A couple of months ago an oomf recommended I should play through Breath of Fire. It was always a game I wanted to play so I could eventually play the popular third entry on PS1. So I’m going through the series in order. I almost forgot to play this one until looking at my list and going “oh right I should get on it.” Enough exposition, time for my opinion on the game.

Well the game starts off pretty promising with a rather dark opening. You know things are serious when you begin in your town all destroyed with your sister kidnapped by the villain. Now it’s off on your own to discover the world and save the day. The character you start off with is named Ryu, who I accidentally named Ryuu. So he will be called that for the rest of the review. I’ll talk about the party members as a whole later.

The game when you’re actually playing isn’t the most interesting as Ryuu can only attack and nothing else. Even when you get to bosses it’s just a game of spamming attacks and herbs until you win. I will say that I do like how you can see an enemy’s health bar. Even bosses are the same way though for some reason their health becomes invisible when you knock it down all the way first. It’s not like that for every boss but it’s for a majority of them. I like how after getting the Earth key it doesn’t end all happy as a whole town gets destroyed for it.

Alright, time for a long paragraph. It’s early to do it but let me talk about every party member. Ryuu is a hard hitter who is good with swords and boomerangs. About a third of the game, you’re introduced to transformations where Ryuu can become a powerful dragon to do massive damage to enemies. He’s a character you probably want out at all times. Nina is your white magic user who can’t hit hard but has a ton of magic to do stuff like heal, give buffs, and give enemies statuses. She spends the early game being on Earth key duty but she ends up being pretty helpful especially for bosses. Gary is a wolf bow user who does good damage and has weak magic that’s good for the early game. Sadly he lacks much AP and he kind of falls behind imo by the late game. He can also hunt on the overworld which is helpful if there is something like ivory you wanna obtain. You also need him to walk through trees in the overworld for some reason. Danq is fast but ok in power. He may seem underwhelming at first but he can later fuse with party members to become really strong. He ends up being one of your strongest units in the game. Hope you find his fuse powers because they will be a huge help. He can also disarm traps and find trap floors but sadly the game doesn’t use this much along with opening locked gates. Gobi is weird, he’s got moderate power but he’s slow and his AP moves only work in the water. He can also host shops but I only found it useful once to get Angel armor. He can also later on help with transportation in the water. Bild is your hardest hitter but slowest character. Though if you ask me, he didn’t feel as strong as I hoped and his slow speed hinders him a lot especially in random encounters. He also can break down walls and knock fruit out of trees. Deis is a black magic user and she gets insanely strong magic and levels up really fast. She’s definitely one of the best members in the game and she gets a ton of AP too. Her only disadvantages are her weak attack stat and somewhat low defense. It’s just a shame you get her so late. Mogu…okay did anyone else find him kind of worthless? He isn’t that strong, his stats aren’t too high, and his ability to flee by digging doesn’t even work in dungeons. He can dig in the overworld to find secrets but I didn’t find almost any use for him which is a shame as his story was quite enjoyable.

When it came to the actual battles, I think it got better once I got more of the team assembled as there is a fair bit of strategy to have when going into enemy encounters and boss encounters. Though by the end of the game I was mostly rocking the set of Ryuu, Nina, Deis, and a fused Danq. Since his dragon form requires Gary, Bild, and Gobi, the only other party member left is Mogu and I sure wasn’t using him. This also meant a lot of my strategy went into power unless I wanted some good magic or some buffs from Nina. There were a ton of auto battle moments which is odd because I almost never use that feature in other games. Also I find it a shame transformations are so limited too, basically only using one move. I think the battle system kind of wavers throughout the game even if it does have times I do enjoy it.

Traveling the world can be fun but god I sucked at figuring out where to go half the time. This was more of a me issue personally but I sometimes was confused at what I was doing wrong only to learn it was something small like I didn’t talk to a specific NPC. I think it’s because a lot of them spout very generic dialogue with some even repeating in the same room no less. It made me less motivated to listen to townsfolk as they don’t feel real half the time. Also you can call me out for me not paying attention but I did have to look at a walkthrough at times for help. I will say at least the story is pretty nice for what’s there and there are even times NPCs will react differently to who’s in the front. Also, if you see something you can’t interact with, write it down and you’ll be thankful for that when you need to go back and get it.

