Really enjoyed Breath of Fire 2; despite being a bit of a mixed bag, it is a significant step up from BoF1. Surprisingly well-defined characters for a ‘94 SNES title, most of this game’s best moments are when it manages to deftly utilise them through meaningful interactions and mechanical nods to their personalities (like Lin desperately wanting to learn magic, but not quite having the capacity to chant the spells she learns). Felt so good to like, want to play as every single character because their roles in the battles feel tuned and identified just right. It may feel thin by today’s standards, but I’m just so impressed by how much dialogue they’ve managed to squeeze into this game. Plenty of opportunities to shuffle your party around to see how the world reacts to who, even has a townbuilding component where you can touch base with everyone in your roster. It’s very character-focused and feels so much warmer because of it. Thru tears, cursing modern gaming for insisting upon only ever rigging a human skeleton for playable characters, I want more fucked up creatures like this, we were eating good.

I often struggle with some RPGs from this era because they tend to be a little one-note. I get uncharitably bored by the droning daisy chain of sauceless overworld dungeons with labyrinthine layouts to snake around as the random battles chip away at my sanity. BoF2 is def one of the JRPGs that manages to avoid this by adopting a variety show-like format for its dungeons. Every one is unquestionably unique, often themed around a character or subquest, and fleshed out with mechanics and funny gimmicks that won’t be used elsewhere. This is kind of the key to my heart. If you want me to feel like I’m on an adventure, write a new rulebook every hour and give every point of interest their own flair. Has a few particular showstopper-grade setpieces and story beats I never predicted, at times it really does feel like you’re playing one of the best JRPGs ever. Could honestly be my new #1 spot for “most deserving of a remake to maximise potential”.

The story is peaks and valleys, sections can be cute but wear out their welcome (frog castle), or feel poorly planned yet have some rather standout character work (Highfort). The game has a “shaman system”, a couple degrees removed from FF’s job system, essentially granting new forms and buffs to your party members and it’s all a very good idea, but it feels so out of the way. By the time you’re able to make the most of it, the game is already drawing to a close. The worst wedge in the experience by far is the random encounter rate that is just dumb high and only exists to crush momentum. You're going to want to map a fast-forward function to a trigger.

Played with this retranslation patch and this rebalancing/QoL patch. I can’t exactly speak to the content or quality of either, this being my first playthrough, but they came strongly recommended to me, and I do love hatchet quality of life solutions.

Want to quantum shift to the alternative reality where the Breath of Fire franchise is as huge as our Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series. What are they up to? What are we missing out on?

There’s a gettin place I usually go to find old games, and the admin for that place basically said the patched version of this game is too complicated and he’s straight up just not going to update it anymore on his websight. I’m mostly interested in this series for the later psx titles, but I figure if I’m going to play it I might as well play the best version, and it can’t be that complex, right? How bad could it really be?

Folks, I’m so glad you asked. Let me tell you how bad it could really be.

First of all, there’s a heavily reworked script that fixes the apparently poor translation from the nineties. It’s the twenty first century now so there’s no reason to play this game with a script localized by Japanese technical writers for electrical appliances that capcom found on whatever the nineties equivalent of fiverr was. We have the technology to make it better stronger faster. But in order to do that, the game has to do this annoying checksum procedure first. You also have to generate a special .srm file first or the patch won’t work. The odds of that working properly are about 50:50 and you have to sit through about a two minute screen for each attempt. I’ve played a lot of retranslated SNES patches and I’ve never in my life heard of any other game that requires this bizarre step. It’s a pain in the ass but ultimately worth getting through if that were the only thing you had to worry about. It’s not though, not even close.

The rebalancing patch is completely separate from the retranslation and offers various quality of life improvements for characters, adjusted exp and gold, among others. There are, however, an absurd amount of different features and options for this patch as well. Where do I start?

