Breath of Fire

"The Bruce Lee of RPGs: lots of fighting and amazingly, no one can beat you."

In the roster of prominent role-playing games on the Super Nintendo, Breath of Fire, though ranked highly, deserves this rank less than most of the RPGs that are scored. It is a game that is overshadowed by its sequel, and it lives in the glory of it, for both a good and a bad reason. The good reason is that it accompanies its sequel well; both games are alike and linked through certain bonds, and players can play both in tandem for a rich experience. The bad reason is that Breath of Fire is only moderately enjoyable alone; with no expectations of a sequel, players experience what is a mediocre game with neat atmosphere and some good ideas, but they don't see how a future game fleshes them out. Breath of Fire and Breath of Fire II roughly share characters, magic, and visual and sonic idiosyncrasies, but Breath of Fire is the lesser half and prominent because of a bond with its sequel, which most players by association relate with the original.

You are Ryu, a member of the Light Dragon clan, whose enemies are the Dark Dragon clan. After the Dark Dragon clan attacks your village, you must sally forth alone and slowly work towards hunting them out. The humble early game intermingles completing tasks for villagers, usually in a dungeon, and finding the characters that will be your allies in the game (but you progress slowly, being on your own for a bit, which I like). The middle-game focuses more on completing tasks and less on finding other characters, and the later game begins to focus on your own objective, which is to kill the Dark Dragon clan. Although Breath of Fire is one of the least story-based RPGs on the Super Nintendo, you do things such as raid enemy camps, including hijacking and sinking an enemy ship, attacking enemy forts, and even fighting villains that are more distinct than the average big boss monster.

However, Breath of Fire's story is less narrated than it is hands-on. It is often told by visual cues and symbolism, which are many and perhaps determined differently by each player. Due to the abstract nature I'll discuss these later, but a concrete example is the cast of characters. They are big or small, human or anthropomorphic, colorful or dark, silly or serious. As a downfall Breath of Fire has the repetition of earlier 8-bit RPGs, but its cast of characters represents a resurgence of the 'merry band' in fantasy rather than generation through dice rolls or picking a Black Mage or a Fighter from a list. The game introduces characters slowly and confidently, and you feel a greater attachment to your troupe with each new addition.

Technically speaking, Breath of Fire is the standard 2-D RPG; you explore the overworld, towns, and dungeons from an overhead view. You find towns on the overworld where you learn what to do in the future, a task usually involving the exploration of a dungeon. You go into the dungeon and fight monsters, and you come out with a sum of gold. On your way to inform the village elder or whoever that you completed your mission, you buy new equipment from the shops and learn the location of a new town. Then you reenter the overworld, viewed from the 'bird's eye' perspective, and with the equipment and skill that you gained from fighting monsters, you navigate your way to the next town and quest. A problem specific to Breath of Fire is that dominating the above routine is effortless--monsters don't challenge you and the equipment and powering-up of characters are relatively inconsequential. You fall into a rut. Perhaps beating the game is all that you care for eventually. Breath of Fire II, which again overshadows this game, corrected the difficulty, but because it is similar, the original is sometimes imagined as sharing the same mold, which is wrong. Breath of Fire had a _limited_ grasp on challenge.

The overworld of Breath of Fire, a standard model that every console-roleplayer has seen before, is the main hub of everything in the game. It is colorful, a 16-bit orchestra plays an overture for it, and it leads to 'dungeons', which can be mountains, caves, haunted castles, etc., and towns, which unlike the overworld and dungeons are free of random encounters with enemies-- a staple of Breath of Fire's old-fashioned gameplay. These are the usual things, but Breath of Fire makes an effort of broadening its scope. For instance, characters in the game are capable of doing things such as hunting and fishing for which the game places fish and wildlife nodes on the map (the wildlife actually move, and the proper character must shoot them with a bow), and you see a visible difference between night and day while you progress on the overworld--usually a combination of slogging through very easy encounters (lack of challenge is a big problem in the game) and perhaps visiting hunting or fishing areas.

