Breath of Fire

"Capcom's first attempt at an RPG falls short of expectations"

You know, Capcom have made some games that aren't fighters, believe it or not. Breath of Fire is one of them, and after playing it, you may well wonder if they should have just made another Street Fighter game.

First, the plot. Imagine, you start in a village, and it's destroyed. Then there's some weak plot about dark dragons wanting to take over the world, and you, a light dragon, must save the world from the evil Zog. That must have taken them a good lunch hour to come up with.After all that's done with, you basically go from kingdom to kingdom, go through the dungeon inside, and get pissed off when you get to the boss, which ALWAYS carries on after they run out of HP, due to the fact that they have extra hidden health.

Which brings me to the battles. This is a turn based combat system, which should allow for strategy and depth in the combat. Well, Capcom seems to disagree. The basic boss fight consists of you and the boss taking turns hacking away at each other, and then using an herb when your health gets low. Of course, that's not uncommon, because each one of your attacks takes off about a millimeter of their health bar each time. Then after you've been through that routine for about 10 minutes, you find out he's got a whole other health bar left, and so you die, and have to beat him, or else you die and have to replay the last hour or so, because save points are almost non existent in this game.

You know how in Mario, when you beat a castle and all you get is that annoying ''Thanks Mario but our princess is in another castle.''? That's the same idea with a lot of this game's plot, at times. You save one kingdom from another's earthquake making machine, and all you get is ''Thank you. There's another kingdom east of here.''. They don't tell you why to go, just that there IS a kingdom, and the hint that maybe you should go there. Character development is also minimal...

The graphics are squared off, where the areas and characters are made of grids. The music is crap, and is mediocre at it's very best. One nice thing though is that they have animated enemies in battle, and the isometric battles look good. Other than that? Nothing much, really. Some would say it's a long game, but it's so repetitive and dull, who cares? The boring plot was made worse by a crappy translation.

In the end, this is another dull, boring, average RPG. You could buy this used for about $50 at Funcoland. Then again, you could go buy FFVI for the same price. You make the choice.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 07/17/01, Updated 07/17/01