The Breath of Fire Series's Dragon Transformations

Show of hands: how many readers expected me to come back after a whole month's absence with something thoughtful and significant?  Let's see, I count...0 hands in the air. Good!  I've clearly trained your expectations well.



Inconsistency to one’s series is a problem that can affect just about any form of media, and RPGs are no exception.  When, for example, Bethesda created Fallout 76, a game with effectively no story, no cast, and no point, they showed that they haven’t got the first goddamn idea of what a Fallout title is supposed to be.  Meanwhile, after over a decade of laughably inept fumbling, SquareEnix had gotten to the point that outsider Silicon Studios had to teach them what a Final Fantasy game is with Bravely Default--and as FF15 and Chocobo GP demonstrate, that lesson did not stick.  And then there was Konami's decision to break with the Suikoden series tradition of being enjoyable to even the slightest degree while they were making Suikoden 4.

Worse still, though, are the series which just as a whole don’t know how the hell to accomplish their own intent.  Wild Arms is a franchise that touts itself clearly and proudly as having a Wild West theme...and yet it took until the third title in the series for this to come to pass, and it quickly returned to its characteristic out-of-character ways immediately following WA3.  While I haven’t played the fourth or beyond, the first 2 installments of Star Ocean are embarrassing demonstrations of a Science Fiction series that can’t Science Fiction--and doesn’t really even try to.  And even SO3 only managed to have half of its narrative escape the rinky-dink backwater fantasy world setting that the series seems inescapably mired in.  Because hey, why have your story take place out in the stars with your STAR OCEAN game, right?

What I’ve only recently realized, though, is that Breath of Fire is kind of in this same embarrassing camp as Wild Arms and Star Ocean.  Because Breath of Fire is a series about dragon-people that, more often than not, doesn’t really deliver on this premise.

Things started out well enough, of course.  Breath of Fire 1 was a straightforward delivery of the goods.  You want a story about people who can transform into dragons?  You fucking got it.  There may be a lot of things that Ryu 1 doesn’t have--an intact home, or the capacity for vocal articulation, for example--but 1 thing he unequivocally does have is the totally bitchin’ power to transform into a dragon.  Magic?  Not needed.  Skills?  No thanks.  Any kind of fighting technique whatsoever beyond doggedly repeating the same rudimentary sword swing literal actual hundred of times?  Keep it.  When it’s Ass Kick O’Clock PM (Eastern Standard Time), our boy Ryu 1 raises his arm to the sky, calls forth a bolt of lightning, and becomes a scaled, fire-breathing reptilian murder machine so menacing that the day God was passing these things out, Reality hid in a corner, shivering in terror, and let Fiction grab the whole bunch of’em.  For the rest of the battle, Ryu fights as a dragon, bringing the full power of the Dragon Clan to bear on his unfortunate foes for your enjoyment.

It was, to the best of my knowledge, the first time an RPG had a transformation power-up battle mechanic, and it was a really satisfying one.  Always felt like an ace up your sleeve to pull out for the tough monsters, and with the ability to become powerful dragons like these (especially Agni; holy CRAP was that thing overpowered and awesome!), you could definitely see why the Brood was considered the most powerful clan in the world.

There you go.  There’s your kickass dragon-transforming badass for your Breath of Fire game.  The title made its promise, and it delivered.  This is a game, a series, about a bunch of guys and gals who can flip the fuck out and turn into dragons and wreck some shit any time they want, and so we get a protagonist who can do that (as well as an antagonist, and a major plot-relevant NPC).  Perhaps that’s not ALL that Breath of Fire is about, but it’s pretty safe to say it’s supposed to be the signature element of the series.  I mean, it’s basically in the goddamn name.

But having the stated theme of your game be the title itself wasn’t enough to save star-faring in Star Ocean, nor the wild west in Wild Arms, and it isn’t enough for Breath of Fire.  Because what the hell happened in Breath of Fire 2?

