Tales of Berseria's Innominat's Betrayal

Huge big grand special thanks to my buddies Ecclesiastes and Angel Adonis for stepping up to be my sounding boards and proofreaders on this rant.  Very much appreciated, guys!



Today’s gonna be 1 of those more rambling, meandering rants I sometimes do where I just don’t really know where I’m going with it and there may or may not be a point.  But hey, people seem to like Love, Death, and Robots pretty well, and something like half of its episodes are totally pointless, too, so surely it can’t be that bad when I do the same, right?

This is gonna have highest-tier spoilers for Tales of Berseria.  If you have not played the game, to completion, then back up, and walk away.  And...then walk back to your PC, tablet, or phone, and, like, go to a different site.  Look, just don’t be spoiled by this rant, is what I’m saying.  Tales of Berseria is awesome and to lessen the eventual experience of it is to do yourself wrong.

Alright, so, we’re all ToB veterans here, right?  Great, cuz I am not writing “Innominat” out 31 more times.  The title of this rant’s mostly just for the sake of avoiding spoiling anything for potential players.  We’re calling the boy by his real name, Laphicet, for the rest of today.  Admittedly not much of a difference in length, but it’s at least easier for me to keep track of its correct spelling.

And speaking of names, to avoid confusion, I use the names Arthur and Artorius to help better distinguish the man before and after his fall into despair turned him into a villain.

So!  Betrayal.  Betrayal is the great sin perpetrated against Velvet Crowe that destroys her life, and transforms her, in body and far more importantly in spirit, from a simple, caring, and optimistic young woman into a murderous, driven demon of vengeance obsessed with destroying he who betrayed her.  The betrayal of her brother-in-law Arthur is the defining tragedy that propels Velvet forward, both haunting and motivating her every act and sin as she brings chaos to an ordered world and leaves pandemonium in her wake.  Artorius betrayed her trust, murdered her brother, and destroyed her life, and nothing can heal her from the pain and fury of that transgression.

Velvet’s is a powerful story of revenge, and it works in large part because it hinges itself on a rock-solid basis: the sin of betrayal.  We as a species have a perspective on betrayal that is, perhaps, not entirely logical--we take wrongs committed against us way more personally when they’re also acts of betrayal.  For some reason, we hold much less contempt for a known enemy doing us harm than for a supposed ally doing so, even if the hurt inflicted is exactly the same.  Hell, we’ll often hold less of a grudge over a foe doing greater harm to us than we will regarding a friend’s betrayal.  It’s a universal sentiment to humanity, as far as I can tell, across any number of major cultures: traitors are the very worst kind of villain.  Violence, murder, mental abuse, rape, theft, arson, manipulation, there’s no evil we can contemplate that doesn’t become substantially worse in our minds when it is an act of betrayal.  We don’t even like people who betray others for our benefit--the infamous Benedict Arnold had great difficulties finding much love or respect from English government or society after switching sides, for example.*

And hey, in fairness, there IS some basis to this deep hatred our collective consciousness has for traitors.  Beyond countless pieces of media from every point of cultural history telling us that they suck, betrayal is, theoretically, the hardest attack to defend against.  Walls keep enemies out, not friends; it’s always harder to save ourselves from harm that comes from a source we don’t expect.  Having natural distaste for those who turn against those who trusted them, and then enhancing that distaste by drilling it further into our head with stories both fictional and historical on the matter, is a psychological safeguard that helps keep us all just a little more honest as a whole, as valuable to our advanced society today as it was to our tribal beginnings, and even perhaps to our social primate ancestors.  Maybe it’s still a little objectively silly that we would classically see an infamous traitor as a worse person than a genocidal tyrant, but there IS a cause for this deep-rooted inconsistency.

