Breath of Fire is a ridiculously long-running JRPG franchise spanning seven games - the original trilogy, a fourth game that only hardcore fans seemed to like, Dragon Quarter - the spiritual sequel of sorts to Dead Rising - and two upcoming games - on of which will be released on mobile and the other on PC. Fans are very anxious about them, because they will probably suck.
The series is well known for a few things.
A) A protagonist with blue hair and the ability to turn into a dragon, the mechanics of which change based on the game.
B) A duetagonist with blonde (or blue) hair, who is usually a princess, who has wings, the mechanics of which change from game to game.
[sup]That image isn't done in the style of the first, second, or fourth games, by the way; I belive it's the third game's style
From left to right, Ryu: IV, II, I, III, DQ[/sup]
[sub]From left to right, Nina: DQ, III, II, I, IV[/sub]
C) Furries. Lots of 'em; there are also quite a few in your party, too.
D) Perhaps as a product of C, the series is also well known for its gay fanbase, which has led to a few memes that never got out of Japan.
I saw Breath of Fire 3 on the Playstation store. I thought, why not. Somewhere deep inside of me, however, I expected my fond memories of nostalgia from about a decade ago to be smited by the crushing, audacious fist of reality.
I was pleasantly surprised.
Breath of Fire doesn't waste time; it begins with two guys in a mine, where they supposedly work, agreeing to blow up a huge crystal with some sort of animal inside. They do so - with dynamite, because dynamite is awesome - and it turns out the creature is alive.
You might be surprised to know that the two idiots who decided to destroy an ancient artifact that's probably historically and scientifically valuable, are not our protagonists. Probably because they're over 25, and the idea of a protagonist over 25 in enough to horrify any JRPG fan.
You're actually the adorable green dragon; the battle is incredibly easy. Kill the fuckers with your breath weapon. Then you hop off of the crystal, and you get to explore the mine for a while, killing innocent, scared workers on the way who don't seem to realise that you have the magical power of a curb-stomp-battle. Eventually, however, your reign of murder and death gets prematurely ended by a wanker with a crane, and you're shipped off to... somewhere, to be vivisected, studied, then thrown out in the trash.
That was a pretty to-the-point start.
You do get to knock the cage off of the train, sending your feeble body tumbling down the mountain, or.. do nothing, and then do the first thing because that's the only thing you can do.
It's probably worth noting that this is the second most updated Capcom franchise, before we get into story proper. Right behind Demon's Quest, that thing that nobody remembers, which lasted four games before dying, forgotten, but still a cult classic.
Moving on, we meet the... fourth most important member of the party, Rei, who picks up our stupid, unconscious, and human-formed ass off of the forest floor.
Rei is one of the recurring aspects of the franchise - the famous furries!
Every game has at least two in the party, and the two main characters are given animal features in some way or another. Nobody really says, "Why are you being followed around by freaks with tails?", they just kind of roll with it.
Moving on, you end up getting adopted into a family of thieves, and after a fever dream about a goddess and some prat, you wake up, in your pyjamas, and then you'll probably spend a while, lost and annoyed, in your underwear.
This is where the game tends to trip up; you aren't given much direction. Ok, you are, but it has a very irritating tendency to leave you on your own, with no given objective than "Go here, do stuff". The puzzles that the dungeons throw at you are also very irritating, often being unfair and forcing you to trek through an area with too many damn random encounters.
Ah, yes. The random encounters. So many... At least the battle music is good and not too memorable, which makes it a little more bearable.
After you do find Rei and Teepo - the other guy whose name you just kind of know, which is a major plot point later - you, fittingly, spend a lot of your time afterwards stealing from people, which lands you in deep trouble with the local mountain man, Bunyan, who sends you, Teepo and Rei to a nearby mountain to find a monster eating the local grain.
Because sending two kids and their surrogate parent, said surrogate parent having had found one of the kids being attacked by wolves earlier that morning, to go fight some sort of abominable threat that's able to empty an entire year's worth of food and harvests, is all going to work out in the end.
...Eh, it's a JRPG. Dumber things have happened, and dumber things will happen, so just get used to it.
And unless you've been grinding on the local goos, learning their spells with the Examine command, and have somehow scrapped up enough money to get some decent equipment, you're fucked, because Rei leaves your party and Teepo learns some magic which is useful in some situations.