Ryu 2’s abilities in the second game are such a huge step down!  First and foremost, using dragon abilities isn’t a power-up transformation any more, it’s just a single damn attack!  In BoF1, if you used the thunder dragon ability, you turned into a damn thunder dragon, and then for the rest of the battle your attacks would be the dragon’s electric breath.  It was a sustained state of enhanced combat ability, as one expects of a transformation.  In BoF2, however, selecting the thunder dragon ability just means that Ryu 2 will launch a single breath attack on his foes, and that’s it--he transforms, barfs lightning, and is back to human form by the end of the turn.  Reducing a sustained empowering transformation into a dragon to just a single, momentary, fleeting attack?  LAME.

Hell, are we sure he even transforms to begin with?  I mean, in BoF2, the process for a dragon ability being used is that Ryu 2 and the rest of the party disappear for a moment, a dragon rolls on up, burps some violent mischief upon whoever’s unfortunate enough to be on the left side of the screen, makes its exit, and then the rest of the party reappears.  This process is in every single possible way indistinguishable from using a Summon in Final Fantasy 6; what assurance do we have that this dragon was even Ryu at all?  There is no evidence whatsoever that he didn’t just speed-dial his unemployed cousin to do a drive-by while Ryu steps out for a quick smoke.

What was the point of robbing the player of the fun of a sustained transformation?  Breath of Fire is a series about people who turn into dragons!*  So why give us a protagonist who can be a dragon if he’s not ever gonna be a dragon?  Why are the only members of the Dragon Clan in Breath of Fire 2 who are definitively shown to take the form of a dragon for more than 15 seconds all NPCs?  To my recollection, you don’t even get to see Ryu 2 turn into a dragon during any of the game’s scenes outside of battle, either!  Yeah, that’s what I want from my game about a guy who’s part of a clan of people that turn into dragons--I want to see him not do that.  I want to see a story in which the capability to become a titanic, fire-spewing death machine is completely and totally irrelevant.

Oh no, wait, I forgot--if you get the Sad End, Ryu turns himself into a dragon, for the first time on screen, and then goes to sleep to seal in the demons and everyone has to say goodbye to him and it’s sad.  “Don’t worry, bro,” Capcom reassures you with an evil glint in their eye.  “We know how much you were looking forward to having the hero turn into a dragon again, after we established that as a major part of this series’s lore and signature.  And we hear you.  We’ve got you, dog.  Here’s your dragon transformation, my man--super-glued to an ending that makes you feel bad.  You are so welcome.”

The greatest Brood ability in Breath of Fire 2 isn’t even dragon-related.  Anfini’s just this feel-good friendship thing that brings Ryu 2’s party back to life during the final battle.  Which, I mean, great, good, Power of Friendship and all that.  But you know how Breath of Fire 1 handles the Power of Friendship in its ultimate ability, Agni?  It fuses the entire party together and transforms them into a golden roaring raging kaiju centaur that takes up a quarter of the entire screen and automatically does an unblockable, max damage cap 999 with every strike.  Strikes that are raging lightning storms so extreme that they are immediately followed by a freakin’ earthquake!  Compared to that, the ability to miss your dog hard enough that he decides to start existing again seems...a bit less flashy, to say the least.

And as if the downgrade from Battle Transformation to Single Attack wasn’t bad enough, the dragon abilities even kind of suck in BoF2.  I mean, yeah, they hit for a good, solid chunk of damage--the G. Dragon’s lethal halitosis actually hits for an unblockable 999 damage, in fact!  But the kicker is that you’re generally only gonna use’em once per battle, and at that, only during bosses.  Because using a dragon ability uses up ALL of Ryu’s MP.  Regardless of how much he has!  Use any dragon ability, and Ryu’s gonna end that turn possessing as many Magic Points as Randy Pitchford possesses moral scruples.  And don’t think that you could just restore Ryu’s MP a little bit and use it again, because the strength of these attacks is directly proportional to how much of Ryu’s total MP has been put towards them.  So if his max MP is, say, 200, and you have him cast this spell while only having 20 MP, then it’s only gonna be 10% as powerful as it’s supposed to be, defeating the purpose.  Worsening the situation is the fact that there’s no item that restores all your MP in BoF2 (100 is the most you can do in a single go), and MP restoration items are crazily rare if you don’t specifically know how to farm them from item creation and hunting.  Bottom Line: these already disappointing 1-shot dragon “transformations” really only happen once a battle, or hell, once per period between inn stays.