Can’t forget about the dungeons which are alright, they kind of vary for me. Some kind of blend in together but others can have some very creative ideas. I was surprised how much this game uses mode 7 ngl. They aren’t too challenging or long even if you’re getting every chest you see. These are some of the more fun places in the game. My only notable gripe with them is that a couple of them for no reason have a horribly high encounter rate. I’m thankful it’s only like two or three but why is it even a thing? I also never really found any boss to be that hard but some do present some interesting ideas like the one where normal attacks do more damage until it stops looking blurry.

Honestly I don’t have much more to say as the game was a progressive line for me as I continue to moderately enjoy myself and there were still moments that surprised me. I also failed to mention yet was I used a hack to basically give the game a rewritten script and it also added a run button. I got very unhealthy about using it. I normally don’t try to use hacks when reviewing RPGs and I don’t know why I even did for this one but I think it was for the better just for the better script. It also gives Danq his original design but was edited to look a little less blackface. So how about something cool I witnessed? There’s a moment with a character that caught me off guard when it happened and it’s really cool what you get for helping the character out. The final part of the game though kind of blows. The dungeon is fine if nothing challenging though running from most encounters probably helped with that. I already felt my level was high enough that I didn’t need more. The last few bosses are just lame, you just turn on the Infinite form for Ryuu and just attack, attack, and attack! It’s dull, it’s boring and it throws out any cool strategies you could have. I mean don’t get me wrong, the form is cool but like I didn’t want just using one move over and over to be the finale. Well at least when it’s over there is a nice ending and I felt satisfied. Though I kind of wish Nina said something to Ryuu before he left, I kept thinking she’d confess to him with love but no, no dialogue. Maybe the sequel finishes that part off or maybe I’m just supposed to use my imagination, only time can tell…

The game graphically looks pretty nice for the SNES. I like the sprite work presented here especially for the battles. I think the locations could use a little more variety but I think it looks nice regardless. I like how some sprites for shops have an animation when you finish shopping. Some of the bigger sprites look so cool. There’s even a couple of cutscenes that always get me excited but man I wish there were more. It’s overall a good looking game. The music is also quite good with the composers being Yasuaki Fujita, Mari Yamaguchi, Minae Fujii, and Yoko Shimomura. I really like the grand feel a lot of them have as they fit the setting and genre the game is in. I feel like it reminds me of some other Capcom games on the system but I can’t remember what it was. There aren’t really any bad songs but goddamnit I can’t stand the house theme as it plays every single time and it got so repetitive that I would eventually make my own lyrics that are so bad and uncreative I’m not telling you them. I also wanna give a shoutout to when you’re getting ready to fight the final boss for real, the overworld music becomes the one from the beginning and you first hear this coming out of the first town again. I was actually getting so hyped hearing it again!! Seriously, it’s good stuff.

Game’s can have their ups and downs. Breath of Fire is not perfect but I still had a good time with it. The setting and story is nice along with a fun party. I think the battle system could use some work, moreso just balancing the group better. I think it’s a good start considering how little Capcom had done with the genre at that point in time. There were better RPGs on the system by 1993, I even reviewed one of them a little while ago but I expect going on past this, it’ll be even better. I hope Capcom will impress me more as I move forward into the series. I should also mention the game would later get ported to GBA but I can’t tell you if it’s any good, sorry. I just don’t know much about it. It’s also available on NSO if you want an easy official option but be warned it still uses the old Squaresoft localization. Breath of Fire is worth playing and I see this as the beginning for what’s yet to come. I’ll probably play the sequel sometime this year so expect it probably in about 5-6 months. I’ll see you around!

I love this game, grew up with it, but I can't justify giving it a high score. The game can be frustratingly cryptic at times, can overstay its welcome both with individual story beats and overall, and has an OK story even with a retranslation patch.
With that said, the retranslation made some moments actually land, and overall I think this game is best experienced as an anime series where each play session and plot beat is like an episode - especially late game, some adventures can feel quite episodic.
Gameplay is a classic turn-based RPG affair, quite fun - AND PARTY MEMBER SWITCHING MID-COMBAT YAY. I think most people would agree this gets majorly one upped by its sequel.

Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Megami Tensei. Not a single one of these franchises had a first game that aged well by today's standards, or even the standards of people who enjoy retro games. However, through the power of sheer ambition, these franchises would continue to learn, advance, and evolve forward into really solid games, paving the way for other companies to give their shot at the money bin that is their very own RPG franchise. At first, these other companies would use Dragon Quest 1 as the basis. But now that we're a few years into the SNES era, you'd hope to god that the influence would come from the more mechanically complex RPG's that have come out since 1986 passed. Dragon Quest V, FF4, maybe Shin Megami Tensei, hell, maybe get crazy and do something drastically different from all the other RPG's?

Here comes Capcom, copying the homework of Dragon Quest 1 in the year of 1993. God damn it.

Breath of Fire's complexity can be summed up like this: You can defeat the final boss by using auto-battle. In fact, the game's primary mechanic, being able to fuse and transform into more powerful creatures actively encourages you to mash the attack button. You know how in actual interesting RPG's, you get to summon powerful creatures but can only use them for a limited time? Right, so barely such a limitation is present here. Use the transformation spell once, and they persist across battles for near-infinite periods of time, decimating everything in their path. And because these transformations contain zero spells or special moves, all that there is to do is attack, attack, attack. Stock up on the surprisingly cheap full-heal items while you're at it, which the transformed creatures CAN use also, and thus you have won the game.

As much of a comedy as it is to say that "an RPG gets better 10 hours in," I've legitimately found that to be the case with some of them. So, having Breath of Fire start off as monotonous as it did, I gave it the benefit of the doubt and patiently waited until I unlocked every remaining party member. Not only did the combat never get more engaging, damage-inducing spells commit the cardinal sin of having fixed damage, and I honestly still can't tell if there were any elemental weaknesses in here. This is turn-based combat at its simplest, mechanically functional, but otherwise terribly disappointing in how every boss and enemy encounter is just begging you to use the most obvious strategy available.

The most ironic part of it all is that by the 20-hour mark, I was reminiscing to get back to the difficulty of the first 10 hours, where in the very least, there were less party members, and taking damage felt a little more threatening. There were also far less moments back then where I felt that the game was constantly trying to waste as much of my time as possible.

And I'm not talking about the encounter rates, though rest assured they're pretty awful, and the lack of a run button does not help. I'm talking about Breath of Fire's obsession with backtracking. First couple dungeons have no shortcuts back to the exit for example, so you gotta trek all the way back and fight more enemies along the way. I especially loved that one dungeon where you complete it to advance the plot, head back to a town, and then you're told to go through that exact same dungeon one more time.

The FETCH QUESTS. My god, the 2nd half of this game especially loves to interrupt your progress to the next area by telling you to go back to 2, 3, maybe 4 of the previous towns to get this item, to give to that NPC, to trade for another item. Actually, sometimes it doesn't tell you where the hell to backtrack to at all, I guess you have to either rely on your photographic memory regarding what that one NPC in that one town said, or look up a guide instead. These moments are rife in the 2nd half, making for some real blatant padding.

I will never forget the audacity of the backtracking required for the town of Scande. You head over there, elevator is broken. Hope you remembered that one NPC in that one town, 'cause you gotta talk to them to receive the parts required to fix the elevator. However, these parts are also broken, so go to this other town first, and fix the parts up. Now, head back to Scande. Parts are in place, elevator's working.

You proceed to have a slow, climatic ascent up the ominous tower via two seperate elevators, almost reaching the peak of the sky. Alright, here we go, you're inside this final-ass looking dungeon. Wait, why is this NPC blocking your way? "Hey, you should go back to this town and get the item first." Okay, uh, nevermind, guess I'm not gonna go through this dungeon yet?? You then have a very anticlimatic, and equally slow descent DOWN the elevators you just ascended, so you can do your 2nd fetch quest in a row in this random-ass town, with an item hidden behind a random-ass tree, then, you head back to Scande, slowly ascend the elevators AGAIN, and only THEN, you feel like you're making progress instead of aging 10 fucking years of your life.

