Breath of Fire 1's Second Wind

You know what was a pretty neat idea?  Breath of Fire 1’s Second Wind feature.  Like some RPGs before it and a lot of RPGs that came after, BoF1 utilized health bars to let the player know, broadly, how much HP an enemy still had during combat.  Health bars are a favorite tool of developers and gamers alike for managing their expectations for enemy longevity, and Breath of Fire 1’s health bars were particularly good ones for its time--the BoF1 health bar was big and diminished in real time with your attacks, giving you a very helpful and accurate understanding of what sort of chunks you could expect your characters to continue removing from the bar on subsequent attacks.  While BoF1 certainly didn’t invent the concept, it just as certainly did have a hand in positively directing the health bar’s evolution.

And the Second Wind system is a neat feature that was tacked onto the still-emerging art of the health bar.  The way the Second Wind worked was that when a boss health bar was fully depleted, they wouldn’t die like the rank-and-file random encounter enemies would.  Instead, the boss could get a Second Wind, in which a message would be given about the fight not being over, like “Evil Wizard grins fearlessly!” or “Diabolical General grits his teeth!” or “Annoying Politician demands recount!”  At that point, you would continue to fight on with no indication of how much HP the boss had left, turning your carefully planned assault into a slug-fest of attrition in which you just try to endure and match the strength of an enemy in the hopes that your own determination can outlast his.

Which is a pretty cool idea, right?  I mean, RPGs and their anime foundations are filled to the damn brim and then some with heroes who’re too damned determined to win to let a little thing like the disintegration of their spinal cord keep them down, after all, so why not let a villain do the same thing every now and then?  I mean, hell, Star Ocean 3’s finale involves the actual entire universe being wholly destroyed, and Fayt gets his Second Wind after being hit by that, so surely it’s not so unfair for 1 or 2 particularly important antagonists to be able to take a hit and keep on truckin’?

A well-placed Second Wind on a really important, powerful adversary could be a great way to really emphasize just what a dangerous villain it is that you face, and force an unexpected and even unnerving change to the player’s tactics.  The tension rises as you realize you’re up against a force that will not yield; blindly you struggle on, taxing your resources past what you had rationed them for, hoping that you can persist long enough to strike the final blow yet never knowing which it will be...it’s a good way to up the stakes of an already major battle, to make it clear that THIS is truly a fight around which the destiny of this world revolves!  I mean, okay, you’d need to have some discretion about the feature, because obviously it’s the sort of thing that should be reserved for only the most climactic of struggles, but I think as long as you didn’t go crazy and give a Second Wind to every damn boss in the game, you’d be good.

So hey guess what Capcom did with it

Yup.  Yup.  Rather than have the Second Wind be a special signature of the story’s more momentous battles and villains, pretty much all of Breath of Fire 1’s bosses have the ability.  Like, from the first boss on.  With a bare few exceptions, every single time you go up against any enemy of any note whatsoever in this game, you’re trained to expect them to outlive their health bar.  Hell, after a while, it starts to seem like they have MORE health in their last gasp!

Obviously this cheapens a tool which could have otherwise been applied tactically to raise the stakes of the narratively significant battles in the game, as a few RPGs have done with the concept in the many years since BoF1.  And honestly, it makes me wonder, what’s even the point of having a health bar for the bosses in this game, anyway?  I mean, if you go into every single boss fight knowing that the battle is going to extend past what said bar indicates, without the slightest knowledge of just how much extra health the bad guy will have, then what function does the health bar have?  If you want players to be in the dark about how much HP a villain has, then just don’t put a health bar on them to begin with.  Let the mystery BE a mystery if that’s what you want; having the Second Wind be a reflex rather than a special event just makes the presence of a health bar at all feel like an irritating bait-and-switch.

They also didn’t get the Second Wind thing off to a great start.  The message that plays when the first boss of the game gets his Second Wind informs you that he started crying, so, y’know, it doesn’t exactly present itself initially as a situation where a boss is too badass to succumb to death.  Doesn’t matter how many monsters and maniacs later in the game laugh in the face of mortality and redouble their efforts; your first impression with the Second Wind is always gonna have been a giant frog monster ugly-crying fat, wobbly amphibian tears down his green jowls.*

I dunno what it is with Breath of Fire pioneering interesting game mechanics, or at least adopting them while they’re still in their infancy, and just not having the slightest idea how to effectively make use of them (or establishing how to do so early on and then completely botching their own successful formula later).  I’ve obviously spoken on this trend in the series before, and I can already think of a couple more examples in BoF1 and 2 of good ideas implemented ineffectually that’ll probably get their own rants at some point, too.