At any rate, getting back to what might generously be called my point, Velvet’s relentless hatred and thirst for vengeance has a solid basis in Artorius’s betrayal.  This isn’t like Grandia 3’s Emelius going evil-crazy because he has to share his worldly importance with his sister, or Shin Megami Tensei 3’s Isamu wanting to remake the world because he got stood up 1 time, or The Legend of Zelda’s Gannondorf falling prey to sunk cost fallacy as regards his efforts to conquer Hyrule.  Velvet is not Wild Arms 5’s Volsung, or Xenogears’s Id, or Xenosaga’s Kevin, or Final Fantasy 7’s Sephiroth, or Danganronpa’s Junko.**  Velvet very clearly has an actual reason to be what she is, and that motivating event is extreme enough that it never stops seeming to the audience a completely believable cause for her quest.  Artorius took advantage of the trust that his family had in him, and the damage that did to Velvet is a penetrating, persisting one that easily supports all that follows.

But what’s really cool, to me, is that Tales of Berseria’s writers managed to top it with the revelation that the true betrayal was Laphicet’s.

Arguably the greatest twist of Tales of Berseria is the revelation that it was not Arthur’s idea to sacrifice Laphicet to save the world--it was Laphicet’s own.  Knowing that he had at best a few years left to him thanks to his illness, Laphicet sought to make his brief existence worth something, and convinced Arthur to kill him, to use that death to call upon the power of the god Innominat to save the world.  No longer able to believe in humanity’s ability to save itself from the threat of daemonblight,*** Artorius agreed, and cast aside his humanity for the purpose, so of course he isn’t blameless, and his discipline of detached, cold logic means that he is still accountable for the atrocities that follow, including those inflicted upon Velvet herself.  But the heart of the matter, the core of Velvet’s suffering, is a betrayal by Laphicet, not Artorius.

It’s a masterful move by the writers, and arguably the only scenario that could have deepened and worsened the treachery committed against Velvet, if you look at the concept of traitors classically.  Dante’s Inferno makes the argument that the greatest of all sins, the evil act that will send you to the very bottom ring of Hell, is betrayal--but even then, there are 4 different tiers of this ultimate sin, describing which forms of it are worse than others.  As Velvet originally understood it, the treason committed against her by Artorius can be described as both Type 1 and Type 3, in Dante’s system.  

The first type is the betrayal of family, which of course Arthur has committed--he’s murdered his brother-in-law.  Hell, even considering that Laphicet actually asked him to do this, Artorius is still guilty of betraying his family, because regardless of what Laphicet’s will on the matter was, killing him still destroys Velvet’s life.  And let's be clear: it would have ruined her life even if Velvet hadn’t become a demon in the process--she’s devoted everything to keeping her little brother alive, and as healthy and happy as possible.  It doesn’t matter if Laphicet didn’t have much longer left anyway; Arthur has still brought everything for which Velvet has lived for and devoted herself to a premature end.

While any betrayal is, in Dante’s estimation, deserving of the deepest level of Hell, treachery against family is actually the least heinous version of the sin.  Worse than that is treason against one’s nation, but that’s the only kind of betrayal that Laphicet’s death does not commit.  The night Arthur destroys Velvet’s life, however, does also qualify as a betrayal of the third tier of Dante’s Inferno: the treachery of a host against a guest.  While that doesn’t seem like a literal description of Arthur’s actions, one must keep in mind that the spirit behind Dante’s description of this kind of treachery is the concept of betraying those who have, in trust and good faith, placed their well-being in your care.  A guest who enters a host’s home is a person who goes into unfamiliar territory that they have less or no control over, with the understanding that the host is now responsible for their welfare.  It’s synonymous with the trust that one places in one’s protector and/or caretaker, and to knowingly double-cross those who you have agreed to defend and provide for is the second greatest betrayal there is.  Velvet placed her faith in Arthur, with his great skills and unique powers, to protect his family: both herself and, far more importantly, their brother.  To witness the man she had held complete, unquestioning faith in as their protector violently take her brother’s life, coldly use his death as a means to an end...even beyond the harm that Artorius did directly to her that same night, such a life-shattering tragedy is easily great enough to sustain any quest for vengeance from start to finish.

And yet, there is 1 final, higher still level of treachery that can exist, if we follow the Dante’s Inferno metric.  The very worst form of the most heinous sin of all: the betrayal of one’s benefactor.  And this is why I find the twist that Laphicet’s sacrifice was his own idea and request such an impressive and clever piece of escalation from the writers of Tales of Berseria.  Because it takes the already life-destroying betrayal that Velvet thinks she has suffered, and manages to actually worsen it.  Because Laphicet is Velvet’s Brutus.  Her Judas.

