A look back at: Breath of Fire 4

It's often debatable which is the better game, this or 3. I could care less, since both games have enough good and bad to talk about.

Well, not too much different gameplay-wise. I did forget to mention world navigation in the previous game does away with random encounters entirely, you can just opt to fight enemies in a field. The same here, more or less. Masters return, which is nice, and this time having to switch characters into and out of battle is also nice. What isn't nice is that if the front 3 fall, it's a game over even when the back 3 are doing fine. Also divided experience meant a bit more grinding on my end, which I'm never a fan of. And loads of minigames too, but despite there being more than the previous game, these minigame's aren't bad for the most part, thank goodness.

So this story is pretty much divided into two parts entirely. But notice that the bulk of the story involving Ryu mostly involved Nina's quest to find her sister Elina, and let that sink in for a moment. This is what she's doing along with Cray, who serves mostly as Elina's lover. Sure, there's a whole slew of other characters, with Ursula and Scias technically being on the enemy side of things, as well as Ershin's obviously strange role in everything, not to mention the dickery that Rasso and Yuna continually employ, and then you get to the other side of the continent, wait, were we still trying to find Elina? I get that Ryu's a dragon and all, and that's a big deal for the series as a whole, but just look at the quest we were first brought with.

On the other side of the plot we have Fou-lu, a playable character on his own path. He's trying to find his other half, Ryu, and merge with him considering his premature awakening has actually disturbed his own empire. It's quite amazing how while Ryu is with good friends and generally sees the good in people, even when his emotions start to swell, Fou-lu never has much to rely on, so as he is continuously being haggled by Yohm (who is yet another general who is hellbent on destroying dragon-kin type people for god-knows-what) he starts to realize just how hopeless humanity is in acknowledging his own kind.

So you can bet things do get interesting when the two plots finally intertwine, but the outcomes of the intertwining are not pretty. For one, Nina and Cray finally find Elina, only for Cray to have to put her out of the apparent misery she had been put on. On the other side, the one person who cared most about Fou-lu was Mami, who was put to death in a particularly devastating fashion which had completely made Fou-lu lose his hope. Both atrocities were committed by Yuna, a character who never actually seemed to have faced the consequences of his own actions, almost as if he was hoping both Ryu and Fou-lu would eventually fight. And they would, should you get the ending where it involves the idea that Ryu still has his friends to rely on and doesn't consider them scum like Fou-lu did. It still kind of sucks that during the whole quest to save Elina, not only was it unfruitful in the end, but it almost completely fell by the wayside for other subplots and Ryu's dragon abilities. Even if this sort of quest seems cliche now, Breath of Fire 4 did it well enough for me to like it, and the series still does a good job at giving players a sense of dread when they realize what atrocities rear their ugly heads in.