Not a whole lot of grinding, thankfully, but that's mostly due to a bad encounter rate. It was super easy though. I think there was one tough boss battle, but you get dragon powers after that so the rest of the game is a cakewalk. Endgame is especially a cakewalk, since you get the ability to achieve the ultimate form of dragon. It's literally a "Press A to Win" type of power and all of the final bosses were a complete joke.

Story and characters were both pretty bland, so I'm not sure why it's heralded as a classic. I guess it did neat things for it's time though, like a day/night mechanic and giving each party member specific uses on the World Map and in dungeons. It also levels up your entire party regardless of whether they fight, which should be required for every RPG created, but isn't...

Also there was a ton of annoying padding that became more noticeable by the end. Like, one of your final missions before the ending area is to save a town frozen in time. So you go to this tower and climb all the way up to find the boss. The boss then warps you away from the tower, so you return to the town and watch a 20-second cutscene..... then do the exact same dungeon again. Like, there were no changes made to it, you were just forced to repeat the exact same dungeon you'd just gone through a few minutes ago. Then you're forced to get some specific item to enter the final dungeon that requires you to fly back and forth between two islands and talk to NPCs. The game just had really bad pacing towards the end, like it was refusing to let you finish things up and making everything as stale as possible.

But overall it was fine. Just fine. Wouldn't really recommend this to anyone.

Oh, and the music was great. This is now one of my favorite RPG town themes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc72rhjygLk 3/6

I played Breath of Fire when it originally came out and it stuck with me because of its creativity and graphics. The gameplay doesn't have much going on, besides some interesting world map interactions, unfortunately.

BoF looks great. The spritework is really well done and the characters are creative. I like how none of the characters in this game are regular humans -- it gives the world a unique and interesting feel.
The world map and dungeon sprites are fine, but less impressive. They definitely don't do enough to save the repetitive nature of the dungeons themselves.

Breath of Fire's story is straightforward and simple. It doesn't try particularly hard to motivate things and often your goals in the world are somewhat unclear or arbitrary. Many of the events seem to only exist to pull you to the next dungeon and progression is often gated by actions that aren't very clear.

BoF does some cool stuff with its world map. Some of the characters have special abilities that allow them to interact, by digging in the ground, detecting traps, and shooting wild animals to get items. It is a cool addition that gives some personality to the characters and further emphasizes their unique traits.
Combat definitely doesn't have as much to offer here. It is about as simple as you can get. Most of the characters are limited to simply attacking and only a couple get spells. Spells do set damage and type bonuses are pretty unclear, so you only end up using a few of them. Most of the boss battles in the game just boil down to attacking and healing. This is exacerbated by the fact that the dungeons are long and circuitous and there is a ton of combat throughout them.

Breath of Fire is pretty and has some cool stuff in it, but Capcom definitely wasn't trying anything super ambitious with this title. If you are interested in the history, it may be worth it, but there are much better JRPGs than this one. There is some hard to define charm here that keeps it barely above one star territory. Probably nostalgia.

+ BGM is delightful, even filtered through the GBA MIDI decay.
+ surprisingly interactive overworld
+ sense of adventure
+ colorful and imaginative character design

+/- Characters have unique roles, which is pleasant, but some are substantially more useful than others.
+/- Enemy designs range from garden-variety to Lovecraftian. While the common enemies are pretty generic, some of the end game bosses are truly unnerving. Shout out in particular to Mote, whose design is cemented upon increasing/decreasing pixelization dependant upon the type of damage received. That was creative.
+/- Transformations are conceptually cool, but mechanically add very little.

- OK story utterly ruined by a pallid, lifeless script. The script is so poor it largely ruined the game for me. The original Dragon Warrior (NES) has a better script and by a huge margin, come on.
- characters are largely blank slates with very little diverging personality
- run-of-the-mill gameplay without any real substance; pales in comparison to even its SNES contemporaries
- despite the unique character roles, virtually every battle plays the same. Strategy is minimal even in the most difficult fights.
- absolutely brutal encounter rate that makes exploration and dungeons a real chore. I abused the hell out of the Marbl3 item just to make it tolerable, and that's just poor game design. Random battles are already a dated concept, but BoF's frequency is just ridiculous.

The terrible script and asinine encounter rate essentially killed the game for me. I pushed through to the end because I want to play the better-received BoF games, and consensus dictates they get progressively better, but I really wanted to drop it many times. Disregarding the mundane plot with a handful of cool ideas, lifeless characters, and decrepit gameplay, this game's death knell was walking around talking to all the various NPCs in the games' tiny villages to find almost all of them have the exact same lines of dialogue. In a genre that's deeply conditioned the player to interact with everything, holy shit was that excruciating.

Breath of Fire 1 review:

Note: This is mainly a review of the War of the Goddess hack, which is mostly a script rewrite with slight other changes. 2x exp and zenny were enabled (yet the game still proved to be challenging so lol). There shall be spoilies:

Breath of Fire is rather rough around the edges, but its ideas and creativity still make it fairly enjoyable for an rpg of its time.