* It also makes that battle feel really awkward.  It’s like, dude, you’re the one who led a violent invasion of a small, defenseless village at the behest of an evil emperor; stop crying like you’re the one getting bullied.  I resent being made to feel sorry for you.

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.

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.

Breath of Fire 1's Party Members' Battle Functionality

Time for another rant that even I admit doesn’t matter in the slightest. That's, what 3 in the last month? Or 336 in the last 11 years, depending on your perspective? But what the hell, I have thoughts and the screen has space for text. Let’s do this.



You know what’s weird? Breath of Fire 1’s cast.

Well, okay, I mean, obviously it’s weird. It’s made up of a human dragon, a winged princess who falls through time and gets amnesia (hurr hurr spoilurz for the 20+ year old game), a fox ranger, a fish man who can become a super fish, a big ox man, a naga sorceress who voluntarily spends 99% of her existence in a coma, and a tiny mole man. I think the last job the lead artist held before being hired by Capcom might’ve been an art booth at a furry convention.

So, yeah, obviously Breath of Fire 1’s cast is weird. I mean, sort of. Weird from most people’s perspectives. From the perspective of a guy who’s played over 300 titles of the gaming genre with the highest saturation of Weird Characters per capita, though...well, this motley assemblage of Deviantart refugees is just my Monday morning.

What does make them odd for even me, though, is how most of these characters function in combat. To whit: they actually just don’t. Half of the party members of Breath of Fire 1 actually don’t really serve a purpose in combat.

Here’s what I mean. On the 1 hand, you have Ryu, Nina, and Bleu (or Deis; personally I liked the original translation name better). Ryu is combat-relevant, because his special ability in combat is to turn into a big honkin’ dragon and tear enemies’ shit up. Nina is combat-relevant for the game’s entirety, because she has a whole gaggle of healing and status effect spells that she keeps learning throughout the game’s course. And Bleu/Deis is combat-relevant, because she learns combat spells over the game’s course that put the hurt on enemies nearly as much as Ryu’s dragon forms.

But then you have the other half of the cast, and they’re...well, they’re really only good for attacking. Like, okay, Bo, the Ranger Rick wannabe? He seems pretty good when you get him early in the game, because he comes with a set of offensive spells, and a Cure spell. Handy! Except that, much like the Genie from Defenders of Oasis,* Bo never learns any spells beyond this initial set. For context, that’d be like a character never learning anything beyond Fire 1, Ice 1, Bolt 1, and Cure 1 in a Final Fantasy game. They’d be handy for a short amount of time, but it wouldn’t take long before they fell to the wayside, and that’s what happens with Bo as a spellcaster. Hell, it’s been a while since I played, but I seem to remember that even before the plot arc involving Bo’s hometown is finished with, his spells are starting to lag a bit. Pretty soon, Bo’s only real utility in combat is basic attacking. Which he’s good at, mind you, his physical attack stats are high. But that’s not serving a combat role that any other character couldn’t.

Similar deal with Gobi. Gobi has some attack spells that are actually pretty useful, and he learns a few more as he progresses in levels. But the problem is, they all only work underwater! I mean, okay, yes, makes a certain amount of sense, him being a fish man, but...well, there’s a decent-sized part of the plot which takes place on the ocean floor, so he gets a good amount of time in which he’s useful in combat, but once you’re done with that part of the game, you’re, well, done. From then on--and this is the substantial majority of the game--you’re encountering enemies on land only, and as such, Gobi’s only combat utility is to poke things with his trident. Like Bo, he’s only there to hit the Attack button, or maybe use an item now and then.