Do you want the encounter rate reduced and the exp and gold and item drop rates boosted to compensate, or do you hate yourself? Pick one or the other. Did you maybe want the main character to have his dragon form completely neutered, you know, the main thing the series is known for, and replaced with a bland magic user build? What’s that, no, you never asked for that even once? Well, the patch creator took it upon himself to make that anyway so you can pick one or the other. Did you want the standard opening screen, or did you want one custom made with one of the worst anime opening theme songs you ever heard in your life? Or maybe “through the fire and flames” by dragonforce (really!)? Well, he went ahead and did it anyway, so go ahead and pick one. How about one where the shaman fusing power gets a little bit unfucked? Oh, that’s a different patch, but go ahead and put that in if you want to.

Oh wait, I almost forgot to ask. Did you want any of these patches… with the retranslation patch? I mean, of course you do, why the hell wouldn’t you, the vanilla version is on switch online anyway. Then guess what, I hope you liked that checksum screen, cause you have to sit through that fucker again, and again, and again, for each individual patch you want.

I know exactly what the admin means now. To host this, you have to to first pick retranslated or not, then dragon or caster ryu, then normal or reduced encounters, then fusing fixed or not, then the lame anime opening screen or the one from planet earth. That’s 32 different permutations for this stupid ass patch, and each one could set you up for failure and time wasted by that damn checksum screen. There’s no way a children’s toy from over thirty years ago could be worth all this trouble, is there? Should I even bother playing Breath of Fire II if it really needs so many skin grafts to be playable? Does it really make that much of a difference?

…yeah, it kind of does. It’s actually pretty good now. I give Breath of Fire II for the SNES, the “1. retranslated 2. standard ryu 3. less encounter rate 4. unfusing less patch 5. non anime-ass opening screen“ version three and a half stars out of five

achei paia ó doido.
no começo até que tava bacana, mas ao passar das horas jogadas eu comecei a achar ele repetitivo, a história não estava me agradando, e sem falar da dificuldade desnecessariamente alta que acaba gerando um grind fudido pros teus bonecos.
além disso eu achei ele meio confuso, em alguns momentos eu não sabia para onde prosseguir por conta de falta de informação ou mesmo por não saber qual personagem usar para continuar avançando no mapa.
e dependendo das escolhas que tu fizer, vai acabar te prejudicando consideravelmente.

I played the original Breath of Fire about a month ago, and while I did enjoy it, I found it to be a bit average, and at times unpolished. However now getting around to Breath of Fire II, I really enjoyed it! It improves a lot upon what the original did, especially in gameplay. However it definitely feels like for every 2 steps, they go one step back.
Gameplay still feels quite similar to the original Breath of Fire, but it's massively overhauled to feel more balanced, while also just more polished. The major rebalancing I want to mention are the Dragon Abilities and Fusions. In the original Breath of Fire, Dragon Abilities are in-battle transformations that change the main character's form and abilities in battle, while Fusions combined multiple party members together to create powerful new characters. Though these were fun, they were way too powerful, and removed any challenge the game originally had. Breath of Fire II improves upon these mechanics though! The Dragon Abilities now take the form of powerful spells, though I personally wish they didn't require ALL of the Main Character's AP. While on the other hand, the Fusion, in the guise of the Shaman System, doesn't require specific combinations to create the more powerful fusions, and even then they aren't as powerful as the ones in Breath of Fire I.
The story is also a lot better than the original, I feel. Breath of Fire I's story is a typical fantasy story, and I'm gonna be honest while I'm typing this, I can't remember many specifics. Breath of Fire II's story is a lot darker than its predecessor, and especially the later half of the story was really remarkable.
But as I said prior, for every 2 steps forward, Breath of Fire II takes one step back. I think the biggest issue with this game relates to managing your party members. In Breath of Fire II, you can only change your party members either at the TownShip, or at certain Dragon Statues. The problem is that the game requires you to switch specific party members into your party to do certain actions only they can do. One example is that only one character can traverse through forests. This would be fine enough, as it would be an annoyance sure, but only that. The other issue though is that in this game, characters not in your current party do not gain XP, which means while your main team may be level 40, the one character you need to progress may still be level 10. I feel like the issue is that while the game requires you, it doesn't incentivize you to switch party members, so you come across this situation multiple times, which I found to be an issue. And I wouldn't be making a big deal out of this if it wasn't for a fact these issues were not present in the original Breath of Fire.
I also want to mention, I did a bit of research before deciding which version of Breath of Fire II. I heard that the GBA version gave triple the regular amount of XP, that's the version I chose. And believe me, I can't imagine how grueling the grind on the SNES version could be, the battles are already quite lengthy as is.
But with that aside, I still really enjoyed my time with Breath of Fire II. While it still has its issues, it's definitely a step up from the original. I really can't wait to get into Breath of Fire III though, I've seen screenshots of the game and it looks gorgeous.

