Breath of Fire: Which should you play first?

Since making all these Breath of Fire posts, and starting a topic about it on Talking Time, a few people have expressed interest in the series without knowing where they should get started. I thought this would be a good opportunity to provide an overview of the whole series.

The first thing to understand about the five BoF games is that they do not form any kind of cohesive narrative. You can’t plug the games together and say, “This is how the series goes,” and mean it. There are themes and characters that every game has in common, and it’s clear the games are taking place in the same world (albeit eons and eons apart, in some cases)… but it’s impossible to “miss out” on part of the story by playing the later ones first.

As an example of what I mean here: BoF1 is about a war between two clans of dragons. BoF2 references characters and events from the first game without going into much detail about acknowledging the war. BoF3, on the other hand, is all about the aftermath of that war, and what became of the world as a result. At no point, though, do the stories or characters of BoF2 and BoF3 intersect. Instead of a linear story of BoF1 -> BoF2 -> BoF3, it’s almost as though the second and third games are both alternate versions of a sequel to the first.

If that confused you, try Googling some theories about the Legend of Zelda timeline.

The moral of the story is: start with whichever of the five games you think you’ll enjoy the most. Prior knowledge of one is not at all required to enjoy another.

That said…

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Breath of Fire

The original game is an 8-bit RPG done up in 16-bits. Which is to say it looks and sounds like an SNES game, but plays like something that came free with a subscription to Nintendo Power. Much of the structure of the game is as follows: your heroes define some objective, such as “get across the river” or “activate the stone giant”. However, some obstacle blocks them, and they can only remove that obstacle by completing the accompanying fetch quest. The fetch quest can only be initiated by returning some lost item to some non-descript NPC. That item was of course misplaced in a dungeon, which is blocked by some other obstacle, which…

…and by the time you get over the river, or whatever, a third of the game has gone by.

Most of what you do in this game is nonsensical and unrelated to the plot. It’s all just an excuse to kill hundreds and hundreds of random bad guys. Your teammates do not have unique motivations for joining our hero; they simply join the party because they figure they’re already in the instruction manual so, hey, why not?

This game has separate music tracks for being in town, and being inside a house in that town. How quaint is that?

Remember, Breath of Fire came out in that innocent time before Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger did their part to redefine what RPGs were like. The game isn’t a coherent story so much as a series of only loosely-connected adventures. You run errands for thirty hours, and then you find yourself standing in front of a switch that saves the world. You get a “PULL THE SWITCH?? (Y/N)” dialogue box, then roll credits.

Now, I like this oldschool style of adventure-RPG, but I’m an old fart who grew up with Final Fantasy and Ultima: Quest of the Avatar. If you didn’t get into RPGs until FF7 was popular, you might not have what it takes to appreciate what the original BoF was doing.

Where can I get it? Amazon has copies of both the original SNES version and the GBA remake for under twenty bucks.

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Breath of Fire II

Early SNES RPGs were basically just 8-bit games with nicer graphics. Sometime during the 16-bit era the new trend became crafting a game that could tell a story from beginning to end. That’s exactly what BoF2 does.

From a gameplay standpoint, it’s practically identical to the original; you have a team of crazy characters, each with unique strengths and weaknesses, that trample over thousands of bad guys in hours and hours of turn-based combat. What it does differently is gives the hero a clear goal to accomplish, and an adequate explanation of how to accomplish it. For the first half of the game this is “chase down the thief”, and for the second half it is “what the heck is that evil church up to.” Not exactly groundbreaking stuff, but it works and flows a lot better than the constant pit stops and side-tracks of the first game.

Unfortunately, the game has two pretty gross flaws that overshadow anything positive it tries to do. For one, it has a notoriously bad translation. I mean, to the point where it is literally impossible to understand what the characters are saying and doing. The game has a surprisingly dark plot, and some very weighty emotional scenes, but both effects are destroyed because the whole cast converses like they’re sharing the same birth defects.

And second, it is one of the most intensely grind-heavy RPGs I’ve ever played. You simply cannot succeed in this game without running circles killing monsters. The game helpfully provides an island with one-shottable monsters that give tens of thousands of EXP, and you will spend hours there. And you will spend hours there again, after the plot dictates you must now use a character who spent the last round on the bench.

Where can I get it? The SNES and GBA versions are slightly pricier than the original, but that’s not the deciding factor here. There is no “definitive” version of BoF2; you sort of have to pick which of the two game-destroying flaws you’d rather put up with.

If you want to abolish the terrible translation, there is a fan translation project which smooths out the rough parts of the story and improves on the game’s presentation as a whole. So you’ll at least be able to tell what’s going on while you’re spending hours and hours running around Monster Island.

If you want a game with a more lenient progression curve, the GBA version gives dramatic increases to EXP and money earned from killing monsters. This means you can win the game without stopping to grind, but you’ll have to put up with an entire world that can’t use words correctly.