And it just gets worse with Mogu. Mogu’s a little mole man, and the game didn’t even try to pretend that he can do anything special in combat, like it did with Bo and Gobi. Mogu’s 1 and only ability outside of regular attacks is that he can use Dig, and dig a hole out of combat. So, basically, he can guarantee that your party can run away from battles. Uh...great. Yeah, Mogu’s 1 defining trait as a party member is to do what most games accomplish with an equippable accessory. It makes even less sense when you consider that Mogu is the final party member to join you! The guy joins, what, halfway through the game? 60% of the way through? Being able to guarantee an escape from combat is an ability for early in the game, when you’re still getting the hang of the game’s balance and battle system, and when you have fewer resources and options to draw on to survive random encounters! Unless a game has outright flaws in its balance, by the time you’re halfway done with a game, you should be pretty well past the point of needing guaranteed escape abilities! So once again, you have a character who, if he’s in the active combat party, really is just there to do basic attacks and nothing else.

And lastly, there’s Ox. Ox sort of has a use in that just being a big lug who absorbs damage and hits stuff is meant to be his thing. The tank of the team, as it were. Unfortunately, BoF1 was made back in the days where you couldn’t really do much of anything to direct your enemies to attack a specific character, so the utility of a tank character isn’t really all that impressive--having him there won’t cause the less durable characters to be hit any less. Also, he does have a couple of very useful healing spells, but he has so little MP that he can cast them like twice before he’s out of juice. So in the end, Ox seems at first like he’s sort of properly designed for a role as a basic attacker and damage sponge, but the game itself isn’t advanced enough that he’s actually substantially more than Bo, Gobi, and Mogu.

So yeah, that’s 4 members out of 8 who, in combat, don’t really have any specific role in their party. They exist solely to hit the Attack button, and nothing else. It’s very weird, honestly. Usually when you have a party whose members can be swapped out during battle and allows you to reconfigure its makeup as you like, there’s, I dunno, some difference between what they can do. In Final Fantasy 10, for example, every character has a clearly defined and unique skillset and function, at least until you’re, like, at post-endgame level of Sphere Grid unlocking. Even in Final Fantasy 6, some characters do maintain useful individual skills through to the end of the game, even if most of them let their skills fall to the side in favor of everyone getting Ultima.

And yeah, there certainly are plenty of characters in RPGs who also intentionally exist solely to use basic attacks. Aguro in Lufia 1, for example, does literally nothing but attack and use items for the entirety of the game. But this isn’t just a single boring party member in a game which doesn’t offer the player a choice in which characters to use (and frankly, Lufia 1’s not usually a good game to model yourself after in any regard, anyhow). This is half the cast who don’t have a reason to be in the active party except to fill in when Nina, Ryu, and/or Bleu get knocked out.

Also, I should just mention for the record, I’m just criticizing the cast on their value in terms of gameplay mechanics (which, if you know me, is just a minor nitpick which in no way actually affects my opinion of them or the game itself). As characters, they all have adequate reason to be on the journey, several do fulfill decent plot and interpersonal roles, and all of them do have their gameplay purpose outside of battle (Gobi is useful for traveling under the ocean without running into enemies, Mogu can dig through certain spots to find treasures and pathways, etc). Basically, what I’m saying is that this is JUST an inconsequential nitpick of an odd design decision that occurred to me.

So, it’s weird. But is it a flaw? Well...I’m not actually sure it is. See, if you’ve been doing the math, you’ll realize I’ve spoken of 8 characters, yet have only described 7. There’s 1 other member of the party named Karn. Karn’s a thief, and at first seems to be the very least combat-relevant of all of them. Even Mogu has his stupid escape ability, but Karn learns not a single spell or ability on his own! But, Karn CAN learn 4 abilities from some NPCs hidden throughout the game. Each of these abilities power Karn up (and give him some out-of-combat abilities, too), making him incredibly powerful. Sure, he’s still just a physical attacker, but with one of these abilities activated, these regular physical attacks of his are the equal of Bleu’s spells and Ryu’s dragon form!

What does this have to do with Bo, Gobi, Ox, and Mogu, you wonder? Well, Karn’s abilities are all fusion spells. Essentially, each of his 4 abilities fuses him with a combination of Bo, Gobi, and/or Ox, making them unavailable to the party, but using their stats to enhance Karn as he shapeshifts into various hybrids of fox, fish, and ox people.** Karn’s final and most powerful fusion, Puka, is a fusion of himself, Bo, Gobi, and Ox all at the same time, which effectively removes those 3 from the party, and makes Karn absurdly powerful.

Mogu is still useless.

