IN SUM: A JRPG with inflated ratings due to nostalgia rose-tinted glasses that fails to live up to the greatness of its predecessor Breath of Fire II. Please play BoF2 with the amazing fan translation instead!
BoF is known as CAPCOM's first meaningful JRPG franchise. It features very nice graphics, great music, and an anthropomorphic fantastic world. The storylines are sort of what you'd expect from a turn of the century JRPG: good vs evil, man vs god/machine, etc. Other common elements are a dragon humanoid protagonist, a female lead called Nina, and lead party members with specific overworld interactions for puzzle-solving.
BoF 2 was a big failure... but only due to sporting one of the most horrible official translations in existence. This was rectified with the very opposite: possible one of the best fan TLs I've had the pleasure of reading. Nonetheless, it made it so that the western audience had a bad impression of the game. I reason this rationale due BoF 3's status as the best of the franchise. After experiencing it, it's clearly not, but it's explained by the aforementioned barriers to entry.
This game is quick to disappoint. It has one of the most boring, redundant, and pointless early games ever. The first 15 hours have you wander aimlessly with similar events repeating, and very little worldbuilding, character building, or story hints. Most enemies are weak and all but boss battles are solvable by leaving the game on autobattle and stocking up on cheap but efficient healing items. This is a trend that remains throughout the whole game. It does not help that the animations are extremely slow with lots of redundancy, making the game an absolute slog without fast-forward. It also features some real stinkers for dungeons, but soon does the game shift its gears by introducing a story twist and segwaying into Act 2. I would argue, however, that no matter how good the individual scenes, a very tedious Act 1 heavily damages the subsequent acts.
Many of the disappointing points remained. Coming from BoF2, I was expecting the same intricate character-driven story arcs and emotional climaxes rivaling and at times surpassing those of behemoths such as Chrono Trigger. It's only near the end that the games does unravel itself and bring on the moments of character introspection. However, it's not helped by the fact that you don't have a strong affinity for these weakly developed characters, and that the game gives the player fake agency throughout, pretending you have a voice in the happenings.
Gameplay-wise, it features two big systems. First is the apprentice system, where you may leave a character under a master's tutelage. You get a trade-off of positive and negative stat growths and learn some skills in return. If you're careless, you could very well gimp your character and make them useless later on. If you just follow your intuition, you should be mostly fine. One of the best masters is met really early on, so it's hard to screw-up your MC. One of the best lategame ones could be permanently lost due to a simple "Do you like how I look'?" question. Coupled with this, with the usage of very restricted consumable items, you're able to switch master-learned skills around between your characters. So you could use some scrubs to gain skills quickly and transfer them to your powerhouses.
The other one is Dragon transformation. Ryu, the protagonist, has the ability to transform into a dragon. You can acquire crystallized genes from story rewards, or items in the overworld. With 18 choices and being able to combine them to up to groups of 3, there's dozens (hundreds) of different possible choices. It sounds pretty neat, but entering and maintaining this form costs a lot of AP (mana equivalent), so you'll only be using it during boss fights (which can be actually challenging). This actually means you'll be looking up the best choices, choosing cookie-cutter options, or picking the same ones as the situation fits due to overburden of choice. So this system can't be exploited to its fullest.
Since I mentioned translation previously, the game suffers from some issues as well. The dialogue is very weak and reminiscent of NES JRPGs with limited characters textboxes. It can even read contradictorily in the most important story moments, and I give the benefit of the doubt by attributing this due to being lost in translation.
The game has inflated ratings due to rose-tinted nostalgia. We have to keep in mind this was the same console that gave us games such as FF7 (and others), Xenogears, and Chrono Chross. The result was an above-average JRPG that fails to live up to the reputation of its predecessor, in big part due to unfortunate circumstances.
TLDR: Play BoF2 with the fanTL instead!
BoF is known as CAPCOM's first meaningful JRPG franchise. It features very nice graphics, great music, and an anthropomorphic fantastic world. The storylines are sort of what you'd expect from a turn of the century JRPG: good vs evil, man vs god/machine, etc. Other common elements are a dragon humanoid protagonist, a female lead called Nina, and lead party members with specific overworld interactions for puzzle-solving.
BoF 2 was a big failure... but only due to sporting one of the most horrible official translations in existence. This was rectified with the very opposite: possible one of the best fan TLs I've had the pleasure of reading. Nonetheless, it made it so that the western audience had a bad impression of the game. I reason this rationale due BoF 3's status as the best of the franchise. After experiencing it, it's clearly not, but it's explained by the aforementioned barriers to entry.
This game is quick to disappoint. It has one of the most boring, redundant, and pointless early games ever. The first 15 hours have you wander aimlessly with similar events repeating, and very little worldbuilding, character building, or story hints. Most enemies are weak and all but boss battles are solvable by leaving the game on autobattle and stocking up on cheap but efficient healing items. This is a trend that remains throughout the whole game. It does not help that the animations are extremely slow with lots of redundancy, making the game an absolute slog without fast-forward. It also features some real stinkers for dungeons, but soon does the game shift its gears by introducing a story twist and segwaying into Act 2. I would argue, however, that no matter how good the individual scenes, a very tedious Act 1 heavily damages the subsequent acts.
Many of the disappointing points remained. Coming from BoF2, I was expecting the same intricate character-driven story arcs and emotional climaxes rivaling and at times surpassing those of behemoths such as Chrono Trigger. It's only near the end that the games does unravel itself and bring on the moments of character introspection. However, it's not helped by the fact that you don't have a strong affinity for these weakly developed characters, and that the game gives the player fake agency throughout, pretending you have a voice in the happenings.
Gameplay-wise, it features two big systems. First is the apprentice system, where you may leave a character under a master's tutelage. You get a trade-off of positive and negative stat growths and learn some skills in return. If you're careless, you could very well gimp your character and make them useless later on. If you just follow your intuition, you should be mostly fine. One of the best masters is met really early on, so it's hard to screw-up your MC. One of the best lategame ones could be permanently lost due to a simple "Do you like how I look'?" question. Coupled with this, with the usage of very restricted consumable items, you're able to switch master-learned skills around between your characters. So you could use some scrubs to gain skills quickly and transfer them to your powerhouses.
The other one is Dragon transformation. Ryu, the protagonist, has the ability to transform into a dragon. You can acquire crystallized genes from story rewards, or items in the overworld. With 18 choices and being able to combine them to up to groups of 3, there's dozens (hundreds) of different possible choices. It sounds pretty neat, but entering and maintaining this form costs a lot of AP (mana equivalent), so you'll only be using it during boss fights (which can be actually challenging). This actually means you'll be looking up the best choices, choosing cookie-cutter options, or picking the same ones as the situation fits due to overburden of choice. So this system can't be exploited to its fullest.
Since I mentioned translation previously, the game suffers from some issues as well. The dialogue is very weak and reminiscent of NES JRPGs with limited characters textboxes. It can even read contradictorily in the most important story moments, and I give the benefit of the doubt by attributing this due to being lost in translation.
The game has inflated ratings due to rose-tinted nostalgia. We have to keep in mind this was the same console that gave us games such as FF7 (and others), Xenogears, and Chrono Chross. The result was an above-average JRPG that fails to live up to the reputation of its predecessor, in big part due to unfortunate circumstances.
TLDR: Play BoF2 with the fanTL instead!