Monday, June 18, 2018

Breath of Fire 2's Characters' Abilities

Yes, today I’m nitpicking a gameplay issue--something which I believe to be totally inconsequential in estimating the worth of an RPG--of a game so old that its era in gaming history can now be classified as ‘quaint.’ Again. Look, I don’t hide the fact that this blog is totally pointless. The sooner we all accept this, the better.



Y’know, it’s weird. When I wrote that rant about the oddity of Breath of Fire 1’s cast in terms of combat utility, it wasn’t even in my mind that I might make something along the lines of a continuation to it. But afterward, I started thinking about how the sequel handled combat roles for its cast far better...and then I remembered that it also had a noticeable flaw in that regard, too. So, here we are today, about to criticize the gameplay mechanics of yet another RPG so incredibly old, that Capcom wasn’t even completely and utterly evil at the time they published it.

So, Breath of Fire 2 added a little more nuance to its combat system and characters’ roles in it, improving upon the very basic battle mechanics of the first game in many ways, to the point that there was actually some strategy to be utilized in party composition, character placement, and ability use. The best party combination is no longer beyond debate as it was in the first game,* and there are even multiple approaches to combat to choose from, now. It ain’t just “Here are the only 4 characters in the game with useful spells, now go away” like it was in BoF1.

Unfortunately, though, not everything to do with BoF2’s combat is a step up from its predecessor (not the least of which being the overall feel and flow of battles; is it just me, or did Breath of Fire 1 feel way smoother and more polished in its gameplay overall?). 1 of the ways that characters are unique in combat is that each has a personal ability in combat beyond just his or her spells. Sort of like how characters in, say, Final Fantasy 6 all have their own unique talent in addition to whatever magic they’ve learned from Espers. Unlike Final Fantasy 6, however, whose character talents generally stay relevant for 95% of the game until everyone gets the chance to just learn Ultima and equip Economizers...Breath of Fire 2’s characters’ special abilities almost all just suck from the get-go.

First of all, there’s Ryu. He gets the Guts ability, which restores some of his HP during battle without needing to use magic points to do so. This sounds good, but the thing is, the amount of HP restored is greater depending on, A, his Guts stat, and B, how damaged he is. This means that it’s wildly unreliable for most of the game, as you don’t have a very high Guts stat for a while, and without that to boost it, it just doesn’t restore enough HP to be very useful--either you’re not damaged enough, and so it barely does anything, or you’re so hurt that you need something way better to do the job. And once you’re late enough in the game that Guts starts healing a decent amount, you’ve got a lot of other, more consistent healing options anyway.

And that’s actually 1 of the more useful abilities! Sten gets RIP, which lets him do an attack with less chance of enemies targeting him, but its utility is limited since party-hitting attacks aren’t uncommon and this ability doesn’t do anything to avoid them. Jean gets Stab, which hits all enemies that turn, but at such a reduced attack power that it frequently does almost no damage. Spar can call on the forces of nature to come to his aid, which is handy, but it only works outdoors, and nearly all dungeons in the game are, well...dungeons. So aside from traversing the world map, which by the time you get Spar you’re not doing a whole lot of any more, there’s very little use for it. Bow gets Shot, which either instantly kills an enemy or just deals 1 damage, but has such a damn low chance of working that I usually find I can kill the enemy faster just by having Bow attack it normally anyway.

Rand gets Wake, which can either be used to wake up a sleeping party member, or revives them at 1 HP. This sounds far more useful than it actually is. First of all, getting physically attacked wakes up a party member anyway, so there’s a good chance that the enemy is going to do it next turn, and then you’ve just wasted Rand’s chance to act. Secondly, Wake only revives dead party members sometimes, compared to revival spells and items being guaranteed to do so, so it’s really only an extremely desperate last resort.

Nina’s Will is sort of helpful, in that she can recover her Ability Points with it. AP recovery items are both uncommonly found, and annoying in Breath of Fire 2, in that most of them lessen your HP by the same amount that they restore of your AP. What the point is of this trade-off, I can’t guess; it certainly isn’t balancing the game in any useful way. So a magic-user being able to restore her AP without relying on subpar and rare items is good...but much like Wake, it’s a toss-up as to whether this is actually going to work, and it restores a small enough portion of her AP that it’s only really good for 1 spell at a time, if that.