The main components of the overworld are towns. Here the inhabitants are less anxious to kill you and more anxious to sell you items, but that isn't all. Despite a generally poor translation of the dialogue, the townsmen offer back-story, information, and the greatest and most important townsman, who is usually the village elder or of a similar position, will ask for help from you . To get on with the game you must accept and explore a nearby location with monsters and a goal at the end. None of the towns have marked differences from other RPGs, and indeed the poorly translated dialogue hurts them when compared with the lively towns of a Final Fantasy II or III, but many scrape out a personality, such as being full of fish- or ox-men (you get a character of each type eventually), or a town of thieves or nomads. The shops in towns are the typical weapon, item, and armor deals, but the game also has storage banks, which I have never needed, but which may occasionally be useful given the amount of secret items in the game. Usually you want to enter a town, buy what you need, get your quest, and enter the main events of the overworld, where you really get down to business.

This final area of the overworld, which though I describe with a broad term has different types, is the dungeon--you can thus substitute mountains, towers, caves, a giant robot, or any place where monsters hang out, for dungeon. As in most RPGs, the dungeons are a good concentration of monsters, which give you experience points that increase your power, and gold, which you earn from killing monsters. You find random encounters with enemies inside of dungeons, and you also get rewards that theoretically balance the risk of fighting enemies (but remember, Breath of Fire has few risks); first, you find treasure chests, and finally, you find the objective of the dungeon. Most often the objective is a boss enemy--an easy kill like everything else-- but sometimes you may need an item, either of which can advance the story. Optional dungeons don't exist in Breath of Fire--perhaps without meaning to some players--but blockades and locked doors are in dungeons, and these stop your accessing secret areas on the first run through. When you get the thief character KARN and the ox-man OX you can return to these dungeons and find items that you previously couldn't get behind these barriers. Sadly, you don't always have a choice of when you must return to a dungeon. At one point you must repeat a dungeon that you've been to, which does seem unfair, and dungeons aren't always exhilarating, pointing once again to the trend of repetition that haunts many of the game's tasks.

A possible source of monotony in dungeons isn't hard to peg down. They are the breeding grounds of monsters and the random encounters that involve them, and become tedious. It's not a universal problem known to RPGS, but for a few reasons Breath of Fire has trouble making its encounters exciting. Normally, encounters serve a purpose in RPGs, of testing and powering-up your characters, whether through experience or gold. However, Breath of Fire's system of encounters like the rest of the game is foolproof. You aren't tested. Why power-up? I spent most of my time in game using items that eliminated monster encounters for a period of time. The gold that you get from monsters is appreciable, but an unusual situation has arisen when you are turning around and spending that same gold on the avoidance of future encounters. If the game were difficult, which it isn't, you would spend monsters' gold on gear in shops, which is the main or secondary way of improving characters. I have joked before that Breath of Fire is the Bruce Lee of RPGs, as Capcom the famous action-game-designers love cramming these games with combats; but I had never framed the enemies as some of the punching-bags-with-legs that appear in his movies. It's not an unfair comparison, except that some of the punching bags may have tentacles or talons, though they couldn't match you in a fight even if you denied them the distinction.

As to random encounters--they occur every dozen steps or so. As they have no challenge about them you learn quickly how many mashes are necessary to initiate auto-attacks. Fighting grow wearisome after a bit, because 1) it's not challenging, and 2) you don't altogether need the rewards from fights to advance. The variety of monsters, their attack-animations, and most everything else is good, but you will want to stock up on the MRB3 item that reduces how many times you have to fight monsters. Once you get hold of the Earthquake Key or similar items that are click-to-win area of effect spells without charges (unlimited), you need only find the appropriate slot in your inventory at the beginning of a battle. The combat interface, however, is a bit unintuitive, because pictures represent all of the actions, such as attack, magic, etc. so that it may take you a while to find even your inventory. My favorite part of combats is the boss battles, especially early in the game when Ryu faces boss monsters alone, because all bosses have a 'second wind' when their life bar is gone, which makes them seem menacing even if they aren't. I have never seen this feature before in another RPG.