I mean, think about it for a moment.  Velvet made Laphicet’s health and well-being the center of her universe, the reason for her being.  Her every effort was devoted to fighting his illness, keeping him alive and as happy as he could be.  Although Arthur kept them physically safe in the village, it was Velvet who was Laphicet’s caretaker, the one who got him medicine, cooked for him, engaged in their home’s upkeep, hunted for their food, and provided him with love, attention, and, inasmuch as she could with their limited resources, things he enjoyed.  Though Laphicet’s determination to live, whether for his own sake or hers, was surely a great factor in how well he persisted, it’s only reasonable to conclude, from what evidence the game provides us, that Laphicet Crowe’s having survived as long as he has by ToB’s opening is primarily thanks to the tireless efforts and relentless, loving devotion of his sister Velvet.

Now, arguments can be made as to what level of gratitude, if any, Laphicet is morally obligated to feel toward Velvet on this matter.  Other arguments can be made as to whether or not it was morally acceptable for him to take the life that Velvet had safeguarded for him and give it away for a greater purpose--it’s a strong point that, regardless of her contribution, it IS still HIS life, and his autonomy to devote it to a cause is inviolable, regardless of how Velvet would feel about it.  And, of course, there’s always the practical argument to be had that his time was running out, regardless of how hard Velvet worked against that fact, so even had he not sacrificed himself, she would only have had a short time longer with him.  Yes, there’s a lot you can argue about the right and wrong and practicality of Laphicet’s decision to give his limited remaining time in service of the world.  

But right, wrong, some impossibly tangled quality between them, 1 thing you cannot really deny is that his voluntary sacrifice IS a betrayal.  Velvet is Laphicet’s benefactor, she has, in effect, given him his life, and he has thrown it away.  She has done everything for him that she possibly can, practically given up the idea of living her own life in order to provide for his, all to the simple, sole intent of trying to keep Laphicet alive and happy.  Maybe it was his right to and maybe it wasn’t, maybe it was morally good to attempt to better the world by using his life to safeguard all others’, but these are irrelevant concerns to Velvet.  For Velvet, Laphicet’s existence WAS hers, his life a treasure that she bought with years of her own. 

Velvet Crowe was Laphicet’s benefactor.  And she didn’t let her love for him consume her time and energy at every turn because she wanted him to make some grand gesture to the world.  What she wanted was for her brother to live, for as long as he possibly could.  And he took what she had given him, and used it to do the opposite.  Laphicet gave up, and in doing so he robbed Velvet of that for which she gave everything.  Right, wrong, practical or pointless, all irrelevant to the story of Velvet’s suffering: what matters is that Laphicet betrayed his benefactor.

As I said, it’s a stroke of brilliance from the writers, in my eyes.  I mean, it’s unexpected, it’s a shocking revelation, it makes a huge amount of sense in the plot and ties a lot of details together, it’s a tremendous turning point for the characters of both Velvet and the new Laphicet, it’s thematically excellent and ties that tragic moment all the more to the concept of despair in having Arthur’s loss of faith in humanity be manipulated by Laphicet’s own choice to give up in the face of his illness’s likely victory,*** it creates opportunity to deepen the characters of the game’s villains (and Selica’s, as well)....it’s already a fantastic plot twist.  But it’s all the greater for the fact that it manages to surpass the power of Artorius’s betrayal of Velvet and expand the tragedy of the night her life was destroyed by increasing the sheer magnitude of treachery to frankly Biblical proportions.

And it even manages to redefine the possibility and potential of the very concept of benefactor betrayal--Laphicet doesn’t stab Velvet, he doesn’t sell her out to her enemies, he doesn’t even wish her harm; he volunteered to give his life to save the world out of love for her.  And it is only the most powerful form of treason because of her love for him!  Had he not loved Velvet so dearly that he burned with the need to do something to ensure her future, Laphicet might very well not have stolen his remaining time with her away from Velvet.  Had she not loved Laphicet so dearly that she valued his own existence and happiness more than her own, Velvet would not have been so utterly destroyed by having Laphicet taken from her before his time.****  There is no malice, no greed, no disappointment, no ambition, nor anything like that--Tales of Berseria’s writers created a scenario of the greatest form of betrayal which is born and carried through solely out of love.  More than just brilliant, Laphicet’s betrayal is poetic.

