A look back at: Breath of Fire

Here it is folks, my first ever RPG that I actually played. Well not entirely, but the first one in these modern times I played back in 2014 or so when I decided to go back to RPGs. Yes, I played Pokemon, the Mario & Luigi games, and the godawful Final Fantasy remakes for the DS along with a few outliers such as Spectrobes. But after looking at Breath of Fire, I got right back into turn-based RPG stuff.

On the surface, this really is the most standard RPG I can remember playing. Standard characters, standard magic abilities, standard encounters, standard navigation, standard save points, all of it. The first Breath of Fire has only a few innovative ideas, such as field skills depending on which character you have, fusion spells to fuse one particular character with others, and "second winds" or so where you deplete a bosses health bar and then they get mad or something and are still fighting you. The dragon powers in this game are actually quite cool too, and are often the trump card in boss fights. One of which combines every character in the party. Apart from that, yeah, good luck finding anything truly interesting.

Most of the interesting stuff Breath of Fire really provides is in characters and plot. A nice little civil war between two dragon factions is quite the interesting take, and key characters include Sara and Jade. The idea that not four, but six keys were used to seal a goddess away was better than just four. Oh but Jade does have these four lieutenants. And you can also have only four characters in the battlefield, but can swap them for the reserves in the back. Speaking of characters, hey, look, none of them are really human! It's quite interesting, the most human ones can turn into other species, Ryu to dragon, Nina to bird, and Karn to whatever fusion spell. While some characters do become pointless gameplay-wise, storyline-wise they are pretty decent overall. Unfortunately I cannot say the same for the villain side. Only Jade and Cerl are interesting, but Zog and the other three members of Jade's four are pretty lame overall. So the plot has some of that "war is hell" stuff, especially considering the Dark Dragon's lust for dominance and control. We see towns almost getting leveled, other towns getting destroyed or lost in time or in perpetual freezing moments, and one character apparently is lost in stasis where the party has to go to a psychedelic dream world to help him out.

At the very best, this game is average, and that's about as much as I can say for it. It has some interesting ideas in plot, but not a whole lot in terms of gameplay. Is it bad though? No.