Breath of Fire — Somewhat Dated. And Goliath.

Throughout the entirety of the Breath of Fire series, I got this sense that there was always an underlying theme of tragedy driving the overall plot forward.  The opening of the first game, the whale quest and the family you condemn to starvation as a result in the second, the barren, desert portion of the world in the third, the desertification of the whole world in the fourth, pretty much everything in the fifth, it’s as if Capcom were documenting their own descent into despair with each and every entry in the series.  And yet, Dragon Quarter ended with a sudden yet inspiring sense of hope, such that a sixth entry in the series might’ve been a bright new rebirth for the franchise if it didn’t turn out to be more grimdark than a Tim Burton film.

Anyway, the original Breath of Fire opens with what is apparently the last remaining home of the Light Dragons, under attack by the overwhelming force of the Dark Dragons.  Sara (I did not name her, I swear I did not name her.  I know I use this name a lot in games, but I swear I did not name her), in an attempt to protect the rest of her kind, transforms everyone in town to stone and confronts the Dark Dragons herself.  Inevitably, she’s captured and is spirited away to the Dark Dragons’ lair, leaving a city of stone behind.

Later, when the town has burned itself out, the spell lifts and presumably, everyone is happy to be out of their stone sleep.  “You’re awake, you’re alive!  We’re together again.”  Anyway, the main character, who actually isn’t given the default name of Ryu in the English version of the game or manual, so let’s call him something strong like Goliath because the cover of the game makes him look like a Conan wannabe with long, flowing hair and muscles, sets out to try to save the world because he’s told that it’s his destiny.  I guess the Dragon Clan has a kind of sixth sense regarding this thing.

Then Goliath promptly dies, five paces from his home.  Nice knowing you, dude.

Two fleas?  Goliath is fucked…

Okay, I’m being a little silly here, but in all seriousness, if a player’s first encounter is anything other than a single slime, it sucks to be Goliath.  Unlike modern RPGs which practically start you off in a freebie tutorial section with hundreds of HP already, sometimes thousands, Goliath starts off with… twenty.  If a bird so much as crapped on him, he’d have keeled over from the damage.  But I’ve played games like this before (and this wasn’t my first time playing Breath of Fire anyway), so I was used to constantly going back and healing until I could handle myself well enough to get to the second town.

Once there, I discovered right away that Goliath can’t run.  It’s possible that the slow pace he finds himself at in towns and dungeons could act as a turn off for some players, but I was fine with it.  Still, it’s one of those modern comforts that I like and I do wish it was included because the random encounter rate in dungeons is quite high and Goliath barely walks ten steps before getting attacked.

There’s an interesting battle mechanic that I’d forgotten was available to me until I played this game again.  Although only four characters are allowed to participate in any given round of a battle, I could swap a character out for another if I needed to.  It reminded me of Final Fantasy X, except that Breath of Fire did it first.  And outside of battle, many characters have special skills they can do in order to help the party get past obstacles.  Bo can navigate through forests, Ox can break down walls, etc.

This is the warrior who is destined to save us all?  We’re doomed.

Anyway, the encounter rate doesn’t let up out on the world map and this is bad news for anyone who wants to hunt.  After returning to the world map from either a town or a battle, animals sometimes appear and can be killed either by Bo (the party member with a bow and arrow) or by getting cornered and spontaneously exploding because that’s what all cornered animals do in real life.  They explode and leave behind their meat or their antlers.

However, if the party encounters another random battle, the animals and any uncollected loot they dropped when they were killed disappears.  This is occasionally frustrating (although less so if one uses an item that decreases the encounter rate), but is usually the most frustrating when the rare white deer shows up.  The antler that he drops is also rare and if one stupidly uses the one that they find in a treasure chest early in the game, they’d better hope they see a white deer sooner rather than later or else they won’t be able to get past a certain point in the game where possessing a white antler is mandatory.  However, the game shows mercy by offering a second in another treasure chest at around the same time as one becomes necessary, but it is possible to miss that second one, causing frustration when a white deer just doesn’t show up for a couple hours and when one does show up, a random battle happens and argh!

I suppose I shouldn’t reveal that kind of thing, for it could be classified as a spoiler and I try to mark spoilers ahead of time, but Breath of Fire is twenty years old and I’m sure most people who want to have played it have played it already.  (Still, spoilers may follow.)  It certainly shares other characteristics with RPGs that old.  For instance, the translation leaves something to be desired.  It’s a little vague in places, and sometimes it doesn’t tell me who’s speaking in a cut scene, although I could figure it out after careful observation.

Protip: don’t sleep in a burning house

During the course of the game, I discovered that there were some dungeons that I was expected to leave on my own after I moved the plot forward, and other dungeons that I was automatically thrown out of as if by an impatient usher handing me my jacket and asking what my hurry is.  After a certain point in the game, I had access to a spell that would automatically take me to the entrance of a dungeon so it wasn’t really that big a deal, but I felt that if the game automatically kicked me out of some dungeons, why couldn’t it have automatically kicked me out of all of them?  I remember one part where I was supposed to toss an egg into a volcano and then return to Bleu’s island, but I wasn’t told where to find the volcano.  Naturally, after I searched and found the volcano and tossed the egg in, I thought it would be easy to get back to the island.  I was right: the game automatically warped me back there, had Bleu join my party, then automatically warped me to Prima, which was where the next part of the plot was going to take place.