The dungeon in question is split into two parts: A fairly simple meadow dungeon with "devourers", death bomb birds, some normal birds, and magical globs of shit that came to life.
This game's monsters... there's a lot of variety in them, at least.
The dungeons in the game themselves aren't too bad; it's easy to get lost, and healing is limited, but the game is nice enough to let you camp anywhere, which usually means setting up camp right after a dungeon.
The party members, like Bioware games, are the focus of the story, as opposed to the average JRPG's "here's some people, they can do stuff, go kill Satan and save the world" set up. Most of the story is about them, and the "real" story doesn't actually come into full swing until about the second half of the game.
Oh God, I forgot all about the combat system.
Combat is your traditional JRPG affair, with some differences. It looks like this.
Characters with high speed can get Extra turns, similiar to Devil Survivor's Extra Turn/Skirmish system. Every character - particularly Nina, the prequisite blonde duetagonist - can sometimes hang on with 1 HP, in the vein of Earthbound.
Every character also have varied roles in combat, meaning that selecting some characters to always use and always leaving some at camp can leave your team umbalanced. For example: Nina is about as durable as tissue, but she can turn into a magnificient glass cannon if she's kept trained. Rei is more balanced, and Momo - a later party member - can use buffs and has a bazooka for God's sake, but she can't hide the broad side of a barn.
While you will find a party that you prefer, you will have to switch up. The game also encourages this... by forcing you to walk out of dungeons, change your party, and go into town to buy expendable key items, because it hates your guts and wants you to know.
In theory, this allows the player to build strategies and decide which party member works with another. In practise, having to leave a dungeon the game won't let anybody but Momo use a machine, or because there's a measly lock, while your party consists of a dragon, a supreme winged mage, and a musclebound monster of an angel, but Rei isn't with you.
It doesn't work.
These issues don't really come up as early in the game as this, though, so you're ok.. because you only have three party members. Why do you only take three people? I mean, why can't I have the theif, the mage, and the mad scientist with a bazooka? It just seems lazy.
By now, you've probably stumbled through an annoyingly huge cave, full of zombies, and you've already fought the big bad monster that's stealing all the food: a Nue.
And now you have to chase it through the annoyingly huge cave with invisible zombies, following trail of blood. You do eventually find it, blocking the entrance to a cave.
This fight is annoying, in every way. It's slow, everyone but Rei will die, unless you've been grinding like nobody's business, and because the main character - whose HP is the lowest of the trio - is the only character with any decent healing spells. It seems like this is intentional. But intentional doesn't make it any less unfair.
After you kill it, it turns out it was trying to force feed its stillborn children.
If that's not black comedy, I don't know what is.
For killing the beast, our trio is hailed by the village as heroes, and the harvest is more bountiful than ever... maybe because of all the nutritious nue blood in the water supply because of you. Hmm.
Fast forward a season, and it's now spring; the villagers of McNeil don't hate your guts, they'll sell you stuff without being an asshole, and the colour scheme is upgraded into a lovely green, that only serves to be hated just like the previous yellow/orange.
There has, however, been some trouble down at the field; some people have noticed an unsavoury type around the village, who have been looking of you.
As thus proceeding:
Random encounters - enough to choke a yak
Jazz - enough to give a yak hemorrhoids
Slow dialogue - enough to beat a yak to death with
Character development - enough to forcefully birth a yak
The first game's plot, now with a better translation and artwork
Dungeons that lock you into them until you finish their stupid puzzle
Fanservice, usually from Nina and Rei. Can't have a JRPG without lots of it, after all.
The horrifying absence of yaks.
When I bought this game on the Playstation store, I was very ready to burn and throw away happy, nostalgic memories of playing this game, suffering through the overly long loading screens, and laughing at a scene involving an Australian mecha dolphin.
It's a very silly game, and it seems to be taking jabs at the Breath of Fire franchise - things like bizarre aliens coming from space and attacking the Gaslamp-lite world, the franchise's much loved toilet humour, and a poke or two at the second game's infamous translation trainwreck, which rendered a party member from a race of gorgeous plant people an asparagus.
It's also a very fun game, perhaps because it's not trying to tell a big, grand JRPG story; it's trying to be fun and stupid. It's very lighthearted, especially compared to the first two games, which couldn't get their own heads out of their asses, and while it's a very frustrating game, its faults (excluding random encounters every other damn step. I'll always be pissed about that) are outweighted by its sense of humour, and the other aspects of its gameplay.