That was a pleasant surprise. I liked how the first Breath of Fire was essentially a Dragon Quest clone, but with the second game, Capcom decided to expand and create a larger game with serious themes, more elaborated characters, and a bigger world. I'm all for it! The plot gets kind of dark at some parts, reminiscent of some older RPGs of that decade, and the game becomes brutally difficult at times (honestly, I had an easier time with some Megami Tensei games).

I believe this one needed a better battle system to become a SNES classic. Debuffs don't work well, and the way the Dragon transformations functioned was a bit lackluster. The shaman fusions were cool, though implemented in a somewhat awkward way too.

(played with d4s retranslation)

This game's highs are really really high. The soundtrack is full of bangers, the characters are memorable and beautifully-designed, and the shamanization system is fantastic, essentially doubling your character roster by giving them alternate forms. The plot seems cliche now but was surprisingly dark especially considering it was made during an era pretty heavy on censorship.

It is hurt by the translation (the plot deserved a better script that could have given its poignant moments more gravitas), and its underuse of the shaman system. By that I mean that you can only bond with shamans at one location in the entire game, and going into low HP (or getting KO'ed) would knock you out of your alternate form which meant a lot of backtracking if you wanted to transform again.

There is a romhack which revises the translation and another which allows you to keep your shaman transformation at low HP (you still lose it if you get KOed). Applying both is probably the best way to experience the game and would probably bump its score up to 4 or even 4.5 stars.

It's larger, bigger, deeper than Breath of Fire 1, but strangely works worse.
Everything bout visuals, plot, world and exploring is perfect. Characters are awesome, locations are beautiful, etc.
When it comes to combat, though...... nahhhhhh it's illegally annoying. The amount of random encounters is indescribable. There's no any variety during fighting, like it was in BoF1. Mb cuz of items, that are pretty boring. (example: u can heal 100hp at once, when u got 300+ hp; 20ap at once when u got, like 200+ ap n this item also takes 20Hp when u use it and so on). Last boss was just "HEAL - PUNCH - AP - HEAL - HEAL - AP - PUNCH". This part of the game barely works properly.

U still gotta play it though. It's a cool gameplay experience!

It has a horrendous translation and a lot of that classic rpg jank and I love absolutely every second of it. It’s a charming little masterpiece.

I’ve never tried this specific version myself but I definitely recommend the recent fan translation should you check it out yourself, it should make it a lot easier to get into and actually understand and appreciate what’s going on. But I’ve replayed this game many times now that I don’t need it, and I only found out about said new translation after I’d already blasted through it all so I’m not in a position to give it a try quite yet.

The lies the original translation of the game gives just add to my experience everytime anyway. Sometimes you gotta trek for hours for an item then be told incorrectly that the item is useless by an npc.

On one hand, this game has one of the most hilariously bad translations of all time. On the other, the fact that nobody at Nintendo was checking means that they got to put blood and religion in this sucker in 1994 and it kicks ass, so who can say if it's bad or not. The fact that they let it stand as-written for the GBA release is harder to defend, but it is extremely funny to crack open this script, remove a single swear and one (1) reference to Othello, and then call it a day.

But you know what? The script isn't actually mistranslated the vast majority of the time. You can get the intended emotional beats and gameplay instruction. The fact that this sucker remains a very solid game despite it stands in testament to the strengths of the game.