So, you see, it’s kind of hard to say whether Bo, Ox, and Gobi’s lack of combat relevance is really a flaw, so to speak. After all, if they were actually viable combatants, it would be a tough decision, whether to risk losing their versatility in exchange for empowering Karn. But since they’re all basically just Attack machines by the time Karn can start playing with fusion, there’s no conflict--fuse the spindly little pickpocket up, and fill that fourth spot in the party with someone who can actually break some skulls! Maybe it was planned that way, or maybe Capcom just wanted to cover its own ass after it realized that half of its cast was never going to see active duty past a certain point, but in the end, it does work toward a functional purpose for 4 of the 5 otherwise useless characters (counting Karn, since he’s pointless on his own).

Still a weird way to set up your party’s combat dynamic, though.








* Somewhere, a hipster just got a boner and doesn’t know why. That’s how obscure the reference I just made is.


** Is it really any wonder why there are so many furries online these days? My generation and the generation after me were fucking bombarded with anthropomorphic animals from all media angles. You don’t put this pantsless wonder in the instruction manual for your game and then expect a kid to grow up with no interest in catgirls.

Oh, and while I’m at it, thanks a fucking lot for Bleu, Capcom. I really needed to be a lifelong snake woman enthusiast.

Breath of Fire 2's Dragon Tear

You know what was a pretty neat idea? Breath of Fire 2’s Dragon Tear. This was the little accessory that showed up with every important character’s dialogue and showed through its color the way the person felt toward you. Kinda like a mood ring, if mood rings were in RPGs, and actually worked at all. The idea’s a good one, giving the player a better understanding of their character’s approval of the protagonist’s decisions, allowing for a way of tracking characters’ reactions to the protagonist’s actions and words as dialogue occurs, and acting as a lie detector by exposing how an NPC really feels, regardless of what he or she is saying--all while being much more aesthetically pleasing than just a message saying someone’s approval has gone up/down, or something like that, as you get in later games like Dragon Age 1.

You know what was a pretty useless idea? Breath of Fire 2’s Dragon Tear. What exactly is the point of having this indicator of how you’re doing in a character’s eyes in a game that offers no player interaction? I mean, there is almost no part of the game wherein the player has any ability to influence the plot or character interactions. It’s a completely linear story, and the protagonist rarely actually responds to anyone in dialogue--and on those rare occasions, whatever the player chooses to have the protagonist Ryu say in response doesn’t really change anything. So if almost every emotional response the NPCs and party members are going to have is unchangeably scripted, why bother to let the player track it? The game’s dialogue is usually pretty straightforward; we don’t really need the Dragon Tear to clarify much.

There’s also the fact that the emotional rating of characters never actually makes a difference, except for a single, extremely tiny moment of the game, which has nothing to do with the plot’s events anyway.* Aside from that one moment, nothing ever changes due to the Dragon Tear rating. Whether the Dragon Tear says a party member loves or hates the protagonist, they’ll say the same lines of dialogue, and they’ll take the same actions in the plot. If it makes the slightest difference in battle performance whether your teammate likes Ryu or thinks he’s scum, I’ve certainly never noticed it, and I’ve played the game through like a dozen times.** No change to the game’s dialogue, to the actions of its cast, to the events of its course, or to the specifics of its conclusion, can be effected by the emotion measured by the Dragon Tear. And like I said, NPCs’ actions and attitudes can’t be influenced by any choice on the player’s part. What little the player can do to affect the mood of the people of the world is of no consequence.

Even as a passive storytelling tool, the Dragon Tear actually doesn’t work all that well. Like I said, the dialogue isn’t all that ambiguous for the most part (bad translation moments aside), so it’s not really needed for emotional clarification, and there were times, I seem to recall, when the emotional reading it was giving didn’t even seem to quite match up with the character’s words, actions, and personality, anyway.

Really, the Dragon Tear is very puzzling to me. From one perspective, it’s a terrific idea, years ahead of its time, something I wish would be implemented in many of today’s RPGs. It would be really nice if we saw it, or something like it, on screen during character interactions in games like Dragon Age 1 and 2, or Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 and 4, games where there’s a plot-significant approval rating to major characters that can be bettered or worsened by the protagonist’s actions and dialogue. It’d be so much nicer than just a little message denoting the approval points you’ve picked up, or a rinky-dink little sound effect, which is what we get for the aforementioned games. And yet, this idea ahead of its time has NOTHING to do with the kind of game it was made for! The linear, forward Breath of Fire 2 is a completely different RPG from the kind that could in any way make actual use of the idea behind the Dragon Tear. It’s like a neat idea for a game got lost and accidentally entered the head of a completely different game’s developer.