Rest assured that if you do run into something challenging, you will have myriad ways of killing it. Most characters, even OX, who needless to say embodies strength and size, can cast cure spells. NINA has more of a selection, and you get a fiendishly powerful sorceress later on. Magic is varied, but characters also have combat skills, not to mention non-combat skills. Combat skills famously include Ryu's ability of transforming into a dragon, which has restrictions and requirements, or less famously Karn's ability of combining with a character not in the party (only four characters may fight at once, but you get more) and turning into something deadly. All of the characters--both visually and more importantly, stylistically--are unique in some way. They also have non-combat skills, which I have hinted at a few times. Ryu can fish, and Ox and Karn can uncover secrets in dungeons by picking locks and breaking things. Most excitingly, Nina can fly, and Gobi the fish-man can give you access to the seas much earlier. I think that non-combat abilities are one of the most ingenious features of the game; combat abilities, whereas they are good, have a deflating tendency of reminding you of the few chances that you have of utilizing them in the easy combats of the game.

Recapping a bit, it is easy to forge ahead in the game, and the story takes a backseat compared to most RPGs. The atmosphere, if anything, is Breath of Fire's redemption, including both graphical and sonic components. It is what replaces story in games that either would struggle putting things into words (in the case of a Japanese game that isn't translated well, i.e. this) or that was really on top of things and wanted to be avant garde. We can guess which of these types Breath of Fire is. The atmosphere in it, however unintentional, gives it more expression and opens it to wider interpretation. Someone will of course say, 'Interpretation? This isn't a novel!' but graphical elements such as the singular combination of shading and coloring, the effective loop music of dungeons, and even the unique and expressive appearance of villages, characters, and villains add something. If you play Breath of Fire in conjunction with Breath of Fire 2, they add a lot.

First, the game's canvas is interesting. For all of its bright and excessive color a great counterbalance exists in the shading of characters, especially, who appear sketchy or sometimes distrustful--not altogether false, as you encounter crooks and traitors in the game. I never knew that a game could be both bright and dark before I played Breath of Fire--and the mood is meant to be dark, but it is not depressingly so. Humorously and artistically expressive drawings of people communicate this. For example, the village chief of one riverside village throws a party when you complete a quest for him, and everyone in town dances to the game's festival music. A noble in another town commissions your help in clearing a castle of some enemies, and his mustache and apparel are outright silly. Then sleepers in the inns wear nightcaps, and you can't help but laugh at that.

The game is also scored well. Looking at the soundtrack, it has about 40+ tunes, enough for an RPG. Atmospherically speaking the dungeons in Breath of Fire are unrivaled. They have showy musical loops with an obvious artificiality, which given the game's liberal usage of color, gives the impression of a dreary cartoon, and dungeons should just plain be dreary but not without spirit, which is where the cartoon-like atmosphere fits. Most cartoons have spirit. The rest of the music calls to mind a great, spanning medieval cartoon, which is a distinction that no other RPG on the Super Nintendo (that I have played) makes. This combined with the visual atmosphere makes Breath of Fire a unique product in its way, and as Breath of Fire II is a continuation of this very same atmosphere, you can jump right back in where you left off if you decide on playing that.

However, Breath of Fire by itself should not be included among the best Super Nintendo RPGs. It is a simple game, with mediocre gameplay and some twinges of character here and there. The sequel is much better and definitely deserves a spot among the top SNES RPGs. By association the original is regarded, perhaps unconsciously, to be there as well (at least, I know that I do this when I think back on the best SNES RPGs), but it shouldn't be. Breath of Fire is great fun if you are working up to the sequels. On its own it is easy and sometimes not fulfilling, with no expectations of a light at the end of the tunnel or at least a friend's waiting for you. Atmosphere, characters, and the system of non-combat abilities such as fishing and hunting are the only reasons that I would choose it for a replay if I weren't playing through the series.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 11/27/06, Updated 12/06/06