Breath of Fire

"Yo, Ryu, you think yo' Dragon punch is hot? Watch this!"

Hold on a minute. You're telling me that a non-Square company that normally produces such cookie-cutter wonders like Street Fighter(about five or six sequels and/or spinoffs before they learned to put a '3' at the end of their name) and...gasp...MEGA MAN, actually produced a GOOD, if slightly linear, RPG? One which occasionally(VERY occasionally) had a small element of challenge(unlike the almost laughably easy FFII?) One which actually bothered to come up with some pretty cool graphical elements near the second half? Needless to say, this deserved looking at, if for nothing else than a historical interest. So I used the ample four-character limit to name my guy 'Rhys'('Ryu' was just SO derivative, and 'Epo' or 'Ezra' didn't quite fit with the nature of the character) and sallied forth on this quite unexpected adventure.

GRAPHICS: Okay, this was one of the strong points. Almost all enemies are ANIMATED, that's right, no more attacking stationary Renaissance works that look pretty but don't do much. Quite often, those enemies will actually deign to walk(well, slide is usually more like it) up to the character and give him a good can o' whoop(sword, claw, bow, fill in whatever you want here.) Your characters, however, seem to be prone to the ''disappear and reappear'' syndrome whenever they try to attack people. I don't know if it's the frameskip or if the same nature of the world that lets you morph into different forms lets you do small hops in the space-time continuum. I'm inclined to believe the latter, due to the fact that enemies seem to disappear through a time portal whenever you kill them. This world is pretty screwy, all told, but at least it's governing laws are more conducive to the laws of RPG logic, which tend to seem rather out of place in the ''futuristic'' or ''modernist'' worlds that some game makers try to force them into(FF7 & 8, anyone? Don't worry, the godlike GF you summon does NOT get tired of making the same grand entrance and annihilating the same planet every 15 seconds! Contrast that with characters such as Bleu, who really does get annoyed that you're calling them out to do simple things like saving the world. Back then, demigods knew the dignity of their positions.) Oh yes, and the last couple of dragon transformations you get have really cool SNES-style graphics to go with them. Spell effects, however, leave a little bit to be desired. Seriously, ''Bolt-X'' is simply a longer version of ''Fry,'' which can be compared to having 'Flare' be 'Fire' extended by about 2 seconds. Sad. Still, there is much more good than bad in the graphical department, which unfortunately can't be extended as much to the

MUSical department, at least not in the second half of the game. Okay, say it with me now: ''BOF DUNGEON MUSIC SUCKS!'' Feel better? Neither do I. While it's true that it contributes to the ''on-edge'' feeling of the dungeons, it gets VERY boring when you hear it in dungeon after dungeon after...you get the point, don't you? As a saving grace, however, you have the overworld music, which, unlike its underground counterpart, gets better and better(the third iteration is AWESOME, well worth listening to over and over.) Add that to the fact that the random battle music also gets better halfway through, and you have a game that ages quite well. This is the problem with the BOF series, though...the beginning of the game tends to sour you on going any futher, and it's usually a long while before you go back and say: ''Wait, this doesn't suck quite so much as I thought!'' I did that with all three BOF games, mind you. Other than the overworld music, other notables include the general town music(it's almost always different for every town, with Bleak being particularly cool) and certain isolated emotional incidents throughout the game(although this game doesn't have nearly as many dramatic moments as its sequel, which takes the phrase ''melodramatic'' to a whole new level. Seriously, if it weren't for the fact that Americans aren't exposed to the cultural milieu that the Japanese have been breathing every day, BOF2 would have never been called the great artsy original tale of SNES RPGs.)