* Basically, if you sweet-talk a resident of your town enough, he’ll teach you the Missile spell instead of something less powerful. This is IF you chose to acquire him for the town at all, of course.

** Look, I only had so many games as a kid, okay? I played ALL my SNES RPGs at least a few times.

The Breath of Fire Series's Innovation

Well, today's disappointing, as it seems that VG Mix's ETA of January 8th for their grand return was a little too optimistic. Looks like the world is stuck with the bad taste, lesser quality, and immense slowness of OCR alone for a while longer for video game remixes. Sigh. Well, on the bright side, being more bored than I had anticipated means I finally am doing a rant! Joy, or something.

So, I was trying to figure out the other day just what exactly it is that makes me such a fan of the Breath of Fire series. Because, really, it has confused me for quite a while. I mean, sure, they're reasonably good RPGs, but none of them are really exceptional. I could pass off liking Breath of Fire 2 as being entirely based on the fact that Katt is in it, but that wouldn't explain why I like the other 4 in the series so much, and why I go out of my way to get a new BoF any time one comes out (which has sadly not been for some time).

I think I hit on it today, though. I like the Breath of Fire series because of its innovation. Each game's got something about it that's new and interesting, but in a quiet, subtle way, usually. It's almost like an unassuming originality, I guess.

Now granted, the series doesn't start out very unique. Breath of Fire 1 is about as much a textbook RPG as you can get. Evil empires, swords and magic, dragons, world that needs saving, long distracting quests with only a vague attachment to the plot, boring and silent protagonist, it's got'em all. Still, it had that spark of interest in that the cast is physically more varied than just about any game of its time save the first 2 Shining Forces. You control shapeshifting humans, a winged princess, a naga, a mole-person, a shape-shifting fish dude, and so on. The game establishes a world of very rich diversity in its inherent species, with more than just the usual boring bunch of humans, semi-humans, and imbecilic elves (seriously, when are elvish societies NOT a huge bunch of pain-in-the-ass idiots?).

With Breath of Fire 2, though, you get the same kind of varied cast (including Katt, whose powerful No Pants Fu was too great for even Nintendo of America censors to stop), but with a plot that has quite a few elements of interest. (Spoiler warning, though, really, you should all expect this sort of thing from me by now) Okay, yes, essentially, it's another story of "Christian-Esque Religion's God Is Actually Evil And Wants To Stab Your Heart, Eat Your Children, And Steal Your Shoes." But back when the game was released, this was still a relatively new and interesting idea in video games, before Squaresoft ate a full buffet of it and then shat it all into one single game (Xenogears) that made it both the trendy and tiresome RPG theme to have. BoF2 handled it all with a pretty good level of dignity and skill--the demons lived up their titles often, being nasty and evil to a high and even creepy degree, and the game never seemed to be screaming at you "RELIGION IS THE BADZ OK." It was an interesting theme to have.

A few years later, Breath of Fire 3 came out. Great example of an innovative plot, there. You can pretty much find my sum-up of it in a previous rant, so I won't bore you further with a repeat of it. But it's definitely an interesting idea, not often used, to make a game's central focus into a choice between an uncertain future of independance, and a safe, comfortable one of limitations and essentially stagnation. Many people, maybe even most, aren't interested in playing an RPG that's not about saving the world or universe or something else of importance, but rather just exploring a theme of humanity. But that doesn't make it any less creative and interesting.

Then there's Breath of Fire 4. Now, this game threw me for a loop. See, you essentially play through a regular RPG of guiding a bunch of stupid young hero types along through the world and all, but you also, for short stints throughout the game, take control of the villain, Fou-Lu, and watch over him (not that he really needs it--he's Main Villain-powerful already) as he makes his own small journey to power. That in itself is pretty original, but it also sets the stage for Fou-Lu to become one of the best developed RPG villains ever, too. You get an idea for his personality so much more clearly than you do for nearly any other RPG's villain, and you even get to see many of the events that shape his final views. Experiencing them from the perspective of actually playing the game with him really makes a big difference in how well they deepen his character and your understanding of it, rather than the standard of just watching a few quick scenes (at the very most) to familiarize yourself with whatever daft reason the Evil Pretty Boy of the Day has for wanting to kill things.