And then there’s Katt. What the hell was the reasoning for giving Katt the Dare skill? Dare uses that turn’s action to make enemies more likely to hit her, instead of other allies. That’d be a useful ability...if it was given to Rand, or Ryu, or Bleu, or pretty much any other character in the game. But Katt is a low-HP, low-defense glass cannon whose role in the party is very specifically to kill enemies as fast as possible! I know that these were the earliest days of the aggro-control gameplay concept (for all I know, this game invented it), so one should expect a few bugs to work out, but Capcom picked the absolute worst possible party member to give this to!

The 1 character who gets a personal skill that’s actually undeniably helpful is Bleu, whose Shed power restores her to full health, no questions asked. Sure, it lowers her defense, but that mild detriment definitely doesn’t stop it from being useful now and then. Unlike every other character-specific ability, this is a case of the downsides balancing the ability’s use, rather than destroying it.

Now, there are some abilities that are unlocked by fusing characters in certain ways, and those tend to be a lot more viable in combat. Hell, some are even overpowered; Demon Katt gets an attack-enhancing ability that is absolutely devastating, and Holy Jean gets this crazy insta-kill attack that targets the entire enemy party and actually has a high success rate. And that’s great and all. But powered-up forms should have powered-up abilities; the fact that Capcom got that side of it right doesn’t make up for the fact that almost every member of the party has a shitty ability that isn’t even as useful as just the regular Attack command. And it’s not like this was some revolutionary idea on their part or anything--Final Fantasy 6 came out 8 months prior to BoF2, and Final Fantasy 4, which also featured this idea of unique abilities specific to each party member, and employed this concept quite competently, was 3 years old by the time BoF2 was published! There’s just no 2 ways about it: the character abilities of Breath of Fire 2 were poorly handled.









* I say this objectively, but in my heart of hearts I know that there’s no way someone could convince me that anything other than Katt, Bleu, Rand, and Ryu is best.

Unless the game were coded so that you didn’t have to have Ryu, that is. I’d totally go Jean over him. To hell with this game’s shitty 1-and-done dragon abilities.

13 comments:

  1. While it's true this game came out close to FFVI's release date (and development cycles may have even overlapped), games were traditionally created in a vacuum. This was the beginning phases of the internet after all.

    Also, and this might sound strange, I think Capcom's approach was to intentionally make the unique skills as crap-tastic as possible. As you mentioned, they were basically last resort type skills, and balanced as such. Honestly, outside of the overpowered fused skills, I've gone entire palythroughs without using any of them. It would be an interesting experiment to balance the game around highly altered (and useful) personal skills.

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    1. Yes, I'm sure Capcom didn't have enough time to really adapt their system to the point that it could rival FF6's, but I also mentioned that FF4's simpler but adequate use of individual character abilities had been around for quite some time by that point--at the very least, Capcom had a better example in that extremely well-known RPG to follow than the product they eventually came out with.

      See, though, if you have an entire system in your gameplay which can be completely ignored in any normal playthrough, without the player specifically planning around its absence, that's not good game design. A character's special abilities don't need to be absolutely necessary, but that's not the same as said abilities being completely superfluous.

      You take, say, this RPG I've been playing recently, Darkblood Chronicles. There are a lot of spells and powers that its characters have access to that are unique to each of them. Now, its protagonist Sam, she has this ability that doubles her attack power for the next strike. I've never used it once. But the reason for that is that I've concentrated her build around magic and support, roles that she is at least equally suited for in combat. That doesn't mean her double-powered ability doesn't have utility, it's just that I play her a specific way in which it isn't necessary. But, another player could use Sam as a physical attacker, and be effective with it, and for that player, this same ability is useful. Darkblood Chronicles, you see, was created with basic competence.

      A Breath of Fire 2 character, on the other hand, has an ability that isn't useful to them because it's just not useful. And whether or not that's intentional--I have to say I don't think you're right on that point, because BoF2 really isn't well-balanced overall anyway, independently of this aspect of it--it's a flaw. A flaw that is "Working as Intended" is no less a flaw; if anything, intentionally making something wrong actually puts you more at fault.

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    2. Thanks for reading and commenting, though! I don't have to agree with a reader's opinions to appreciate their being shared with me!

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  2. It's all good.

    I have quite a history with Capcom. They were one of my favorite developers growing up. I will be honest though, what really drew me into their games was not necessarily good game design, but that their games have always had a somewhat indescribable quirky quality, whether it's in the visuals or the, at times, bizarre design choices. As the BoF series evolved, the story-book quality of the visuals reached near perfection. The animation in BoFIV especially was fantastic. Street Fighter, culminating in Street Fighter III had a similar development arc, if you look at it visually. In my opinion, Capcom historically has had some of the best pixel art when compared to their contemporaries in the 16bit and 32bit console (and arcade) generations. Square. historically, has been rather weak on that front. And the recent remakes have been kind of all over the map. But I digress.

