I've loved the Breath of Fire series since I first played the GBA port of the first game as a kid, back when it was new. I unfortunately missed III and IV until I was in high school, but I got Dragon Quarter in middle school and I ADORED it, despite its very obvious antagonism toward the player. It reminded me of Chrono Cross, which I had also fallen in love with at the time.

Dragon Quarter is VASTLY different to every other game in the series, to an almost ludicrous degree. It's honestly vastly different to most games I can think of. It uses semi-roguelike mechanics (if the D% reaches 100%, then the game is over, gotta restart the whole thing- carrying over stats and items and D-Ratio improvements, but still) and an SRPG movement and action point system, and the former is even directly woven into the themes of the narrative.

All in all, if you like extremely punishing games, games with New Game+ (in this game, it's kind of mandatory), and roguelike-ish experiences, Dragon Quarter is worth at least TRYING. There is a really great game here and it has a history of being very unfairly maligned.

Me entristese que este videojuego fuera tan mal recibido cuando es tremenda obra. Definitivamente tiene un par de cosas que no me gustan, como que sean necesarias monedas para guardar, que necesites guardar cierta cantidad de D-Counter o si no, es imposible completar el juego, que para alguien que no lo usaba mucho como yo no es mayor problema pero para quien jugará usandolo seguro fue una patada. Igual, la música es excelente, el tema de batalla contra jefe es sencillamente sobresaliente y quedará grabado en mi memoria, el sistema de combate es muy bueno y la conclusión de la historia junto a sus personajes es espectacular. Uno de los mejores RPG de PS2, uno que disfrute demasiado, un clásico y una experiencia más que recomendable.

the lockdown during the covid’s pandemic made everyone appreciate a little more things that were common and even rejected by some people: going outside, having human contact, not using masks and looking at nature, especially, looking at the sky. can you imagine being deprived of looking at the sky forever? the people in breath of fire: dragon quarter (D¼) don’t even know what “sky” is, instead, they have blue-painted ceilings to simulate it. the concept of “sky” is a legend, living underground for thousands of years, the “sky” for them is almost like “heaven” is for us: it’s paradise. the thing is that pretty much everyone in this world is agnostic.

and is not a wonderful world! full of creatures that were initially created in order for people to have food but some of them went mad and became more like monsters. the air is not good too! is very polluted and if your d-ratio is low, you will live in the worst places possible. oh, yeah, “d-ratio” is a very important concept: D¼’s world has this species of caste system called “d-ratio”, where people have a fraction associated with them, which denominator is always a multiple of 4 (actually, is always 4 raised to an exponent) and the lower your “d-ratio” is, the lower your status in this world is.

you, the protagonist: let’s call “ryu” for the sake of simplicity. ryu’s “d-ratio” is 1/8192, a low rank, specially considering that he is a pig/cop/pest-exterminator-guy in this world – called “ranger”. he can never make the top with a “d-ratio” like that. his partner, bosch, however, has a 1/64 “d-ratio”. he not only can make it to the top but he can even become a reagent as well (basically the people that control this world, the higher class someone can have, they literally live at the top of the world). anyway, ryu and bosch are given the mission of escorting a top-secret-object to a top-secret-lab. shit happens, the top-secret-object is actually a girl with wings called “nina”, ryu feels the urge to protect her, allies with lin from the trinity (a group of rebels) and discovers that the rangers sucks.

if people are agnostic about the existence of the “sky”, nina is a true believer. she does not only have faith in the “sky”’s existence, but far beyond the ceiling painted blue or the stories of the ancients, she wants to see the sky in its best form and ryu feels the need to help her.

in the middle of all of this, ryu even connects with a dragon, earning the power of transforming into a dragon that, in-game, can trivialize everything. you can pretty much win all battles with a single button or a buff + 2 attacks combo. it’s amazing, it can turn all the difficult moments into nothing. there’s no struggle in reaching the sky after all! right? right??

oh, your d-meter is 100%, i guess this is a game over, you have to restart. the whole game.

and this is where the real D¼ begins. as soon as you gain access to all those new dragon features, a meter appears in the top right corner of your screen, probably at 4.00% after you obligatorily use it in a boss fight and is always increasing as you progress through the game. you can always “d-dive”, turn into a dragon and make your life easier but this will just increase the meter. 12.00%, 26.37%, 56.78%, 78.98%, oh no, it’s 100% again and you are not even in the middle of the game. i guess you gotta restart it again.