Now, I do plan to soil my memories of this game... so I'll replay it in a decade and actively try to hate it.
The series is well known for a few things.
A) A protagonist with blue hair and the ability to turn into a dragon, the mechanics of which change based on the game.
B) A duetagonist with blonde (or blue) hair, who is usually a princess, who has wings, the mechanics of which change from game to game.
[sup]That image isn't done in the style of the first, second, or fourth games, by the way; I belive it's the third game's style
From left to right, Ryu: IV, II, I, III, DQ[/sup]
[sub]From left to right, Nina: DQ, III, II, I, IV[/sub]
C) Furries. Lots of 'em; there are also quite a few in your party, too.
D) Perhaps as a product of C, the series is also well known for its gay fanbase, which has led to a few memes that never got out of Japan.
I saw Breath of Fire 3 on the Playstation store. I thought, why not. Somewhere deep inside of me, however, I expected my fond memories of nostalgia from about a decade ago to be smited by the crushing, audacious fist of reality.
I was pleasantly surprised.
Breath of Fire doesn't waste time; it begins with two guys in a mine, where they supposedly work, agreeing to blow up a huge crystal with some sort of animal inside. They do so - with dynamite, because dynamite is awesome - and it turns out the creature is alive.
You might be surprised to know that the two idiots who decided to destroy an ancient artifact that's probably historically and scientifically valuable, are not our protagonists. Probably because they're over 25, and the idea of a protagonist over 25 in enough to horrify any JRPG fan.
You're actually the adorable green dragon; the battle is incredibly easy. Kill the fuckers with your breath weapon. Then you hop off of the crystal, and you get to explore the mine for a while, killing innocent, scared workers on the way who don't seem to realise that you have the magical power of a curb-stomp-battle. Eventually, however, your reign of murder and death gets prematurely ended by a wanker with a crane, and you're shipped off to... somewhere, to be vivisected, studied, then thrown out in the trash.
That was a pretty to-the-point start.
You do get to knock the cage off of the train, sending your feeble body tumbling down the mountain, or.. do nothing, and then do the first thing because that's the only thing you can do.
It's probably worth noting that this is the second most updated Capcom franchise, before we get into story proper. Right behind Demon's Quest, that thing that nobody remembers, which lasted four games before dying, forgotten, but still a cult classic.
Moving on, we meet the... fourth most important member of the party, Rei, who picks up our stupid, unconscious, and human-formed ass off of the forest floor.
Rei is one of the recurring aspects of the franchise - the famous furries!
Every game has at least two in the party, and the two main characters are given animal features in some way or another. Nobody really says, "Why are you being followed around by freaks with tails?", they just kind of roll with it.
Moving on, you end up getting adopted into a family of thieves, and after a fever dream about a goddess and some prat, you wake up, in your pyjamas, and then you'll probably spend a while, lost and annoyed, in your underwear.
This is where the game tends to trip up; you aren't given much direction. Ok, you are, but it has a very irritating tendency to leave you on your own, with no given objective than "Go here, do stuff". The puzzles that the dungeons throw at you are also very irritating, often being unfair and forcing you to trek through an area with too many damn random encounters.
Ah, yes. The random encounters. So many... At least the battle music is good and not too memorable, which makes it a little more bearable.
After you do find Rei and Teepo - the other guy whose name you just kind of know, which is a major plot point later - you, fittingly, spend a lot of your time afterwards stealing from people, which lands you in deep trouble with the local mountain man, Bunyan, who sends you, Teepo and Rei to a nearby mountain to find a monster eating the local grain.
Because sending two kids and their surrogate parent, said surrogate parent having had found one of the kids being attacked by wolves earlier that morning, to go fight some sort of abominable threat that's able to empty an entire year's worth of food and harvests, is all going to work out in the end.
...Eh, it's a JRPG. Dumber things have happened, and dumber things will happen, so just get used to it.
And unless you've been grinding on the local goos, learning their spells with the Examine command, and have somehow scrapped up enough money to get some decent equipment, you're fucked, because Rei leaves your party and Teepo learns some magic which is useful in some situations.
The dungeon in question is split into two parts: A fairly simple meadow dungeon with "devourers", death bomb birds, some normal birds, and magical globs of shit that came to life.
This game's monsters... there's a lot of variety in them, at least.