The first Breath of Fire endeared itself to me with nothing more than its experimental spirit, with all sorts of silly ideas for mechanics and area gimmicks thrown into the mix to keep you on your toes. The sequel is a bit less goofy, and focuses on refining some of those ideas, or at least remixing them. For example, the character fusion idea got turned into the shaman fusion system, which applies more equally to all characters, has more depth, and deactivates if a character goes below a certain health threshold so it's no longer just objectively correct to have it on all the time. I even found it factoring into my party composition, my god.

That's not to say there's nothing new: the town building aspect of the game was more novel back in 1994, and while it is an absolutely baffling mix of mutually exclusive choices that you don't know you're making, it's at least a fun idea. Honestly, making you choose things permanently (you can't give this poor beggar a house without sacrificing that slot for someone who can actually help you mechanically) isn't a bad idea, but everything is so arbitrary so as to be nonsense. I suspect future games will bring this back and remove the friction entirely so I'm glad we have this entry at least trying something.

I think it's ultimately the story and presentation that shine, here: you have a variety of party members again, and their battle sprites just ooze personality. Capcom absolutely the best to ever do it these are some fuckin great furries dude. Bosch Doggy walked so that Vanillaware could put a cunty owl sorceress in Unicorn Overlord. The actual plot has an actual focus and development now unlike in the first game, and while everything that happens is very broad, archetypical melodrama, it's well executed enough that-- again, even through the butchered script-- I could lose myself and say 'hell yeah' at it. Sometimes you just want the mysterious goofball in your party revealing his tragic backstory dude! Sometimes you have a duel with your old friend on a bridge during your unexpected and bittersweet homecoming! What the hell else do you want this is the good stuff!!

Holding the game back is the fact that the combat is the most workhorse stuff possible. Even though every character has unique abilities, very few are even slightly interesting. Offensive magic is extremely spotty in terms of effectiveness so most fighting is just mashing attack and healing when you need it, and only towards the end were a few more interesting bosses thrown at me. Levels are really important here, but benched characters do not gain XP and this is a pain in the ass.

In fact, it's pretty interesting to come to this after playing some old JRPGs that famously "aged poorly" or "are grindy" or whatever and be able to conclude that like, Dragon Quest 1 is way more mechanically interesting in the combat. The random battles in BOF2 are insanely frequent, uninteresting, and largely cannot be mitigated. The enemy sprites look absolutely sick as hell though. I think Capcom still being new to the genre shows here, as this is kinda what people who played these games as kids and haven't touched them since think NES JRPGs are like.

Overall, Firey Breath The Second gets a heck yeah from me. I am stoked to see what sorts of shenanigans they were able to get up to on the Playstation.

A fantastic game that was ahead of its time with its characters and storytelling and would probably have been as acclaimed as the classics of the era like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI had it come out with a proper localization and the GBA balancing back in '95.

This game has a lot of issues which are pretty much all attributed to some of its more antiquated design choices. Once you get a decent ways in, random encounters are very frequent, characters take forever to level up and animations take too long. One of the cooler aspects of the game, the shaman system, is hurt severely by characters losing their shaman fusions when they hit critical health or die. Some cutscenes also remove shaman forms forcedly. Not being able to swap party members on the fly can be a bit cumbersome as well, but I understand why this feature was omitted when the original Breath of Fire included it. Inactive party members gaining no exp at all is also pretty not cool.

Now onto why this game is great. The intro sequence is a fantastic hook and if you stick around you'll see that the serious story parts will hold up to that quality and soar to even higher highs. That said a ton of this game is comedic and it really hits the mark. You're thrown into wacky situation after wacky situation for a large portion of this game and it never ceases to be entertaining. One moment you'll be chasing a fly that calls you retarded and soon after you'll be shrinking to microscopic sizes to kill an overweight queen's cellulite from the inside. It makes this colorful cast with awesome designs very likable and you'll have genuine attachment to them which makes the serious moments in this game that much better. The way this game connects to the original Breath of Fire is amazing as well. That game had its own (rather mediocre) complete story and II makes great use of that foundation it established to make its own world, characters and events even more interesting.