the thing about restarting your life after failure is that: it’s not easy. you lose a lot of progress, feel frustrated and may even consider if it’s worth it to continue chasing your dreams after so many times failing. however, you have more and more experience as you try and you may reach it sometime. it’s not so different in D¼: every time you restart the game, you maintain part of the money and party xp (experience that you gain in order to distribute it between the party), your skills, the items that were equipped and can even see some new scenes each restart (the so called “SOL system”). not so different from mr.best-action-game-of-2020, huh? D¼ is a roguelite. of course you can just “continue” (restore) the game instead of restarting from the beginning, you always have this option and the decision is yours. except for when your “d-meter” is 100%.

not only D¼ is a roguelite jrpg but it’s also a survival horror: this game atmosphere is very oppressive and claustrophobic. always walking through corridors, avoiding combat since every single enemy can kill you very easily if you don’t have a good strategy for every single battle and even your backpack is limited by the amount of items you can carry: you can’t have 99 “potions”, only 10. you can’t even save it everytime, you need a “save token” that is like resident evil’s ink: it’s very rare, sometimes not even worth obtaining since there’s a big-bad-can-kill-you-in-one-hit enemy in the front of it. the combat also is more like a crpg, having “AP points” to move your character in-map and also being the points you need to attack the enemy. gladly, utilizing items does not take off your “AP points” so you can pretty much survive the next hit even if you already did your movement. the combat depends a lot on positioning and you can even hide behind boxes, go around and hit the enemies on the back (which every single attack hits). D¼ is also a fighting game in a sense, since you have to do combos in order to do real damage in this game: press “circle” while holding “R2” then hit “square”, “square”, “x”, “circle” again and wow! a combo! a critical hit! or it may not even land! you can buy weapons as well but the best ones are obtained randomly after killing strong enemies or opening boxes (that need a key (that you obtain after killing strong enemies)), the same goes for skill. the “steal” skill is probably the best steal skill in any videogame since it’s a passive skill that activates every time you take damage so you can pretty much get fucked up but with a “????????+5” weapon (you gotta discover what it is in a shop (a girl with glasses (that is also the same girl that stores your items that you can take after every restart)).

this c-j-survival-horror-fighting-rpg is a very complex and most of the time miserable piece of gaming. the gritty, melancholic, tarkovsky-meets-anime style of its narrative does not help too. you are never secure in this world, even if you are, it’s more like being comfortable while a catastrophe is happening (not so different from the lockdowns, huh?). still, it is such an interesting and addicting experience, restarting it again and again, seeing new scenes, having new items, doing things faster and faster. one of my restarts i did ⅔ of the game in 3 hours, which, before, took me a lot more. D¼ is a game about perseverance. it teaches you that it’s not your “d-ratio” that will change the world: i mean, which time in history the higher classes actually did something significant for the people? when they did, they were pressured by the lower classes. D¼ tells us to not accommodate our situation but to break the blue ceiling and go all up to reach the sky, like a true dragon. it doesn’t matter how many times you gotta die each day, you can try again and again until you fulfill your dreams.

"man will gain wings and the sky will return to the world"

…

D¼ was very controversial for breaking with so many structures that breath of fire as a franchise constructed, for being so weird and hard and “unfair” and whatever people were saying back in the day. still is perceived as the black sheep of the series, the game that killed the franchise and this was repeated so much that a lot of people didn’t even try to play it! however, if you open your mind and especially your heart, you will encounter a very frustrating videogame, yeah, but very rewarding, both gameplay-loop-wise and spiritually. in this site, there’s more “backlogs” and “wishlists” for this game than actually plays! and is such a fancy designed experimental piece of gaming that did stuff almost 20 years before mr.best-action-game-of-2020 did and in a better way, in my opinion. so please, you reading this, know that i’m not the roger ebert of game’s writing but i really ask you with all my heart to consider giving it a chance. it’s not so hard to emulate it (even if it does have some graphic bugs) and it’s not so expensive if you live in the states and can buy it for your ps2. don’t mind dying a couple times before discovering what you have to do, just experience the beautiful story of a young dragon seeking for freedom.