Really doesn’t help make Ryu 2’s other magic, those being minor support spells Cure 1 and Cure 2, particularly viable, since you’ll naturally want to conserve his magic use as much as you can to keep his single useful ability in the next boss battle as powerful as possible.

Basically Ryu 2’s entire existence is defined by being the dragon version of a 1-pump chump.

Thankfully, after Breath of Fire 2, Capcom seemed like it’d gotten its head back in the game, and Breath of Fire 3 brought things back to the way they were supposed to be.  Not only could Ryu 3 properly, demonstrably transform into a dragon, and maintain that form over multiple combat turns, but there were now a ton of new dragon forms to take on!  BoF3 really went all out in providing different types and strengths of dragon for the player to experiment with and have fun turning into.  There were the whelps and the standard adult dragons (which looked cool and vicious and savage; BoF3 knew to make even the basic forms badass), as the previous games had established.  But all kinds of other interesting dragons could be unlocked with the right combination of Brood genes, like giant behemoth dragons that looked like what would happen if a warthog and an ankylosaurus had violent hate-sex and it somehow became your problem, cute little baby dragon-slugs that look like just the most precious things you’ll ever get eviscerated for hugging, those snake-y eastern-style dragons except that BoF3 actually somehow manages to make it look cool...there are even fusion dragons!  Like, dragon forms Ryu can take that are basically a fusion of a dragon and 1 of his companions.  The tiger dragon based on Rei and the bird dragon made from Nina 3’s influence are both insanely cool.

This was the golden age of the dragon transformation in the Breath of Fire series.  These dragon forms looked awesome, they stayed around (while not being unlimited as they were in BoF1; they were well-balanced in that they cost MP each round to maintain), they pleasingly increased Ryu’s power appropriately, they had more than just a single signature ability to draw upon, the actual transformation process looked awesome (lightning strikes, a circular explosion of black energy envelops the party, and then clears with Ryu standing in his new form), you could use them more than just once between rests, the special abilities were no longer just set amounts of damage but rather were dependent on Ryu’s own power...BoF3 basically took every single quality of what felt awesome about the first game’s transformations, improved it, and corrected every possible flaw either of its predecessors had.

The 1 complaint I had was that the ultimate form, Kaiser, was just Ryu doing a yellow palette-swap rather than actually transforming, instead having an ability that would, for a single turn, ostensibly have him turn into the same G. Dragon that Ryu 2 could in the previous game, deliver a single attack, then fly off-screen.  So basically, it was a single instance of a return to BoF2’s lame one-and-done dragon transformation attacks that were indistinguishable from a basic summon.  It’s a far cry from BoF1’s Agni, but still, I guess going Super KaiSayan is still cooler than BoF2’s Anfini complaining about having to solo a boss loud enough that the party decides to resurrect just to shut you up.

Unfortunately, the good times were not to last.  Breath of Fire 3 is the second installment in this 5-part series to utilize real, proper dragon transformations, and it is also the last.  And worse still, as fun of a ride as it was, it was BoF3 itself which planted the seed for the disappointing direction 4 and 5 would take Brood abilities.

See, 1 of the transformations of Breath of Fire 3 was the Warrior form, which wasn’t a dragon so much as it was someone’s fursona.  Scalesona.  Whatever.  The Warrior form is basically just a dude with dragon wings, a tail, claws, and horns.  It’s not an actual dragon, it’s just a D+D half-dragon.  You want to see what the Warrior dragon form is, go to Fur Affinity, type “dragon” into the search bar, look at the first 5 results, and swear eternal vengeance on me.  It’s that simple!  Hell, most people’s dragon scalies are demonstrably more dragonlike than BoF3’s Warrior is.  The Warrior isn’t a dragon, it’s just a guy who is dragon-ish.

And unfortunately, Capcom decided that its future endeavors with Breath of Fire would be based entirely on this immigrant from Inkbunny.

