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.
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.
3 Comments
@Nickakyoin Yeah, I meant the original NES game. I've played the Pixel Remaster edition, and thought it was great, a really solid entry point into RPG's. The point being here, that not even popular franchises like Final Fantasy began on a great note when they first came out, which is why I wanna give Breath of Fire slack and hope that the later entries get better.
Phew, thank you. Solid points for the rest.
Nickakyoin
2 months ago