(NOTE: This is my first Breath of Fire game)

Essentially what if you took a regular JRPG with a special chosen hero but made the game more like those It's Always Sunny Nihilist memes and make extremely interesting/bizarre design choices like having to reset the game because you destroyed the world (someone ask if Yoko Taro played this game dude) and each time you reset the game you're seeing more of the story but also you realize how insanely well done the balancing is that 5 hours of your first run will be cut down to like 1 when you have a new cycle

Literally if you've beaten every PS2 megaten game and want more, look at this game

My only complaints here stem from this probably being a lower budget title for Capcom with how the presentation is aka if this got a remaster (THAT DID NOT CHANGE THE GAMEPLAY/STORY) that'd solve everything

Started this up on a whim and was shocked by how immediately fun I found it. I'm worried that in the long-term the strategy-heavy nature of the combat will get tiresome (already slowly picking apart a mob of enemies one-by-one isn't that engaging) but am hopeful that with more tools will come deeper or more interesting fights.
I'm trying not to get too hung up on missing skills or sub-optimal item usage or whatever, but knowing that I've already missed a one-time chance to get a skill off a boss (thanks for unequipping my shield skill, item shop!) is painful.
The game's got great style though. That perfect, early-2000's post-Matrix future-grime. I want to say it's a killer aesthetic curveball for the Breath of Fire series, but I'm ultimately not familiar enough with the previous games to know if that's actually the case.

Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter is a really excellent RPG with some awesome and unique ideas that make up for its few narrative missteps and mechanical opacity. This is the best and most interesting Breath of Fire game.

The visuals and music in Dragon Quarter are great. The character models are well done and expressive and the environments are varied and look good.
The music is definitely a high point, a lot of it is reminiscent of Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story (same composer) and it sounds fantastic throughout the game.

The narrative here is very cool to begin with but runs out of steam towards the end. You play as a 'Ranger' in an underground, post apocalyptic society that seems to have formed after a disaster on the surface of the world, making it unlivable in some way. Over the course of the game you meet Nina, a girl who is a lab experiment of some kind, and Lin, a member of a resistance organization. These three main characters are cool spins on the Breath of Fire main cast (Dragon Boy, Flying Girl, and Cat Person), and it makes this game feel like a weird, far-future version of a Breath of Fire game.
The story itself is contained and drives forward effectively. The world and factions are all interesting and the game generally doesn't try to do too much. There are a lot of really good character moments and the graphical style and animations convey feelings really effectively. There are more than a few very striking character reactions of sadness and horror that are among the most effective I have seen in games.
Near the end the game throws in what is basically a boss gauntlet of a bunch of barely foreshadowed members of some organization that vaguely controls the Rangers and isn't really involved in the story up to that point. It all feels very disconnected and low stakes, even though they hint at some sort of metaphysical connection between these characters. It didn't work for me and just distracted from the main through-line of Nina trying to get to the surface with Ryu and Lin's help (plus interference and rivalry with the Rangers).

Exploration is fun, with distinctive, not-overly confusing dungeons and the ability to start combat by attacking enemies on the field. The environments look cool, in that classic PS2 sort of way, and even though most of it is underground and dark, there is a lot of variety to the areas you travel through.
There is also a fairy cave mini-game where you recruit ants to do various jobs. shrug Breath of Fire.
Combat in Dragon Quarter is tactical. Characters have action points they can spend on movement and attacks in a fairly straight-forward way. There is a twist that works pretty well, where you can build combos from abilities you have 'threaded' onto your weapons. Abilities have different costs and how they are set up in the weapon and how you string them together brings a lot of depth to the system. Each of the three characters also has things they are better at and each feels distinct to play, in terms of their actual abilities and how they combo them together.
Additionally, the main character can use a special dragon mode that gives him new abilities and can kill literally every enemy in the game in one turn. You have a percentage counter and if it hits 100% at any point, it is game over! This seems insane, but manipulating this counter is an integral part of the game that feeds elegantly into...

The real innovation in Dragon Quarter comes, strangely, from the save system which is, unfortunately, very opaque and weird. Getting your head around (and even remembering) how it works is definitely a challenge.
It comes down to basically one menu option (SOL Restore) that you can do whenever you want (and it triggers automatically if you die, which shouldn't ever happen). Using this overwrites certain aspects of your save file and boots you back to the main menu, letting you load your newly altered save. When you load, you are back at the location from the save file, at the level you were when you made it with a minimal set of items and (Importantly!) your dragon percentage at whatever it was when you saved. From the SOL Restore, you get your weapon inventory, item bank, any new skills you found, and your cash and freely assignable party experience points. This is all very complicated and seems arbitrary, but the bottom line is that the game wants you to save before a new area, then run through the upcoming dungeon using your dragon abilities to trivialize it (gaining massive amounts of party exp because of efficiency bonuses) while you pick up new weapons, learn new skills, and loot a bunch of stat bonus items. Then you SOL Restore (which resets your levels and dragon counter) distribute your party experience and use your stat bonus items, save, and do it again until you can easily make it through the dungeon without needing dragon form at all. Basically, a unique, interesting form of grinding is built fundamentally into the mechanics of the game that make it almost feel like a roguelike.