Of course, it did kinda backfire a bit, in that by comparison, the actual heroes of the game aren't really very interesting. But that's not really relevant; the point is that the game's very innovative in how it does its villain. It's quiet, but impressive.

Then there's Breath of Fire 5. Or Dragon Quarter, I guess. I don't know why Capcom suddenly decided that the series was too cool for numbers any longer, but I care just little enough to call it BoF5 and not BoFDQ. Anyway, BoF5 has a REALLY neat setting--long post-apocalypse, 1000 meters below the surface of the planet. They really play up this interesting setting well, creating a whole social order of the people living in this sub-surface world, a reason for this order originating in their being there to begin with, etc. It's really very cool and unique, a totally new, urban-style (something few RPGs have even in a normal sense) setting that has terrific story-telling potential. Sadly, the plot's a little hard to follow at times (as in, there are aspects of it that even I just can't quite reason out, and lord knows I think about and ponder RPGs probably more than any person healthily can), probably due in part to a not-quite-great translation and localization (something the entire series seems doomed to). Still and all, this short installment to the series, with its original setting, skillful use of said setting, and really odd but manageable system of game restarting that's actually a natural part of playing the game, is a really unique entry to the world of RPGs.

So yeah, I think that's why I'm a solid fan of the Breath of Fire games--because, whether good or just kinda blah, its installments can always can at least always be depended on to give you a little something interesting and out of the ordinary.

Breath of Fire 3's Plot

With the summer comes a lack of time spent wondering how to spend it whilst sitting in a college computer lab inbetween classes, and thus, I'm gonna cut my rants back to just Mondays for the season. Yes, yes, I'm sure you're all devastated.

Anyways. I've always been a big fan of the Breath of Fire series--bigger than the good-but-not-fantastic series might warrent, even. One thing I've heard from a lot of people who've played some/most/all of the series, though, is that BoF3 is the low point of it. This is simply just not true. (Spoilers ahead, like, of the whole game).

Now, I can understand where this comes from. People I've encountered largely criticize it as seeming pointless, a long adventure without any satisfying aim or conclusion. The reason for this is that Breath of Fire 3 isn't your standard, shallow save-the-world deal. It's not a typical world-spanning quest ending with a climactic showdown with whatever mentally-imbalanced villain with unspeakably destructive powers is threatening the planet/universe for reasons one can only describe as "stupid." In fact, the conclusion of the game has your actions putting the planet's people in more jeopardy than ever, because you choose to kill the goddess who holds a slowly spreading, all-engulfing desert at bay, giving it no obstacle to continue its expansion into the last untouched continent of the planet, where almost all of the world's civilzation is gathered.

The problem is that people don't approach the game with an open mind. They go into the game expecting what they do from almost all RPGs--an eventual happy ending with the world safe and sound and evil banished forever, with several aspects of human nature and interaction having been examined along the way. Well, with Breath of Fire 3, the philosophy IS the plot. The whole quest is just a series of events and characters that all build up to the moment at the end when you confront the goddess who watches over the world, protecting it from the danger of the desert, but stinting its growth and freedom. This moment, in which the main character Ryu must choose whether or not he'll submit to the goddess and allow her to keep coddling the world's people and restricting their advancement, or trust in the determination and strength of the world's people and strike her down to free them to live life as it should be lived--with freedom and choice, even if having those important qualities brings danger, is the defining point of the game, everything it's built up to. It's not MEANT to be a climactic battle showing that Good will overcome Evil. What it's meant to be is a moment showing that despite the dangers and hardships that come with it, people need to have their freedom to live as they wish to, without a parental entity holding them back to protect them from the harsh realities of the world. It's an excellent and thought-provoking message of hope, freedom, and individualism all wrapped into one, but it nonetheless does mean an ending of uncertainty rather than happy security, and that's just not what most people expect from a video game. It's certainly not an inferior method, but if you can't appreciate this original twist on RPG story-telling, then the game will, indeed, seem as empty and disappointing as its detractors claim.