STORY: It's been claimed that some young punk of the Dragon clan couldn't just waltz out of his village and free city after city single-handedly and only accept about seven people as friends to help him free the rest and kill the evil demon to make sure they stayed free. The claimant was executed. Seriously, even some of the earlier SNES and NES RPGs had you traipsing around the countryside trying to get a feel for the country, perhaps working as a slave, and most definitely gaining a little extra experience before you did something as foolhardy as breaking the curse on a rather large kingdom. Not so BOF. Before you get your first companion, you've slaughtered the captain of one kingdom and saved all the inhabitants, reduced an enemy stronghold to rubble, and saved the royal heir and the future of a third city. And you did the latter on request after the aforesaid heir and two of the best soldiers in the kingdom nearly got themselves killed trying to do what you did with a simple boomerang and the key you picked up when demolishing the second city. Let's just say that your guy could fill in for the Terminator(or to be more period-specific, Conan) any day of the week. Not like the other people you meet couldn't put up a good fight either. Nearly every person in this world is either some combination of animal and human, or has the ability to switch between the two at will. Sometimes you'll have the chance to control one of these apart from the hero, which makes the story that much more non-hero-specific, although he remains the star of the show. Best of all, there's a secret ending you can get if you make sure to finish all of the subquests that makes the game that much more replayable.

GAMEplay: Okay, maybe not THAT replayable. Not only does the music lag during the first third of the game, the gameplay does too. You still have to spend a whole lot of time slowly but surely gaining experience points. (Fortunately, it's a lot easier to do this when you know how to use the E.Key, Capcom's trademark cheap shot of an item that only real men do without. Unfortunately, you have to use extra button presses to select this key if you don't want to use the ingenious ''Auto-battle'' function. How much time do you have to waste anyway?) The dungeons are usually not that long, but long enough to annoy you, especially with the many, many random battles you tend to get into. Fortunately, if you did your leveling up early like you were told, those random battles mainly serve as slight interruptions in your three-inch trek to the next boss. Did I mention that the bosses, excepting a slight few near the end, tend to be laughably easy with the dream team of Hero, Nina, Karn(bonded) and Bleu/Ox? One can blast through the second part of the game like nobody's business with those guys. Especially when aided by the dragon transformations, quite possibly the coolest(and most-mimicked in games like Xenogears and Legend of Dragoon) little RPG feature yet seen. And Karn. It wasn't enough that he could throw knives, break locks, and disarm traps. You could finally put your back-row fighters to good use with him around. Was it really coincidence that the people he tended to bond with were the ones you'd use least in most fights? Thank you, good designers! In addition to these features, you could also hunt and fish on the overworld map, use certain characters to move heavy objects or phase through trees, turn into birds and fishes, and generally make the most of your environment without having to hire a passing airship. Good thing you could have all those choices when walking around, because the goal itself was generally horribly linear, i.e: Find poor victim of Dark Dragons, kill Dark Dragon boss or find special item, then repeat. Oh, and the prices at the stores tend to be reasonable, too. So if you want to see what Capcom was like before they sold their souls to the Street Fighter franchise, take a look at Breath of Fire. It's a weird, wide, wonderful game, and despite the negatives, it's worth about a day or so of your time. Emulate, or buy the cartridge if a die-hard non-Square fan.

Nintendo Logic: No, despite the fact that Squaresoft DID put it's logo on the opening screen, the only involvment that company had was in donating Ted Woolsey(of FF3-translatin' fame) to make sure the translation didn't look like it had been run through Nintendo's Fascist Censors(TM), which made FF2 the endearing and humorous repository of all the best moments in video game history. In other words, they took all the Capcom quirks that might have made BOF a classic and turned it into just another polished, but incomplete SNES work. In other words, quotes like ''I, Garland, will knock you all down!'' are nowhere to be found. AUUGH! However, though it didn't have quite the same charm for avoiding the most egregious reworking, there's still a few nuggets of bad formatting and strange speeches. Nothing in particular stands out, though. You'll have to wait for BOF2 before you get the chance to see what Capcom can come up with when you don't edit their original translation. It's VERY funny, but alas, it must wait for another review...

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 11/12/00, Updated 11/12/00