    I think we can at least agree that, yes, the personal skills are more or less useless, and that's where I feel it was intentional (more of a gut feeling based on other games I've experienced from their lineup, even outside of RPGs), though the end result, as you said, just wasn't very good. I still stand by them being a "last resort" as a design choice, it's just the way the skills are fundamentally designed. The one that really sticks out though is Katt's. But the others are at least somewhat geared towards that character's primary abilities, but again, as a last resort. Look at Nina for example, you run out of AP, have no items to restore it, and potentially find yourself in a situation where you're seriously considering using her personal skills. As you mentioned, in any number of turns, attacking, using an item, perhaps even defending, will often yield better results.

    And since you mentioned FFIV, that's an interesting point of comparison, because easy type removed a lot of the personal skills, with absolutely no consequence to the main game, even with monster stats and behaviors returned to their original values. I have a similar experience with FFIV when I replay as I do with BoFII, as I more or less ignore the personal skills, as they're almost always the least optimal option available on any given turn. I will say however - if the ATB system wasn't so broken in FFIV, many of the skills would improve tremendously, but they would still feel like an afterthought. Like you mentioned, FFVI made the skills relevant and actually feel like an extension of the character's (at times, loosely) defined class, and were at least 50% of the time the optimal choice (yes, I am choosing to ignore sketch - at least control was near broken when used and abused correctly).

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    1. I wouldn't say there was "no consequence." The American audience, who Square had insultingly decided were too stupid for a real RPG even though JRPGs are already the dumbed-down version of a game that Japan ripped off from America, simply made do with a more restricted, less functional game because they didn't know any better. FF4's erasure of substantial gameplay content didn't remove superfluous content, it removed agency from the player to choose different ways to approach combat. Those other ways legitimately worked overall: when I have replayed FF4, I have made use of several characters' abilities without having to go out of my way to do so.

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    2. The FF2US release has the unfortunate flaw of Cecil's plot relevant flaw as a Dark Knight taken from him. You're simply told he can't fight darkness with darkness, and you're left to wonder why normal swords don't exist. When he fights himself in Mt Ordeals, you're told to tank hits to the face because reasons.

      In FF4 proper, Cecil's powers actively sap his strength, and this is a real threat in actual gameplay. This flaw is gifted to him by the imposter king of Baron to render him useless against opposition he can't immediately kill, but now it's a real concern, not a theoretical one. In his fight against himself, you get to understand why the Dark Knight is sure to lose; using your own brute force against an immovable object.

      That this is the stronger portion of FF4's storyline only compounds the loss.

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  3. I viewed their abilities as focused not on giving them abilities that were useful but more of tools to portray the personalities of the characters.

    Ryu gets guts because his character is meant to be like the typical hero that gives it everything hes got for his friends and is gutsy enough to take on a dragon with a stick. Its his balls to the wall attitude that gives him strength or perserverence to stay in the fight.

    Bow gets shot because hes a sniper and thats a hit or miss job in general. His characterization is primarily finished by the time you play with him as much as others.

    Rand is a farmer with a heart of gold that supports his friends with healing abilities and saw Ryus kind spirit in the coloseum and wants to help him anyway he can. So he has an ability that shows how he keeps Ryu going even when times are tough.

    Katt is a cocky fighter who acts before she thinks. In her coloseum fight she keeps taunting Ryu even until she is defeated. Its her character to taunt and be stupid about fights.

    Nina is a wizard from a long line of wizardry. Her ability shows her innate proficiency in magic by having an ability that lesser magic users like katt dont. The amount of mp availiable to magic users essentially portrays how strong they are at magic inherently. Katt just learns magic and though she knows how to cast the spells she doesnt have the natural ability power to fulfill her moves.

    Sten is a tricky flirty magician. His ability reinforces the trickster character he shows when he makes Ryu "dissappear"

    Jean is a carefree aristocrat who has a wide array of abilities including fencing, painting, cooking, singing, romance, and in a way bounces from one lifestyle to the next. His ability seems to portray how he isnt a specialist at anything but has spread his focus on everything in front of him at any given moment so he doesnt have a strong attack because he doesnt focus on one thing idealistically he hits at everything or perhaps bounces from one target to the next with little forceful effort in target.

    Spar is a plant connected to nature. This one is easy to figure out.