As if the gameplay and combat design wasn't boring enough, the story isn't even there to keep you going. I mean, for starters, dragons? That's the best we could come up with as far general story theming and worldbuilding? It certainly doesn't help in making Breath of Fire stand out amongst the competition, but to be fair, the execution of such a story could've worked if given a better sense of dramatic scale.

Dramatic though, this is not, because presumably due to the limitations of the cartridge - further compounded by the english language not being as efficient in letter usage - Breath of Fire, at most, can only spare two lines of dialogue for every major story beat beyond the intro. Characters clearly meant to be expressing some form of emotion or excitement have a criminal lack of exclamation points or elllipses during many a scenes, making them sound like stiff, robotic husks reading off a script with only 2 hours of sleep under their belt. Bizarrely, the game often spared a considerably larger amount of dialog for its attempts at comedic scenes instead, and I think it might have mixed up its priorites in that way. This just isn't selling the epic fantasy adventure vibe at all, it feels like a phone-in rushing me from one scene to another, and yet still manages to get the game to clock in at 30 hours somehow.

The one real thing that Breath of Fire has going for it, is its presentation value, and I imagine it'd sucker in a lot of people back in the day just based off seeing some of its screenshots. The Capcom art and sound team are doing their best with what they've got, which isn't anything particularly imaginitive, but in the very least, looks quite nice and detailed, up to par if not beyond franchises like Final Fantasy. The soundtrack has multiple themes for the overworld and battles, that will change as the story progresses, some much appreciated variety. Most of it was composed by Yasuaki Fujita, the Mega Man 3 fellow, if you liked that soundtrack. Plus, there's even one song by Yoko Shimomura, shortly before she left for Squaresoft.

I could also give honorable mentions to the simple, but effective hunting mechanic this game has, where animals can be hunted down on the overworld with precise aiming, while ensuring you don't wander around too much in fear of triggering a random encounter and despawning the animals off the map as a result. It's an interesting little risk/reward system, where you decide how many walked tiles you can get away with to position yourself in front of the animal accordingly, before trying to take the shot and hoping that the animal hasn't wandered off by then.

All around though, I've been wondering about this game from the perspective of a japanese '93 kid. Suppose my mom's gonna buy me a game for Christmas, and I want an RPG because I want something fun that'll last me months. By the holidays of '93, some of the recent releases I have to choose from are Final Fantasy 5, Secret of Mana, Phantasy Star IV, oh hey, two remakes of Dragon Quest I & II just came out. That's quite a platter of choice from some fairly established RPG franchises. What does Breath of Fire have to offer that the rest of these cannot? Good graphics? Ooh, if that would be my main reason for buying Breath of Fire, then I'd feel very sorry for the hypothetical '93 me. But, you gotta hand it to them, in spite of everything else about the game being dull as hell, they would at least get you in that one department, and it's unlikely hypothetical '93 kid me would care. Well played, Capcom.

I won't judge the entirety of the Breath of Fire franchise based on just its first entry. As stated at the beginning, every influence it took from had its bad day as well. With that said, I'll excuse future Breath of Fire games for having no story depth, but they seriously need to step it up in terms of gameplay. I'd be hard-pressed to tell you to play this first game, but if you absolutely must, a romhack with a run button and double EXP gain would be highly recommended. Interestingly, I heard of a romhack called War of the Goddess, which has the aforementioned QoL changes, + a rewritten script. It's not intended to be a more faithful localization, but rather, a way of making the game's stiff script more entertaining and interesting to read, and I'm seeing a notable amount of good reviews surrounding it. If you're not a total purist, enhancing this game in any way possible would be in your favor, as you're in for a much duller experience otherwise.

Here's to hoping that Breath of Fire was sent off to mobile hell for no good reason, rather than because every other entry was just like this one.

I tried. I really did. I got to the underwater area and realized I was not having fun whatsoever.