Now on the more game side of things, this game looks and sounds fantastic. Some of the songs got old and at times the battle theme or world map theme was replaced by one I liked less but the great songs are there and are very good in or out of context. No small amount either, the first battle theme, first two world map themes, boss theme, final boss themes, the great bird theme and many more.

Gameplay wise it is fairly standard at its core but there are enough deviations for it to feel different compared to other games of the era. All characters have a unique command to use in battle such as Ryu's Guts which heals him exponentially more the lower his current health is. Bosch can use Snipe for a chance to instantly kill any regular enemy, but if it fails it will deal 1 damage. You can lay out your characters in a few different formation types which will affect how much damage they can deal and take to suit your playstyle. Characters have their own spell learnsets by leveling up but the game also presents opportunities for you to learn spells early or choose to give someone a unique spell after completing a sidequest. Besides the traditional stats characters also have a Will stat which gives them a chance to survive a lethal hit at 1 HP and they shout a cool one liner when it happens. Characters also all have unique field skills and speaking to NPCs with a different character at the front of the party can yield different interactions. On the field Ryu can fish, Bosch can hunt animals for recovery items while other characters like Rand or Tapeta allow for different movement options like swimming through shallow water and going up ledges. Difficulty wise it is generally well balanced and a fun challenge, other parts can be a overly unforgiving but this is usually made fine by the game cutting your money in half when you die instead of booting you to the title screen. There are banks in most item shops to keep your cash safe.

This game also has a cool sort of community building mechanic where after leaving the starting town you create your own from the ground up and it slowly expands as the game progresses. Named NPCs found across the world can be recruited to live in your town. They can set up shops or provide unique services for you such as blacksmithing or cooking.

The most unique mechanic present in this game is the shaman fusion system. As you progress through the game you'll collect up to 6 shamans to fuse with your characters. On their own they usually just increase a single stat but proper combinations can give you extra bonuses that also give characters color palette swaps. A step further than that is each character's even more unique fusions where their design changes entirely, they become vastly more powerful and their unique battle command will change as well. Fusions are not limited, so provided you have the necessary shamans you can mix and match all you want and see what works best for you (or who looks coolest). Now this point can be a positive or a negative depending how you view it, certain characters will be required for you to use, especially once you hit the second half of the game. You'll need to speak with NPCs as certain characters to progress or be required to use a field skill to get where you need to go. I generally felt this was a nice opportunity to diversify the characters I was using and ended up using them all fairly equally until the finale where I decided on a set team. These portions are never without good reason either so it was hard for me to feel bothered. This would likely be no problem at all if the GBA version's money and exp balancing was present.

Overall Breath of Fire II is a really cool and memorable experience any JRPG fan should give a chance. There's a decent amount of archaic design and the game can be a little too unforgiving at times but after it was all said and done none of that could ever stop me from loving this game.

Note: I played this with the popular retranslation patch. Avoid the original SNES localization.

UN ESPECTACULAR SALTO DE TITÁN

Tras un inicio interesante pero simplista con el primer Breath of Fire, con la segunda entrega se decide dar el siguiente paso en todo y entregar un JRPG que esté a la altura del resto de su género en la legendaria SNES.

Donde el primer juego era un amasijo de clichés, aquí se le da un enfoque narrativo menos lineal donde comienza con el misterio para darnos intriga de que hay algo importante que va a suceder pero se deja en impasse para presentarnos al resto de sus interesantes personajes poco a poco y cada uno con su respectivo arco.

Donde la jugabilidad del primer título era un simple JRPG por turnos sin mucho que mostrar, aquí se nos dan muchas mecánicas para jugar a nuestro favor. Personajes con roles marcados y habilidades propias, diferentes formaciones en cuestión de los personajes elegidos para nuestra party, dificultad que te obligará a pensar bien tus turnos, e incluso la capacidad de poder personalizar a nuestro gusto nuestra propia ciudad.

Identidad propia y gran calidad hacen de este, uno de los mejores JRPGs de SNES.

With the retranslation patch which comes with qol and various other improvements? Genuinely one of the best snes rpgs. Has some genuinely poignant character and narrative moments and no grinding whatsoever. An improvement on the first game in every regard. Feels like the first true Breath of Fire game and really shows the groundwork that BoFIII eventually built upon.