    Im not saying this to say your wrong but more of to point out one of the reasons i have always loved the bof series. Its character development is done in a way where i genuinely like all the playable characters except the plant ones. Its fun and bof2 feels like it was ripped from a shonen anime. Capcom focused on making the player feel powerful not from making some fantastical uniquely powerful team but by showing the power players have within themselves as human beings. It does this by creating a portrayal of the flexibility of the human spirit, its ability to do good or bad. The flaws are natural and real to everyone that connects with these characters and through them a player just might choose to do good instead of evil. That they will be able to identify the good spirit amongst the liars and thieves and all others seemingly procreating evil. That they might see beyond class and broaden their perspective. That they connect with not just the natural world but connect with the natural spirit in everyone hopefully attracting kindred spirits together in Friendship and creating some form of beneficial goodness.

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    1. That said thanks for postibg this article it was helpful to me on my playthrough on the switch.

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    2. Well, yes, you're certainly correct on this point, but I feel compelled to counter that, as a general rule, ANY character's signature abilities in combat in an RPG are generally reflections of who and/or what they are. In Final Fantasy 6, Locke doesn't get, for example, the Tools ability, which he would have no connection to--he gets the Steal (and Mug) ability, because he's a thief.* You can call it a form of character narrative, and to be sure it is, but individual combat abilities are also, and I would argue more relevantly, gameplay features, and their first concern should be whether or not they can be utilized as such. Most other games have character abilities that can describe their owners AND have reasonable functionality; there's no reason it has to be an either-or situation.

      At any rate, though, you're welcome, and I'm happy to have been useful to you. Thanks for reading and commenting!




      * No, Locke, NOT a treasure hunter, a THIEF. Treasure hunters do not "hunt treasure" so hard upon one's person that they wind up stealing said schmuck's entire outfit clean off him!

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  4. I just read this and your rant about BoF1 characters and rarely have I agreed so much with any article on any subject. I'd like to add that the game makes it needlessly difficult to level up individual characters. Since xp is always shared equally, you can't level up just one character. You gave to let the entire rest of the party die if you want to have only one character get XP.

    Still, I enjoyed it. It says a lot about the game that in spite of these flaws it is still fun.

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    1. Thanks for reading; I'm glad you enjoyed it! And yeah, regardless of whether you find this detail mildly, greatly, or in no way annoying, it doesn't change the fact that Breath of Fire 2 is a solid RPG.

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  5. I think maybe you are just a bit harsh on 3 of the abilities. Ryu's guts ability is actually fairly useful even later on, if nothing else because it allows him to not use MP so he can save it for dragon skills. Plus, if you give all GutsBLs to him, and you can also cook a bunch of them, it's reliable enough. The same is basically true of Nina. Will is based on the Guts stat, so you can cook some GutsBL and give to her. And you can also give her Cure2, so she gets effectively infinite heals. If she has Cure2, honestly, her skill is probably the most useful. The other one is Jean's Jab. So, yeah, it seems like it sucks, but if he is actually leveled (which most people avoid) and you give him PwrFoods, his jab can do a good job on any groupings of 3-5 enemies. At the very least it will do at least half damage x 3-5, so more total damage. Even be worth it on 2 enemies in some cases. It's also useful if you plan out your battle well enough and his attack can kill one enemy and damage another. No wasted overkill.

    Rip, Wake, Shot, and even Nature are pretty useless most of the time. That's half of them still, but at least they get useful upgraded specials.

    One might complain that some skills in FF6 (which is my biggest problem with FF6, as much as I love the game) make regular attacks useless, so it is possible for specials to be too useful. Shadow's throw, Cyan's Dispatch, Edgar's Drill and/or Flash, Sabin's many Blitzes.

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    1. Okay, but can any of that really count for much when it all requires one to be cramming an unnatural number of stat-boost items down the characters' throats? Grinding a crapload of stat items isn't a natural part of a BoF2 playthrough for most players, I should think, and frankly, once you sit down to stat-hype your characters in such a manner, you're already breaking the game anyway--not a lot is gonna threaten you regardless, so the fact that you've gone to unnatural lengths to exploit the system to make these skills viable is superfluous.

      True, some FF6 skills certainly do make the Attack command unimportant, but I dunno if I can really agree that that's a flaw. The Attack command is a basic fall-back, the option one takes in RPG battles when no other alternative is present, not a desired part of one's strategies. Phasing it out as better options become available doesn't strike me as an issue, honestly - and if it were, one might as well take issue with the entire magic system of FF6 (and some other games), since a basic inventory of Tents means that more often than not, you can just have all characters casting better-than-Attack spells nonstop from 1 save point to the next.

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