Usually with a game this old I can look at it and try to say "I'm sure this game was good when it came out, so I'll just power through it using that kind of POV..." but there's just so much that turns me off of Breath of Fire. I can assuredly say this game would have sucked ass to me had I played it as a young child.

Spritework and music were good I guess!

Not a bad game for Capcom's first venture into the genre. Here are some of its main redeemable qualities (with their caveats):

+ Character design: Unique and memorable characters, some of them will see future iterations in the following games and remain loved to this day for their design and personalities.

- Con: There isn't much character development.

+ Music: A very cool soundtrack. The main theme is awesome and you'll hear it a lot (it's in the overwold), it's a staple of the series. Unlike other RPGs, the best songs here are in towns, which is where you'll spend a big part of your time as well.

- Con: Dungeon songs are boring, and become annoying quickly. And you'll also spend a lot of time in these.

+ Abilities: Each character has their own unique abilities they can use either in the overworld or in dungeons/towns. Like fishing, hitting trees, and so on. Some of them allow you to find secrets hidden around the world, allowing for some interesting exploration.

- Con: Sadly, the exploration part isn't used to the fullest. Sometimes you're just forced to use a particular ability. And some abilities are used once or twice and then completely forgotten for the rest of the game (I'm looking at you big fish underwater ability)

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Other problems with this game are:

- Story: Really poor and basic "stop the main villain from conquering the world" kind of story. There is some world building to what will become a bigger story later in the series though.

- THE GAME IS GRINDY: If you're gonna play on emulator I strongly recommend using a 2x experience patch. Otherwise you'll meet an extremely unbalanced grind factor where you'll have to circle around the dungeons for hours to be able to beat the bosses.

- Translation: I think Ted Woolsy just did the best he could with some horrible limitations. A lot of weird dialogue, mistakes and shortened text. Specially annoying are the shortened item names, you can't really tell what anything does in this game. For this I recommend the "War of the Goddess" sort-of-retranslation patch (it's based on Woolsy's script but improved).

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I recommend playing this game first if you wanna get into the series. It'll be hard to go back to this game after you've played the 2nd one, which improves upon basically everything, and fixes most of these cons. It'll also make that experience so much better after you've already seen some of the characters and the world built in this first game.

While Breath of Fire 2 was a game I had as a kid, the first game is something I'd never tried before. For this month's TR theme of Capcom/Konami games that aren't action games, I was thinking of playing the third game in the series, but I decided to finally get the first game under my belt first before going yet further into the series. It took me about 30-ish hours to beat the Japanese version of the game with the good ending on the Switch Online's Super Famicom service, and while I did use save states and rewinds, it was largely just for saving time to avoid needing to reclimb towers just because I thought an escape window was a door to another room XP

The game starts with the main character, Ryuu, being spoken words of prophecy in a dream only to wake up to his home being on fire and his village under attack by the Dark Dragon Army. His sister turns all the other villagers of the Light Dragon clan (including him) to stone in order to save them from the flames, and sacrifices herself to the commanding general of the Dark Dragon Army, Judas. Ryu, ever the silent protagonist, sets out at the wishes of his village's elders to avenge his sister's sacrifice and to save the world from the clutches of Dark Dragon Army and their emperor Zorgon.

The story is overall very standard and nothing very impressive for 1993. I picked the Japanese version of the game after spending an hour or so with both that and the English version and finding that the Japanese version had more entertainingly written dialogue, but it's still very much "on an adventure to save the world" fare. The fairly large cast of 8 characters (including Ryu) don't have a ton of character between them, with most of the lines being split between Nina, Danku (Karn, in English) and Deis (Blue, in English). The most interesting thing in the story to me was how much of it I could see as early echoes of what would become Breath of Fire 2's much better done character arcs. Karn would be developed into Katt, Ox into Rand, and Gobi into Jean were the most obvious of those. BoF1's story is humorous and generally quite light, which doesn't make it bad, per se, but it does result in fairly unsatisfying set dressing for what ends up being a fairly long game.