The vanilla release? Somehow worse than the first game in every way. Grindier, slower, and even harder to understand.

It's crazy how far those fixes go. I'd recommend breath of fire 2 with the retranslation any day of the week (on top of just avoiding the first game altogether) but it's incredibly upsetting how capcom not only did basically nothing for the translation and grinding in the gba port, but continues to re-release the vanilla snes release without any improvements.

Obviously, it's not totally fair to say "I think this game is great because there's a patch to fix most of its issues", but I'd bump it at least down to a 3 stars if the grinding and tedium were kept the same, because the writing really shines when it's actually comprehensible English.

The changes, additions and advances to mechanics in Breath of Fire II are a mixed bag. On one hand, the quality of life improvements to menu & combat, and new features such as settlement building (predating Suikoden) are welcome, but the changes to transformations (now a mere attack instead of altering character control) and the overall grindy gameplay is disappointing. Not to mention that obscure progression rears its ugly head in this game as well. At the very least, the game takes some cues from Final Fantasy IV and began focusing on meaningful character sub-stories.

One of my favorites, it has a great story, great characters, great everything. For a SNES RPG it has a lot of really cool mechanics that enhance the experience, for example you can recruit elemental shamans which can fuse with your party members, changing their look and abilities. You also end up leading your own village, which you can customize with various merchants and useful services. If you play your cards right in the story, you can even turn your village into a flying city which you can use in lieu of the airships many SNES RPGs had for easy travel. Overall for such an unassuming SNES title, it does a lot of neat things that few games tried since then.

I still don’t like this just like BoF1, kinda sad since I really love BoF3 and 4.

The story is better than the first one, but it’s basically just your typical evil being that was sealed but now is about to escape, so you have to defeat it. There are 3 different endings apparently, bad, good, and best. I got the good ending only because I didn’t know the requirements for the best ending before it’s too late.

The game isn’t too hard, you can get away by just auto-ing all random encounters, even a few bosses. Of course, in true old JRPG fashion, the final dungeon and final battle has a steep difficulty curve from the rest of the game. But even that still isn’t that bad. Also in old JRPG fashion, the encounter rate is pretty bad too.

The worst part of this game is the backtracking you have to do, some place needing a certain character and lastly, just like BoF1, progressing can be really obscure.

The backtracking in the early and late game is really bad, the early game you have to go back and forth your starting town for 4 times or more I think, without any way of fast travel, combine that with stupidly high encounter rate, you got yourself an annoying game. And the part where you can’t progress unless you talk to this specific person can also increase your backtracking time. And you can add one more thing, some characters are needed to progress the story or jump over some obstacle, you won’t know that until you reach the obstacle, so after you reach it, guess what? Backtrack to a town to change your party.

There’s a collectible in the form of Shamans, where you can recruit some random NPC, this Shaman can be fused with your party member to give them new form and better stat. This is all good, until you realize that if the fused party member health is low, it will cancel the fusion, and you will have to go back to your base (the only place where you can fuse) in order to fuse them back, this is more of a hassle than just powering through the game with a relatively weaker party but still strong enough to beat the game.
Not to mention, your fusion will also get canceled if a certain event is going on, the notorious one is in the middle of the final dungeon, the longest and most annoying dungeon. So if you want to have your fusion for the final battle, you will have to go back outside and trek the dungeon again, while being careful not to let your fused party to be low on health.

You can also recruit people to be part of your town, but I don’t know if this is important and I can’t be bothered to do it.

Pretty substantial improvement over the first game but still far from being a great game. The random encounter rate is absolutely insane, most of the dungeons are gimmicky and a slog to get through and the combat is still barebones and leaving it on "auto" worked for 70% of the game. Besides that, the shaman system is a very interesting idea but it requires a massive amount of backtracking everytime you get to low health.
As for the story, it has some interesting ideas but doesn't flesh them out enough to leave a lasting impact (this point, however, might be due to the awful localization though).
All-in-all, it has Katt in it so it's a good game.