Breath of Fire II

"This is a pure classic! One of the best RPG's of all time!"

Breath of Fire II, the sequal to Capcom's Breath of Fire I was a huge classic. Even in America this game is reveared as one of the greatest RPG's of all time and it rival's Squaresoft's Final Fantasy VI/III as ''The best RPG for Super Famicon/Nintendo''. And it's really not hard to see why. On with the review young grasshopper!

Graphics: 10/10

-Beautifal. Unlike the first one, the map looks a lot better, especially with the (bit) smaller characters, and updated look. It's basically BoF I's but the characters look a lot better now, and so does the landscape. In battles, WOW ... um, is this PSX? Nope, it's SFC. The characters look amazing in battles, and so do the enemies. The spells, are really a thing to watch, especially the dragon spells. The boss's look very good as well. This was a BIG improvement over the first one.

Sound: 10/10

-I really loved the sound in this game. The battle music is one of my all time fav's with the boss music. The town's music is done VERY well, with my favorite being Tunlan's. This is one of the few games that has next to none in bad tracks, I don't remember disliking any of them. The sound effects are equally impressive from Ryu attacking to using his dragon spells or Nina throwing out her spells, they're all very well done.

Story: 10/10

-WOW, even better than number one's and that's hard. I was skeptical at first because of how it started it out, I thought it was just another re-make of number one's but it isn't at all. A few characters from the first return in this one such as Ryu and Nina (who are both in all of the BoF's) and even Bleu! It's a great story that you definitly won't want to miss. It has a lot of religious base in it, but it's not boring at all.

Gameplay: 10/10

-Capcom went all out here folks. The same battle system is basically installed again, with a few minor tweaks. The menu's are a lot better. You can make your own town which is basically a better version of BoF III & IV's Fairy Village's. I like the FV's but this one was always my favorite. You can do many thing's in your town such as making wepon/armor shop's to having a music shop! You can also choose the style of your town. Another very cool feature is the Shaman's. You can get various Shaman's in the game from the fire shaman to the dark shaman and ''merge'' them with your characters to get different looks and updated stats. It's a very cool idea that I loved doing. One character (Spar) can have three different forms! The only characters that CAN'T change at all are Ryu and Bleu. Why, I don't know. Oh and another cool semi secret thing to do with your town is at a certin point you can ''resuce'' a guy in the game, more of just don't kill him to make your town fly. Character development is very good to say the least, because I really dug the characters in this game, and they were all useful in there own ways. The fishing and hunting games are back and improved from BoF I. The replay value is very high on this game if you played it how I did at least. I um ... didn't get the flying town the first time through and I read an FAQ to find out about the shaman system's so I picked certin characters beforehand to only use them and then the next game I would use others. The game is definitly good enough to play through three times. It has an average difficulty, and battles don't drag on as much as number one's did. Also getting level's up is a lot easier than number one as well.

Overall: 10/10

Conclusion: This IS one of the best RPG's of all time. Capcom proves over and over that they can make more than just fighting games because they have one of the best (if not the) RPG series's out there. Breath of Fire III took a step down from my standard's because of the high one's this game put out there. If your an RPG fan, you OWE it to yourself to buy this game. It's almost impossible to find it in stores any more but you can get it from ebay easily. You could also pick up the ROM but I'm not responceable for any problems with the law you may have with that route. Basically if you like RPG's and haven't played this one through ... SHAME ON YOU! :P

E-mail me: paulwolfstien@aol.com

-PW

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 10/18/00, Updated 10/18/00