The mechanics are fairly simple, even for a JPRG of this era. Characters have normal attacks as well as spells, and that's just about it. Karn has some cool transformation spells he can learn from secret move tutors (they're what would influence the Shaman transformations in BoF2), and Ryu's dragon transformations work a bit differently than they do in the sequel, but there's really not a ton of variety here. BoF1 is quite an unambitious game narratively, and that extends to the mechanics of fighting as well.

The combat itself isn't really well polished, either. The random encounter rate is far too high, and the only saving grace is that most combats can be fairly painlessly solved with just normal attacks, and you also have an auto-attack button you can set that to work with. The bosses aren't really all that powerful either. Especially if you go for the good ending and get Ryu's ultimate dragon form, even the final bosses of the game are pushovers, with the only really tough boss I faced being a big green fishy guy right before you get your dragon forms. Ryu's dragon forms are boss killing machines, but even more than that, it just seemed like my party was always very powerful compared to just about everything I was fighting. It makes the game drag on even more on top of the already fairly meh-writing, and that's before we even mention the poor signposting that plagues this game's pacing as well.

The presentation in the game is quite nice, thankfully. A good portion of the music is pretty forgettable, but a lot of it is pretty darn good, especially the second main battle theme and several of the later town themes. The sprites are also very big and pretty. Breath of Fire 2 has a lot of really pretty big sprites in its isometric battle layouts, and that is something its predecessor doesn't slack on either. In a world where FFV was out but FFVI wasn't yet, BoF1's graphics still manage to hold their own on the SNES despite Capcom's relative unfamiliarity with the RPG genre.

As far as differences between the English and Japanese versions of the game, there aren't really many of note, ultimately. While the character of the dialogue is more entertaining in Japanese, I don't think the actual content of the story is that meaningfully different (other than foreshadowing the final twist a bit more). There are some character name changes, of course, and the art direction of Karn's Japanese counterpart is a prettttty racist black stereotype (the grey skinned, big lipped clan of people whose proficiencies are stealing and disguise was proooobably a good thing to remove in localization ^^;), other than that, things are more or less the same. I saw some claims online of a couple of balance changes around how often enemies can inflict status effects, but I personally experienced none of that. At any rate, I wouldn't say the game particularly needs a retranslation to the degree that BoF2 certainly deserves.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. BoF1's biggest sins ultimately just mean its a bit boring. While I personally like it better than something like FFIV that I played last year, I think a lot of FFIV's faults are a result of the reckless ambition in which it was crafted. BoF1 is a very unambitious game, and that makes for a colorful yet not terribly memorable experience. It's not a bad game by any means, but even among the RPGs just on the SNES, many people will likely find it difficult to stay focused enough with to finish it.

Well, Square Enix has FF and DQ (aka the most influential JRPGs series of all times), Konami has Suikoden and so we finally go with Capcom with this.

While in 1993 we already got plenty of more interesting RPGs (FF V was released one year prior for crying out loud), this one doesn't really do anything bad or outstanding: it does its job quite alright: an alright combat system, an alright artstyle, great charming graphics, an alright soundtracl.

So, yep: it's overall a pretty alright game.

LOS AÑOS LE HAN AFECTADO DEMASIADO

En su día probablemente funcionase al ser de los primeros JRPGs de la consola, pero a día de hoy jugar al primer Breath of Fire equivale a jugar uno de esos JRPG de la NES que simplemente consistía en aventura, mazmorras y combate por turnos.

Toda la historia del juego es una lista entera de clichés; guerreros de luz y guerreros de oscuridad, imperio maligno que hace cosas malas, aldea del prota arrasada, personaje importante del prota secuestrado y demás personajes afectados por el imperio que también quieren luchar y se unen al prota por un objetivo común.

FFII llevó el concepto de la lucha por el imperio a un contexto más interesante 5 años antes de este y no hay giros de trama interesantes como se hizo años después en The Legend of Dragoon.

Si cualquier jugador de JRPGs piensa en los tópicos del género cada vez que estos ocurren en los actuales, esto es como si se hubiese hecho un juego con todos y cada uno de esos tópicos pero con la salvedad de usar animales antropomórficos como personajes principales.