This is a winding, rambling rant and I barely managed to make a point in it, let alone have any idea how to end it.  I guess I’ll just say, not for the first time, that Tales of Berseria is an inspiringly well-crafted story of a remarkable caliber, and I have nothing but respect for it because of such shining moments in its narrative as the plot twist of Laphicet’s betrayal.




















* In fairness, some of this was, as I understand it, more practical than personal (sort of), in that he was so reviled by American revolutionaries and later officials that he would be a disruptive military target in the field and a liability in the court.  Still, a lot of it was emotional bias of society against traitors; the East India company once basically told him to fuck off because no one likes a backstabber, even those who he acted in favor of.


** If Danganronpa was an RPG, there would 100% be a new queen loser at the top spot of my Lamest Villains rant.  Junko is the kind of pathetic, tiresome dipshit that makes Sephiroth look legitimate.


*** Oh, hey, by the way, Spike Chunsoft: this is how you write a character defined by despair.  Maybe take some fucking notes, hm?  Or at the very least look up what the damn word means; it’s clear you guys haven’t got the slightest idea about what despair actually is.


**** Yes, she still would, presumably, have been done the great injury of having been turned into a Therion demon.  But while she clearly, in the story’s course, resents Artorius for this personal harm and the terrible treatment she endures because of it, it’s also just as clearly not the root of her tormented quest for vengeance.

General RPGs Need a Run Button

This is not the most controversial opinion I have possessed.  As hot takes go, this one’s temperature is clocking in somewhere between Cocytus, and fans’ reception to Suikoden 4.  It’s basically common sense.  Nonetheless, it’s worth being said: RPGs should pretty much always give players the option to run.

And most of them do!  This isn’t usually a problem; the run feature was figured out and widely adopted back in the 16-bit era, and by the time the 32-bit era rolled around, it was basically standard.  And thank goodness for that; can you imagine the mundane frustration of navigating a Playstation 1 Final Fantasy from start to finish at walking speed?  Squall walks to a destination like he’s read ahead in the script and knows exactly how stupid the next thing that’s gonna happen to him is.

But there are still a few RPGs even nowadays that don’t program a feature to allow players to run, and that really just shouldn’t be the case.  And weirdly, they seem to be RPGs that are actually really good.  Like, the first ones that come to mind for me are Undertale and Rakuen.  Undertale is a cornerstone of the genre which has influenced what RPGs are and can be going forward, and Rakuen is an emotional titan whose story and message still sometimes make me cry a little just to remember.  Each is virtually flawless...except for the fact that actually playing through them is kind of annoying, because the plodding pace of the protagonist can’t be increased in any way.*

I mean, it’s not that big a deal for most of Undertale, since you’re frequently stopping to check details of your environs as you move forward, but there’s plenty of moments in the game where you’ll want to backtrack, particularly if you love the characters as much as you’re meant to (and Toby Fox is good at his job, so you will) and want to see all their dialogue changes as the game progresses.  And Rakuen really, really needs a running feature, because unlike Undertale, a large portion of progressing from beginning to end involves going through areas multiple times as new paths and possibilities open up, so the start-and-stop novelty of exploring new surroundings that Undertale benefits from isn’t something that Rakuen can likewise rely upon.

And sure, you can make a defense of Rakuen based on the fact that its protagonist is a kid who’s sick in the hospital.  It’s thus quite plot-consistent that he wouldn’t be sprinting through the halls faster than Elon Musk toward a way to embarrass himself.  Still, I gotta tell you: shortly after I started playing Rakuen, I downloaded a mod for it that added a run button, and I don’t think that saving myself a cumulative couple hours of my life on the commute from 1 plot event to another ever lessened my immersion in the game or made the main character’s situation any less meaningful to me.  I certainly don’t think my tear ducts’ output was lessened whatsoever at the appropriately moving parts of the game for the fact that I’d had a more convenient time in arriving at them.

