Breath of Fire

Originally posted on Facebook on 23 January 2021

Just finished Breath of Fire!

Breath of Fire is a game that somehow manages to feel really ambitious and interesting, yet at the same time incredibly generic and kind of boring. It's strange.

The overall gameplay is pretty standard old-school JRPG stuff, with the turn-based combat, killing slimes, skeletons, goblins for EXP and gold, leveling up, buying equipment from shops, all that good stuff. It's really nothing special in this regard, but it does this stuff competently enough.

The combat system is very basic, but there is still room for fun strategies. I particularly like equipping the hero with a boomerang, and then casting a Luck-up buff on him, to try and score a critical hit on every enemy at once. Things like that are fun to pull off.

The game is very slow-paced, and there are very frequent monster encounters. It is a bit of a grind to play through this game, but it's nothing I haven't managed before - especially with the recent Phantasy Star playthroughs. It's a shame that the Nintendo Switch Online app I'm using for Breath of Fire doesn't include the fast-forward feature that the Mega Drive Classics app has. It made the slowness of this game much more apparent by comparison. I've heard that the GBA version lets you walk faster, which is a good thing I guess. ...But I wasn't playing the GBA version, so too bad for me.

Anyways, the game has a few interesting features. I liked how your companions are a bunch of animal people, that's pretty fun. I like how they all have some kind of overworld ability, such as hunting wildlife, punching trees, transforming into a giant fish...it makes things a little more interesting.

I like how the various villages you visit have different problems afflicting them - there's the town with a zombie problem, there's a town that's stuck at nighttime, a town stuck in winter, a town where time is frozen...and even the villages you don't need to rescue all have some kind of unique quality to them, such as the town made out of gold, the underwater fish market town, the town full of people who speak only in music... I actually really liked the variety here. Makes the towns more interesting than just regular pitstops between dungeons.

However.... A big problem with the game is that all of its interesting stuff is only interesting on the surface level. Exploring the towns isn't actually as fun as it could have been, because many of the NPCs share their dialogue with each other, and many of the interiors just don't have anything inside them. Add this with the excruciatingly slow walking speed, and you get a game that really discourages you from actually exploring the towns, because there's usually nothing to find, and it takes so dang long to confirm that there was indeed nothing there. 

The game attempts to explore some interesting concepts, such as dream worlds and time distortion and some other strange things, but ...I've seen it done much better in other games. EarthBound has a much MUCH more interesting dream world section, and Chrono Trigger has many incredibly fun applications of time-travelling nonsense throughout the whole story. Breath of Fire just...doesn't do enough with these concepts. 

And now the biggest problem I have with the game... it's incredibly bad at explaining itself. 

Firstly, I can't talk about Breath of Fire and not mention the ridiculously unhelpful item names. When you begin your brand new adventure, the very first item you can buy at the very first shop in the game is called a "Mrbl3". ...and this beautifully sets the tone going forward that the items in this game are going to be inscrutable.

Mrbl3 at least tells you what it's for in its item description - it's used for reducing enemy encounters. ...But I still don't know what the heck it's supposed to be. Searching for Mrbl3 on Google gives me plenty of Breath of Fire results, but not a single one of them can actually tell me what the name is supposed to stand for. What is it? It kind of sounds like "marble" or something, but when you use it it describes it releasing a mist. So it's actually a bottle of perfume or something? Then what is that name? WHAT IS THIS THING???  

...In Japanese, the item is called "mamorikemuri", or "protective smoke". Which is fine. but then why the heck did that turn into Mrbl3 for English. I'm just so utterly confounded by this.

There are a ton of items in this game that don't tell me what they're for, and this basically just means I never want to use them. Items such as the DkKiss, F.Stn, ProtnB... their item descriptions are just "You can use this item during a battle", and nothing more. I basically have no idea which item is which in this game, and I don't exactly feel like consulting an item list on GameFAQS whenever I forget what my items do. So I basically just don't use items. It's really unfortunate.

My favourite item description is for the Vitamn. It says, "The use of this item is pretty obvious. It's just what the name suggests". ....... that is one helpful Item description, I've got to say.

Other than items, the game's progression can get very obtuse during certain points in the story. I would have never been able to beat this game without looking up a guide, because there are several sections that don't explain what you're supposed to do or where you're supposed to go next. The worst one was when I had to lead a bird NPC outside of its area, onto the world map, and into the next area so I could distract some castle guards. ...There is never any other time throughout the whole game where NPCs can walk about on the world map, so I had no reason to ever believe this was something that could happen. It just feels bad when the solution to a problem is so out there that it's impossible to figure out.

The worst part is how the good ending is locked behind some of this arbitrary nonsense.  You need to kill the final boss with the ultimate dragon skill, which can only be learned if you find the dragon armour, which can only be obtained if you find a fishing rod under a box in some town. It's insane that it's like this, because the bad ending is very very bad - you kill the boss and the credits just roll immediately with no closure. The good ending is the only real ending, but you can't even see it without jumping through some very non-obvious hoops. 

Overall.... I had fun, but this game has some real problems. I will likely not want to revisit this one any time soon.