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Breath of Fire III

The contrast between early- and late-era SNES RPGs was pretty stark; the contrast in the PSX-era is much less so. Early PSX RPGs had the same kinds of overarching plots that SNES RPGs did. The later you go in the generation, the more overbearing and pretentious those plots got. This eventually came to a head in Xenogears, which discarded gameplay entirely in favor of being able to cram more and more dialogue boxes and exposition into the game.

That’s kind of a roundabout way of saying that BoF3’s story is pretty hefty, but not overwhelmingly so. It’s actually quite charming how the game takes itself seriously only to the precise level required to craft an enjoyable experience.

Mechanically speaking, this game really stepped things up. The first two games were all about leveling heroes up along their straight, pre-determined paths. The third game, however, has a pretty complex system of skills, stat gains, battle tactics and dragon transformations to navigate. This was the point in gaming history where RPGs needed gameplay systems in their lists of bullet points, and there was some grumbling that BoF3 didn’t do enough to distinguish itself in this regard. The good news is, nowadays, a lot of those other RPGs look needlessly gimmicky, whereas BoF3 just looks delightfully old-fashioned.

Where can I get it? You can get used copies of the PSX disc on Amazon for about what the game went for new, back in the day. The version I’m currently playing is for PSP, but that was only released in the EU, although in this wondrous age of the internet it’s not really any more difficult to come by. If Capcom had any sense, of course, they would drop this as a $9.99 PSN download. I mean, a man can dream, right?

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Breath of Fire IV

I think BoF4 remains the most intensely Japanese RPG I’ve ever played. Most JRPGs, even the over-the-top anime ones, try to sell themselves as generic cartoony fantasy worlds. BoF4 went in the exact opposite direction; all of the themes, settings and aesthetics of this game have a very distinct Eastern flair. There is a lot of emphasis on Asian philosophy and mysticism which my stupid gaijin brain had a hard time grasping.

Outside of that, the game is very similar to BoF3. The major difference is how the party is handled; in BoF3 you had three characters in your party, and three on the bench. In BoF4 you have six characters in your party, split into two lines, which can be swapped back and forth as needed. The strategy involved in combat is less focused on character development and more focused on correctly moving those characters in battle. If you can imagine Final Fantasy X as a turn-based game, you’d be in the ballpark.

Where this game really shines is how it looks and sounds. There are not prettier sprites anywhere in the PlayStation, and the soundtrack is nothing short of spectacular. I’m not the kind of player that can appreciate a game solely based on its artwork, but if you are, BoF4 should already be in your collection. What are we even talking about, here?

Where can I get it? A used copy of the PSX disc is your only hope until Capcom wises up and gives us a PSN option. New copies of this game are worth their weight in gold.

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Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter

The fifth game is so different from the rest of the series they didn’t even bother calling it “Breath of Fire 5”. At this point all the trappings of traditional RPGs have been abandoned completely; Dragon Quarter is much closer to a greuling dungeon hack than a world-spanning adventure. A lot of people who loved the first four games hated DQ, and a lot of DQ’s most vocal fans are people who dislike standard JRPGs.

This game is all about resource management. Every move you make expends resources, and resources are limited. There are a finite amount of battles in the game, which means a finite amount of experience and money. There are no Inns or recharge points; every point of healing you use comes from your pocketbook or a dropped monster item. You can always fall back on your super-powered dragon transformation, which is immune to everything and can kill anything in just a couple hits… but doing so adds to a counter which constantly ticks away in a corner of your screen. If that counter ever caps out, it results in an immediate and irrecoverable Game Over.

The gimmick to this game is that, at any given time, you can put a portion of your amassed wealth in a box, then start over from the beginning. You’re back at Level 1, but you still have everything in your box. Subsequent trips through the game get easier and easier as your skills and equipment are expanded and secured, until eventually you are able to keep that D-Counter down long enough to get to the end.

And then you can start over again, gaining access to new areas and plot sequences your next time around.

What really killed this game in the eyes of so many is that heart-stoppingly insane concept of permanent loss. You’re not supposed to be able to “lose” a JRPG the way you can lose in Dragon Quarter. The game is actually forgiving about most of its aspects; far more forgiving than a proper dungeon hack or roguelike… but JRPG fans are carebears all the way down to their moist, weepy centers.

The hilarious thing is, the three or four stacked playthroughs required to get to the end of Dragon Quarter still only take up a fraction of the time it would take to get all the way to the end of whatever other JRPG you have on your shelf. If you know how the game works, you can still approach it like a standard RPG; you can grind, you can shop, you can cheeseball your way through encounters. But you can’t be lazy. This game punishes laziness.

Oh, and the camera sucks.

Where can I get it? The masses at large despised this game, and Capcom seems to have disowned it. Ten bucks on Amazon, and I’ve seen it on the bargain shelf at GameStop. (Or, rather, I would have seen it there if GameStop had a bargain shelf.)