Also, this should probably go without saying, but in addition to having a running feature, RPGs should also always be made in a way that this feature is, well, functional.  The whole point is player convenience, after all, so having this feature be in itself inconvenient doesn’t really work.  We luckily don’t have to deal much with situations like Secret of Mana or Wild Arms 1 any more, where the ability to move faster meant being forced to go in a line so narrow and forbidding of detours that it could be considered practice for playing Final Fantasy 13.  But sprint meters and their kin are still a very real and annoying thing, and then there’s the thing where mouse-based RPGs force you to double-click your destination if you want the character to run there, because just a single click will mean them slowly walking instead.  Disco Elysium is 1 of the greatest games ever created, a work of such skill and brilliance that it feels humbling just to experience its majesty, but it sure makes you fucking work for the privilege of experiencing its excellence if you’re on the PC, because EVERY SINGLE TIME you want to go somewhere, you’ve gotta double-click that spot, person, thing, whatever.  The pace at which Harry moves toward a single-click implies that he’s drunk, exhausted, depressed, out of shape, and has been shot in both his legs--and only most of that can be true at any given time.  I can’t for the life of me conceive why ZA/UM decided to use Windows 95 as their inspiration for this particular part of their gameplay design, instead of just having running be the default movement speed and walking the one that’s selected with the less natural double-click.

And don’t even get me started on the PC Shadowrun titles’ approach to the run function.  That one probably just deserves its own admittedly short, but highly vitriolic rant.

It’s not even like giving the players a functional option for running really has to impact your work’s gameplay pace.  I mean, in total frankness, a lot of a run button’s convenience is entirely mental.  Like, take the examples I gave before of the Playstation 1 Final Fantasy titles.  As I mentioned, the regular walking function in them is stupidly slow, to be the point of being outright unfeasible.  The overall size of screens in Final Fantasy 9, for example, are, I think, basically designed with the assumption that the player is going to be running through them, not walking.  I’m relatively sure that if you compared the general size of most Final Fantasy 7 environments and the speed at which you can proceed through them while running, it’d probably be, functionally-speaking, very close to that of Undertale’s unchangeable walking pace.  So in effect, the run buttons in these Final Fantasies aren’t really any faster than the walking speed of a walking-only RPG that’s been fairly well-designed.  You can still design your game to be traversed at the pace you prefer either way--but having a run button is a lot more psychologically pleasing to the player, even if the result winds up being the exact same.  And unlike just about everything else related to human psychology being employed in the gaming industry these days, this placebo of travel autonomy is harmless.

Also, in cases where the lack of a run button is felt most annoyingly during backtracking, as it is with Undertale, you can always use an alternative method like Tales of Berseria’s geoboard.  The geoboard in ToB is basically just a hoverboard that goes a little faster than the normal running pace of the protagonist, which of course makes it very convenient (as does its ability to just smash through enemies that are a level lower enough than your own, something which you all know I like a lot).  But even once you gain the geoboard during the course of ToB’s story, it’s not something that you can automatically use--each area of the game has a spot at which you can activate the feature, and only after reaching this spot can you use the geoboard in that dungeon.  In practice, this usually means that you’ll only be making use of the geoboard’s extra speed once you’re near or at the end of any given dungeon.  But while that’s an unfortunate downside in Tales of Berseria, whose regular run speed does leave something to be desired,** a similar system of awarding run functionality for backtracking purposes would’ve been a hell of a useful feature in Undertale, while still allowing for the existing controlled pace of only being able to walk through new territory.

Like I said before, this isn’t a problem for 90% of the RPGs coming out these days.  Run functions are a standard feature built into the game for most developers at this point.  Still, there are some indie RPGs that, for whatever reason, don’t include it, and not every game that does have one utilizes it in a way that actually makes it convenient.  And while I adhere strictly to my policy that gameplay considerations do not affect an RPG’s quality and worth, even I have to admit that it’s hard not to resent a game that makes me feel like I’m wasting my time getting from Point A to Point B.  RPGs need run buttons.














* Well Rakuen also does have the flaw that it doesn’t have a non-vocal version of its main theme and I totally want one.  But that’s admittedly more a subjective thing.


** Yes Angel I heard your complaints the WHOLE time and am hereby publicly acknowledging their legitimacy; are you happy now?

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.