In Breath of Fire 4, all dragon transformations end the same way: with Ryu 4 in a Warrior form, floating in battle awaiting your commands.  And, I mean, it’s kind of cool, for a while.  The main attack animation is him doing an elbow strike into the enemy, which is kinda badass, and as much as I’ve been razzing on it, the Warrior form does actually look pretty cool overall.  But there’s no variety!  It’s not a real dragon to begin with, and it’s the ONLY form he’ll take for any amount of time in combat.  It gets old!  In Breath of Fire 3, when I wanted Ryu to power up and start breaking skulls, I had a colorful, badass buffet to select from!  Everything from hybrid mecha-knight dragons to the tried-and-true western style with laser-beam breath was open to me.  Here, it’s just the 1 single form, throwing elbows like it’s going out of style.  Guy better hope he never feels the urge to take up tennis.

Granted, there ARE actual dragon transformations in BoF4 in a certain sense.  And that sense is...the 1-and-done variety.  Again.  Yeah, while you’re in the base Warrior form, floating above the ground like you’re afraid of getting your toes dirty, you can opt to spend your turn transforming into the actual dragon that whatever Brood variant you selected is named for, at which point Ryu 4 actually deigns to transform into a proper dragon, launches his attack, and then returns to Mr. Every Hour On The Hour ELBOWS ELBOWS ELBOWS again.

I mean, don’t get me wrong: this is a hell of a lot better than BoF2’s situation was.  You actually SEE Ryu 4 transform into the dragon for this hit-it-and-quit-it attack, for starters; this isn’t like Ryu 2 potentially just swapping out for his stunt double every time.  And it can at least be done more than 1 time per battle/inn rest thanks to it not completely draining all your MP in a single go.  Ultimately, I guess that the difference between just being the dragon in battle and what BoF4 does could be seen as pretty minimal.  Still, it feels like there’s a big difference between the back-and-forth transformation situation of Breath of Fire 4, and just being a dragon in Breath of Fire 3.  The momentary transformations of BoF4 just aren’t fun like the sustained ones of its predecessor.

And unfortunately, Breath of Fire 5 finishes us out** with more of the same.  Or should I say less of the same?  Because the only sustained transformation in BoF5 is, once again, Half Man, Half Dragon, All Deviantart, but this time, there are no 1-turn transformation attacks to go with it.  Ryu 5’s OC form is all we get!  Granted, he’s no longer courting sponsorship by G-Form and thus now uses other, more versatile parts of his anatomy to attack his enemies than just his elbows, but still!  There’s no dragons to transform into.  In a Breath of Fire game.  Not even the desperate implication of it that BoF2 had.  Nothing.

Capcom, I know BoF5’s development was a bit rushed, but you left the dragons out of your dragon game.  Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 suffered from a rushed release schedule, too, but Obsidian still remembered to put in the damn lightsabers!

Oh, wait, THAT'S right, there IS a moment in Breath of Fire 5 when Ryu can transform into a dragon!  It slipped my mind, but faithful reader and possessor of a better memory Adam E. has gently reminded me.  Thanks, Adam!  Yeah, Ryu 5 can totally transform into a dragon.  If the D Counter hits 100%.  Which is to say, in Breath of Fire 5, turning into a dragon is a game over.  Yeah, that's...that's fucking great, Capcom.  You made AVOIDING turning into a dragon into the entire point of your Breath of Fire game.  Truly stellar stuff guys.

So let’s do the math, shall we?  In Breath of Fire, the series about humans who can turn into awesome ultra-powerful dragons, 2 out of its 5 games contain a real, legitimate ability to actually become a dragon.  Less than half.  The rest either make dragon transformation effectively (and sometimes entirely) indistinguishable from a summon ability, or forgo them altogether in favor of a single fursona.

It may not be Wild Arms only bothering to make good on the Wild West theme they sold themselves on once in a 5-game franchise.  It may not be nearly as bad as Star Ocean spending its first 2 games ignoring its science fiction premise for 95% of the game, and then only committing to it halfway through the third title.  And hell, it may not even actually matter in the slightest.  But it’s still startling, in retrospect, to look at the Breath of Fire series and realize that Capcom only ever really seemed to understand 1 of the core ideas of the series for less than half of its iterations.  It’s nothing compared to how tone-deaf SquareEnix tends to be about Final Fantasy (and really just any of its IPs, for that matter), but it’s still weird.











* Or dragons who spend most of their time futzing around as people.  I don’t think I’ve ever been 100% clear on which way it is with the Brood.


** Haven’t played BoF6 yet.  Probably never will, by both choice and circumstance.