Story, Worldbuilding, and Characters:
The story wastes no time in getting you started on your journey and is relatively straight forward. The protagonist, Ryu, has to make his way to the Dark Brood’s kingdom, Scande, all the while collecting seven Goddess keys to prevent the unsealing of the Goddess Myria. As such, events typically relate to retrieving these keys or having to overcome an obstacle blocking the way forward, and for the most part they’re pretty fun. Most of them tend to have their twists and turns to stay memorable while others use more creative ideas with objectives or dungeons. Good examples are when you take control of the 2nd party member, Nina, instead by the time you reach Wyndia, or dungeons such as the stone golem or Mogu’s dream world. In relation to this, the worldbuilding is rather strong in this game. The game tends to be creative with its environments, accompanied with different kinds of races such as the Fae or the Wolba, making the world exciting and fun to explore. I also like how the 7 keys lend themselves to this worldbuilding too, with something like the Day Key making the city of Auria remain in constant daylight, or the Sky Key affecting the weather of the town Spring. The day and night system adds a little more flavor, I find it neat.

Characters are also fun, with the War of the Goddess hack adding some more richness in their personalities with some basis from the manga. All eight party members are also a different race from each other, and with some added gameplay quirks such as their overworld skills and generally nice character design, they end up feeling distinct and unique.

Graphics and Music:
The visuals in general are pretty great in this game, with well-done sprite work of characters in particular with an appealing enough overworld and dungeons. The battles especially look great: the isometric perspective it takes on and how both party members and enemies are portrayed makes the rather simple turn-based battles feel more exciting. The menu UI is rather simple looking though, but it does its job; the UI is more interesting in battles.

I absolutely love the music in this game. There’s almost zero tracks I can think of that sounded bad or annoying, and none of them ever really got grating to hear; they fit the situations they’re used for as well. It’s quite distinct as well, and as such makes it easy to tell apart from other jrpg soundtracks. They tend to be short loops, but again, it never got to a point that any track in particular sounded annoying. My favourites definitely include the 2nd overworld theme and the underwater world theme.

Gameplay:
Breath of Fire’s turn-based battle system is fairly simple, becoming a little more interesting as more party members join. A lot of enemies typically just need to be dealt with physical attacks while bosses are the real challenge, requiring you to use your magic and items carefully to beat them. The original game as I recall was rather grind heavy as well, especially early game, but the 2x exp and zenny patch does ease that frustration a bit. Still, even with the patch, a lot of battles tend to be challenging and so caution must still be taken in new areas and dungeons.
There’s a wide variety of enemies but typically the variety of enemy attacks is mostly physical attacks with some magic here and there and some status effect skills. Bosses I usually found more interesting due to their designs and attacks, and magic and items being more worth using in these situations.

Party members generally have some sort of skill set both in battle and overworld to make them stand out more from each other and to ensure they remain useful. Usefulness of each character varies as the game progresses but each one is needed at some point or another. It helps that swapping party members can simply be done through the menu, and members not in use still gain exp which helps to not have to play catch-up. Speaking of which, characters seem to level at different rates, so don’t worry too much if someone seems to be lacking behind in levels or is leveling too fast.

The menu is simple and easy to work with, but item sorting can be a bit of a pain as there’s no auto-sorting of any kind.

Negatives:
Battles can become repetitive, especially with the encounter rate, but at the least you can buy smoke (marbl3 in the original) to prevent encounters for a while. The original game is also rather grind heavy early on, while mid-game tends to feel a bit too easy.

Dungeons can be a little frustrating due to the way they’re structured, requiring a lot of walking around for the potential of treasure while also having to deal with enemies. From early to mid-game, dungeons can also feel rather samey.

Item descriptions are simplistic but to the extent that any effects a piece of equipment has is not listed either. This can be a bit of a pain seeing as some equipment like the Wolfgod helmet (WolfHT) apparently makes the wearer take extra damage from magic, and so I kept having doubts about other equipment and would often check online to make sure. Magic doesn’t get any descriptions but the names are typically simple enough that you can make a good enough guess as to what they do.

Npcs would often share the same dialogue which is rather annoying as talking to an npc is sometimes required to progress the story, and there also tends to be unnecessary empty space in towns mainly. Different tracks from the town usually play inside houses, so the constant music changing can be a bit frustrating.

Debo’s rather useless in the original as it can only be used underwater, and by the time you get this fusion you have almost zero reason to traverse the underwater world, nor are there any water dungeons ahead (the hack switches Shin and Debo’s placement so you get Debo first, which gives it more use as you need to traverse the ocean floor by that point of the game). Similarly Gobi tends to be a bit more useless among the party members, due in part his skills can only be used underwater.

Type bonuses aren’t usually that clear so you typically end up just using whatever strongest magic you have.

why do you get the Emperor Sword so late oh my god

Final Thoughts:
I really enjoyed this replay, more than I expected to. The hack does a good job with it’s script rewrite and the game itself wasn’t as rough as I remember it being. I definitely would recommend it if you feel like playing an older jrpg, it’s a pretty fun time.