That’s one thing I really noticed about the game.  There seemed to be a lack of key information in places.  I didn’t know what some of the stat
s were supposed to do, especially MAG and INT.  The most I could come up with was that they were tied into the Wisdom stat, which is described in the manual as “The members of your party vary in how savvy they are.  This entry explains which ones are on the go in the brains department.”  But everyone’s spells all had a set amount of damage or healing they could do.  MAG, INT, Wisdom, none of those stats had anything to do with it.  If a spell did 400 points of damage to an enemy, it always did 400 points no matter how strong a character got.  There was no possible way to power up a character’s magic whatsoever.

It would’ve helped me to know what each accessory did, too.  When I equipped the DreamRG, I was certain it did something, but neither the in-game description nor the item list the game came with was of any help.  It’s got 0 weight and 0 defence power, so there would be 0 purpose equipping it otherwise.  It wasn’t until I got into a fight with a Shadow that I found out that it seemed to prevent sleep.  Well how was I ever going to find that out beforehand?

I’m sure Erdrick would have something to say about that

As I hinted before, the translation didn’t do me any favours trying to figure my way around.  I needed to save the daughter of a rich man by finding a thief to unlock the safe she was in, but after I’d done that and unlocked the damn safe, the game refused to let me continue the story.  I had to find a mirror in the Tower of Light And Dark so that the rich man could have a quick chat with his dead wife.  The wife would then convince him to let me go and get a key he was going to give to the Dark Dragons.  Voila, I was able to continue.  The only clue to any of this was in Bleak when someone mentioned that the mirror in the tower would show me the spirit world or something like that.  It was vague, just like other aspects of the translation job.  Granted, I liked to explore around and it was because of this that I happened to stumble upon the next portion of the plot, but still: gamers who are used to having things explained to them every few minutes would be lost.  However, anyone who played and enjoyed the first couple Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games would be right at home with Breath of Fire.

Despite that, I never really found the game to be all that difficult.  About the only part that had me roaring in rage was when the party was stranded on an island and it was up to newcomer Gobi, never-tested-in-battle Gobi, his-powers-aren’t-listed-in-the-spells-list-Squaresoft-provided Gobi, severely-underleveled-and-weak Gobi to bring back the Gills and rescue them all.  Unfortunately, when (not if) Gobi dies, it costs half the party’s fortune, and at that point in the game, it’s quite easy to have a couple hundred thousand G on hand, not protected in the bank where it should be.  Fortunately, when Gobi dies, he respawns in Prima, which is where he was supposed to go in the first place to get the Gills.  Any money that’s left can go towards beefing up his DEF stat immensely.

Even though the game was tragic in places, I didn’t get the sense that there was any real emotion behind the translation.  Like, when the party is reunited with Nina and she’s grown up due to sudden, unexpected time travel, I guess the amnesia robbed her of any real sense of time because she acted like she’d just left the party despite clearly knowing about her new ability to fly and her suddenly adult body.

I only ever met either Light Dragons and Dark Dragons… unless all the other species in the world were supposed to be Dragons, since many of them could shift into larger forms.  The fish people, the bird people, etc.  The introduction certainly made mention of a lot of different species of dragons.  However, the only “classic” dragons were Goliath, Sara and one of the Dark Dragons.  The rest of the Dark Dragons instead shifted into evil frogs and plants and stuff.  But maybe that was an indication that the bird clan and the fish clan and everyone else were all Dragons of a sort.

Better check the lost and found, just in case

The only pet peeve I had with the game was that I hated having to rearrange my party members after each cut scene to get it back the way I wanted it, even when I had less than four characters to choose from.  Was it so difficult to keep Bo at the head of my party so I could keep walking through the woods?  I shouldn’t have had to keep moving him back to the head of my party.  Clearly I wanted him to lead or else I wouldn’t have put him there.  Respect my gameplay decision, okay?

At least the game didn’t sound like a bag of cats.  The soundtrack was composed by a team of four musicians who were already well established in their own right, including Yoko Shimomura, who would later go on to compose such soundtracks as Super Mario RPG, Legend of Mana and Kingdom Hearts.  Granted, she only supplied one track to Breath of Fire, but her work is always good anyway.  And despite having four composers working on the soundtrack at once, I never got the impression that any of their work was incongruent to anyone else’s.  Anyway, my point is that the game was pleasant to listen to.

In all, Breath of Fire is a good start to the series, if not overly spectacular.  I suppose it’s one of the harder games to find, considering it’s only currently available to purchase on eBay.  It has never been released on the Virtual Console, and the first and only remake (so far) was released for the GBA.  Other than that, if you have an SNES like I do, you might be able to get the game for cheap if you don’t mind not having the box or manual.  Myself, I didn’t have to fork out too much to get a box and manual with it.  However, I can see how eBay is impossible for some, so I suppose emulation is the only convenient way anyone can enjoy this game these days.

Screen shots hastily generated by the author after discovering he didn’t make any years ago when he thought he had