and the characterization of the villain are standout aspects. The combat has a unique hook with the combo system and how you learn new abilities that keeps it interesting throughout.

Really my only complaints are that the overworld camera can be pretty rough at times, and there are some big difficulty spikes that necessitate grinding.