The SOL Restore system makes the dragon form work! You can use this massively powerful, fun form as much as you want to learn the level and defeat hard, optional side enemies then reset your counter and keep most of your rewards!
The level design exploits the SOL Restore system! The main path through a level is almost always short and straight, so once you learn the level and have gotten every item and skill out of it, you can just run right through to the next part of the game!
The system lets you bring weapons from the future back to help you in the past! You can run up to the boss of the level, steal their sword, SOL Restore, then use it to kill them!
New narrative events happen the second and third times through an area, so SOL Restore has some additional reward for effectively using it!

There are a few missteps with this system, unfortunately.
There is an additional SOL Restart feature, which does the same thing as SOL Restore, but sends you back to the beginning of the game. I think you would never want to do this, and it seems like it is included so that there can be a newgame+?
Saving is unnecessarily annoying, with a dependency on sparse save terminals and a pseudo-rare item (that is part of your basic SOL Restore inventory). The game would just be better if it let you save at every terminal for free.
A couple of things don't carry over but should, which just makes things fiddly. If SOL Restore saved new backpack slots, used stat items, and applied party experience the whole thing would just work more smoothly without losing anything.

All that aside, it is hard to express how awesome and unique the SOL system is and how much it truly impacts the game. It is really a triumph of game design that brings Dragon Quarter from 4 stars up to 5 for me, despite its other minor shortcomings. This game is worth checking out... just give it a chance to teach you how to play it and you will have a good time with its unique take on RPG advancement, interesting world, and solid, turn-based combat.

This game is different, not only from the rest of it's franchise, but from almost every other JRPG I've played. The way it utilizes it's mechanics, such as SOL and the Dragon form, is some of the best game design I've seen, trusting you to do what you want with them without holding your hand in the process. Because of this, though, it's not as easy to recommend to casual players because it can be just as rewarding as it is punishing. If you do like a change of pace from other JRPG's and are looking for something different, though, I'd definitely recommend you give this one a try.

I suppose I'll start with the negative, the game at times suffers from linearity. Especially for a title that expects you to occasionally turn in your badge and gun to start effectively from scratch at the beginning of the line. Also, although befitting the overall story of the game, the art style is fairly dark and feels like you're fumbling your way through a poorly lit warehouse for the majority of your 20+ hour excursion.

Those shortcomings can be forgiven as the package as a whole remains fairly compelling. The story is simple, you are a grunt in a force tasked with maintaining the status quo. You and a partner take on a transport mission that goes awry. From that mistake, you learn that the system you've been fighting for is actually not what it had seemed to be. Because of this you realign your goals with a rogue revolutionary as she tries to liberate a humanoid science experiment against all odds.

This story is wrapped in a handful of interesting play mechanics, an odd save system that allows you to carry stats through restarts, an battle system that lacks random encounters and instead lets you bait and trap opponents before encountering them, and the dragon counter.

The dragon counter is simple enough on paper. Each time you use a special ability (i.e. overpowered), the counter goes up. If the counter fills, your game ends. As that counter sits with you constantly on the screen through your entire play-through it becomes a silent omnipresent entity that ultimately will define your entire experience. For myself--a player that is overly cautious with the tools at my disposal--it was a badge of pride to keep it low at all costs, yet later the d-counter became a source of embarrassment as I had to lean on those powers with more occasion.

The game is filled with plenty of these small little intricacies that feel unique to the title even almost 20 years after its release. If you're an RPG fan it would be hard to not recommend this as a must play if only to explore the boundary pushing that was on display here.

Back when I was a kid my older brother got this game after seeing me struggle so much trying to play BoF IV. He didn't really like it that much, we were big JRPG heads and anything that didn't look or play like Final Fantasy was discarded as a waste of time. I thought it looked pretty cool tho so it always hovered somewhere in the back of my mind.

Over the years i've only heard this game mentioned as the "bad one", "the one that's plays badly", etc etc.

After my BoF IV replay I was willing to give it a shot cause I was always fascinated by the concept of "you're stuck underground and your journey is to make it to the outside world." Turns out I shouldn't ever trust other people's opinion on video games because it was one of the most enjoyable game I've played in the recent years. The combat system is phenomenal, and the constant anxiety of trying to outrun the constantly ticking time limit is something I've never seen in a game before, nor since.

