Breath of Fire

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Breath of Fire

Breath of Fire - SNES - USA.jpg

SNES - USA - 1st edition.

Developer Capcom
Publisher Capcom
Published 1993-04-03
Platforms SNES, Game Boy Advance
Genres Exploration, Role-playing game
Themes Adventure, Fantasy
Series Breath of Fire
Distribution Commercial

Breath of Fire is a fantasy role-playing video game developed and published by Capcom in Japan on 1993-04-03 then localized and published by Square Soft in the USA for the SNES. It was later ported to the Game Boy Advance. It is the first game in the Breath of Fire series.

The game begins with a young man named Ryu living in a small village which has been destroyed by the Dark Dragon Clan which is trying to conquer the world now that is has gained the power of the ancients. You play as Ryu who is trying to stop the Dark Dragon Clan and, as you defeat the oppressors, you meet new heroes and heroines on the way.

The game uses a unique mechanic where, once you get more then four party members, they still travel with you, but no more then four can be involved in combat at any given time. They can still use abilities and magic outside of combat, and you can swap them into combat by changing the order. However, despite not being involved in combat, they still earn experience.

Personal

Own?No.
Won?Yes. I needed hints multiple times.
Finished2023-04-20.

In the mid-1990s, my friends and I were really into fantasy RPGs, and one day I watched one of them playing Breath of Fire II. I thought the game looked pretty interesting, but I didn't play it then. In the 2000s, when SNES emulation matured, I tried playing it myself, but wasn't really interested in fantasy RPGs anymore, so I got bored very early in the game and quit. Many years later, I was eager to expand my knowledge of the SNES library, and I decided I would start with the first game in the series, so I started playing the original. I needed hints from a walkthrough several times because the game is often cryptic about where you need to go next.

Review

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5 6 7 7 4

Best Version: Not sure

— This section contains spoilers! —

Good

  • The auto-battle feature helps expedite the grinding process.
  • The character design by Keiji Inafune is pretty good and the backgrounds look nice. I especially like the isometric view in combat.
  • The game has above average music.
  • Throughout much of the game, there are a lot places where you can heal for free which makes grinding easier and faster.
  • The palette shifting for the day and night transitions looks nice, and the minor affect they have on the game's towns adds to the realism. I felt like more could have been done with it though.
  • The hunting minigame is a fun distraction, but the high rate of random encounters makes it very unlikely that you'll actually catch anything before launching into another battle.
  • The manual offers a fairly detailed walkthrough of over half of the game. However, it also spoils most of the major plot points and bosses.

Bad

  • The narrative, while it has plenty of twists and turns, is pretty boring. It's mostly very long series of kill the baddie and fetch quests. There are eight playable characters, but most of them are two-dimensional and none of them are well-developed. I was bored of the game about a third of the way into it.
  • Magic is very uninspired. Spells do a set amount of damage regardless of the enemy, so, if you cast Flame on a spider, it will take the same damage as if you cast it on a fire elemental. Because of this, most of the spells are useless, you just cast the one which has the best damage/AP ratio.
  • There are several spots in the over world where you're fighting extremely under-powered enemies, so the experience and gold you get from them is worthless.
  • Although the game has thematic areas, the monsters don't follow them: Creepy monsters are not relegated to the dungeons, undead are just as prevalent during the day as during night, etc.
  • The game suffers from tiny names. Character names are limited to four letters, not enough to customize them to your liking, and monsters and items are limited to seven characters so most things are abbreviated and sometimes pretty hard to decipher. What is a RustCW or WorldML? Most of them are such abstractions that they hurt verisimilitude, and the manual offers no help.
  • I don't like that you have to have a character as the party's lead in order to use their ability. If you want to hunt or travel through forests, Bo has to be leading, if you want to unlock doors or avoid traps, Karn has to be leading, etc. This requires a lot of boring order shifting. Also, since some key NPCs will only talk to specific characters, you can get stuck in the game until you switch your leader and talk to them again. Sometimes this is obvious, but not always.
  • Most of the items you get in chests will be a letdown. Even late in the game you're rewarded with very cheap items like herbs which just clutter up your inventory. They're not even useful for selling because a single battle awards several times their worth in gold. You'll also almost always get equipment that is weaker than what you bought at the store. Every so often will you get decent equipment or expensive items, so you still have to try and open every chest.
  • The amount of experience enemies give is not properly calibrated. An G.Slime or E.Chest will give you about 1,000 XP a piece, but most of the other enemies in the same area give, which are just as tough or even tougher, only give about a fifth the XP. Because of this, there are certainly preferable areas to grind.
  • I don't like how the music switches from town music to room music each time you enter or exit a room. This is pretty distracting.
  • The way the item list works is annoying. New items fill up the first vacant spot, so, when use use an item and create a vacancy, you will have to go hunting for where the new item appears in your inventory. You can't sort your items by category or fill in all the empty spaces at once. And, near the end of the game, you'll be saddled with a bunch of plot-crucial items you can't sell but no longer need, so you'll be strapped for space.
  • It's annoying that bosses don't die when their hit points reach zero and you have to hit them several more times to finish the job.
  • At one point in the game, you're required to spy on a bathing woman.
  • The invisible maze in the dream sequence is a pain in the butt.
  • Because you're forced to change into Agni for the boss battle, it makes it extremely anticlimactic. Your whole party changes to the dragon that can only attack with lightning. It's a battle on rails during which you occasionally heal, so, not even remotely satisfying.

Ugly

  • Like most JRPGs of the era, you have to do a ton of grinding. To make matters worse, the combat is slow-paced, and random encounters occur far too frequently. Playing it at double speed in an emulator makes it more tolerable, but if the game only required about a quarter of the battles, I would appreciate it more.
  • There is a huge amount of backtracking. When you get Karn, you have to return to the locked doors, when you get Ox, you have to return to the crumbling walls, and the pushable objects, when you get Mogu you have to return to the dragon holes, then the same with Karn's Doof and Puka transformations. Most of what you get from this is weak items and better equipment, so this is primarily optional, but you also find a few plot-necessary items this way, so, unless you've got a walkthrough which tells you the necessary ones, you have to do all the backtracking. This is boring, takes a long time, and, since you're severely overpowered, the experience you get from combat is useless.
  • There are several spots in the game where the next thing you need to do is very obscure and there isn't really anyone in the game who will give you even indirect advice on where to go next. For example, at one point you have to take over a ship, so you defeat the sailors and boss, then, nothing happens. You will eventually discover that, if you return to the previous town, on the other side of a mountain range, the ship has teleported to the pier. WTF? This sort of thing happens several times through the game. Without a external hint or a walkthrough, you'll just have to start visiting random places in the hope of some new information.

Media

Covers

Documentation

Maps

Screenshots

Videos

Longplay - GBA - English.
Longplay - GBA - Japanese.
Longplay - Super Famicom.
Longplay - SNES.

Play Online

Game Boy Advance (Europe), Game Boy Advance (Japan), Game Boy Advance (USA), Super Famicom, SNES (USA)

Representation

Strong female character?PassNina and Bleu are both playable characters who grow in the game.
Bechdel test?FailThere are a couple named female characters, but they only ever talk to each other about men.
Strong person of color character?PassIn the Japanese version Karn is black (with a problematic depiction), in the USA version, he's some non-white race.
Queer character?FailThere are no queer characters.

Titles

Language Native Transliteration Translation
English Breath of Fire
Japanese ブレス オブ ファイア 竜の戦士 Buresu obu Faia: Ryu no Senshi Breath of Fire: Dragon Warrior

Links

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