The dungeons in the game themselves aren't too bad; it's easy to get lost, and healing is limited, but the game is nice enough to let you camp anywhere, which usually means setting up camp right after a dungeon.
The party members, like Bioware games, are the focus of the story, as opposed to the average JRPG's "here's some people, they can do stuff, go kill Satan and save the world" set up. Most of the story is about them, and the "real" story doesn't actually come into full swing until about the second half of the game.
Oh God, I forgot all about the combat system.
Combat is your traditional JRPG affair, with some differences. It looks like this.
Characters with high speed can get Extra turns, similiar to Devil Survivor's Extra Turn/Skirmish system. Every character - particularly Nina, the prequisite blonde duetagonist - can sometimes hang on with 1 HP, in the vein of Earthbound.
Every character also have varied roles in combat, meaning that selecting some characters to always use and always leaving some at camp can leave your team umbalanced. For example: Nina is about as durable as tissue, but she can turn into a magnificient glass cannon if she's kept trained. Rei is more balanced, and Momo - a later party member - can use buffs and has a bazooka for God's sake, but she can't hide the broad side of a barn.
While you will find a party that you prefer, you will have to switch up. The game also encourages this... by forcing you to walk out of dungeons, change your party, and go into town to buy expendable key items, because it hates your guts and wants you to know.
In theory, this allows the player to build strategies and decide which party member works with another. In practise, having to leave a dungeon the game won't let anybody but Momo use a machine, or because there's a measly lock, while your party consists of a dragon, a supreme winged mage, and a musclebound monster of an angel, but Rei isn't with you.
It doesn't work.
These issues don't really come up as early in the game as this, though, so you're ok.. because you only have three party members. Why do you only take three people? I mean, why can't I have the theif, the mage, and the mad scientist with a bazooka? It just seems lazy.
By now, you've probably stumbled through an annoyingly huge cave, full of zombies, and you've already fought the big bad monster that's stealing all the food: a Nue.
And now you have to chase it through the annoyingly huge cave with invisible zombies, following trail of blood. You do eventually find it, blocking the entrance to a cave.
This fight is annoying, in every way. It's slow, everyone but Rei will die, unless you've been grinding like nobody's business, and because the main character - whose HP is the lowest of the trio - is the only character with any decent healing spells. It seems like this is intentional. But intentional doesn't make it any less unfair.
After you kill it, it turns out it was trying to force feed its stillborn children.
If that's not black comedy, I don't know what is.
For killing the beast, our trio is hailed by the village as heroes, and the harvest is more bountiful than ever... maybe because of all the nutritious nue blood in the water supply because of you. Hmm.
Fast forward a season, and it's now spring; the villagers of McNeil don't hate your guts, they'll sell you stuff without being an asshole, and the colour scheme is upgraded into a lovely green, that only serves to be hated just like the previous yellow/orange.
There has, however, been some trouble down at the field; some people have noticed an unsavoury type around the village, who have been looking of you.
As thus proceeding:
Random encounters - enough to choke a yak
Jazz - enough to give a yak hemorrhoids
Slow dialogue - enough to beat a yak to death with
Character development - enough to forcefully birth a yak
The first game's plot, now with a better translation and artwork
Dungeons that lock you into them until you finish their stupid puzzle
Fanservice, usually from Nina and Rei. Can't have a JRPG without lots of it, after all.
The horrifying absence of yaks.
When I bought this game on the Playstation store, I was very ready to burn and throw away happy, nostalgic memories of playing this game, suffering through the overly long loading screens, and laughing at a scene involving an Australian mecha dolphin.
It's a very silly game, and it seems to be taking jabs at the Breath of Fire franchise - things like bizarre aliens coming from space and attacking the Gaslamp-lite world, the franchise's much loved toilet humour, and a poke or two at the second game's infamous translation trainwreck, which rendered a party member from a race of gorgeous plant people an asparagus.
It's also a very fun game, perhaps because it's not trying to tell a big, grand JRPG story; it's trying to be fun and stupid. It's very lighthearted, especially compared to the first two games, which couldn't get their own heads out of their asses, and while it's a very frustrating game, its faults (excluding random encounters every other damn step. I'll always be pissed about that) are outweighted by its sense of humour, and the other aspects of its gameplay.
Now, I do plan to soil my memories of this game... so I'll replay it in a decade and actively try to hate it.