I'm a big sucker for metanarratives, and I get what they were shooting for here. Stumbling through these longs dungeons that have no checkpoints, that constant doomsday clock ticking over your head, the lack of safe area where you can just relax and heal up. You get none of that, you have to spend every little ressources trying to move forward and get no chance to catch your breath. Why would you anyway? The air is disgustingly polluted so there is no reason to stop until the end of your journey.

But by far the best part about this game is those extremely hard and unfair boss fights at the end of each dungeons. I was annoyed at first, but then Bosch said "Protect your friends or save yourself, you can't do both !" and suddenly I understood. They are meant to be unfair because the game gives you a choice every single time: will you start over from a previous save so you can be stronger and more efficient (saving your friends by hurting yourself), or will your be selfish and summon the Dragon to make the boss easy? (Saving yourself by hurting Nina). After struggling for so long I decided Nina shouldn't be the one to suffer for my dumb mistakes, and I replayed the entire game without using the Dragon form until the very end, and I'm so glad I did.

I want to save Nina. TO THE SKY!

Finally wrapped up the game after dropping it earlier this year. I managed to get through the whole thing only restarting once towards the beginning of the game, which made for an interesting experience where I spent its entire twenty-odd hours anticipating needing to do it all over again and ultimately being just fine. The other side effect of that though is that I never got the pay-off of restarting and having all of the skills and banked EXP giving me the power trip of blowing through the once difficult earlier game. In any case!
The game has so much personality. There are so many bizarre design decisions and weird quirks to the game that you need to slowly figure out yourself, and even now I couldn't tell you with certainty what you do and don't lose when you do the different kind of SOLs, but it's so strange and compelling.
The Regent fights at the end are impressively tough, and each time I was convinced that this would be the boss that sent me back to the beginning only to come out ahead. Absolute Defense is a crazy mechanic, but it really does a lot to crank up the tension in the end game.

Breath of Fire 5 Dragon Quarter was the last game in the series and was met with mostly negative reception at release, however nowadays players have come to appreciate this gem. The developers decided to shake up the formula and it resulted in a game that is a far cry from past titles, but also a game that truly breaks the mold.

First thing that strikes me about this game is how dystopian it is. Gone are the vibrant, lush lands from the previous games in favor of a miserable, underground hellscape. People live in poor conditions and only the ones at the top of the food chain live closer to the surface. In fact, the living conditions are so utterly dire, people in one town painted the roof blue to resemble what they call the "sky", when in reality they don't know if such a thing even exists.

I can't delve deep into the story considering I haven't gotten all the cutscenes (more on that later) and I don't want to spoil anything but I really appreciate how it manages to be simultaneously small-scale yet high-stakes. You don't go on a globe-trotting adventure to rid the world of some great evil, you only have one goal: going to see the sky. This sounds really mundane but Ryu and the party will go through many trials and tribulations before reaching their final destination. Furthermore, the cutscene direction is brilliant, some of the best in the medium and it might be my favorite aspect of the game second only to the gameplay.

Moreover, bof5 manages to be one of the most well-crafted rpgs ever because of its gameplay systems. Starting off with the combat, it revamped the classic combat system into a completely different beast. AP is now the primary resource in battle, as it's used for not only every attack, but also for moving around. The game asks you to be strategic by using skills like elemental traps and proximity attacks to gain the advantage on the battlefield. This can be further facilitated by setting up traps before engaging in combat. One of the most intriguing gameplay additions lies in the Scenario Overlay System (or SOL). Upon restarting the game after a game over, you'll see new cutscenes in your playthrough, with more being unlocked the higher your D-ratio is. The game is very bold for locking away bits of story, as well as several small areas, demanding the player to improve and replay the game if they want to absorb everything it has to offer. Obviously this didn't sit well with everyone, but I find it very ambitious. The biggest turn-off and most beloathed feature for most people is the D-counter. Essentially, it's tied to the dragon form, which lets you destroy anything in your path, at the cost of your D-counter crawling up whenever you use it. Walking 15 steps and using the D-dash also increase it (walking much less so) and when it reaches 100%, the game is over. The idea of the win button also doubling as a ticking time bomb is so genius to me, as you really have to use it sparingly and it adds to the dreadful atmosphere.

This last section is kind of aimless since I don't have anything else to add but I just really love this game. I adore how it deviates from the rest of the series (don't take this as me dismissing the other games I love this series) and most rpgs in general. The way it oppresses you and pushes you to the brink...I took every single encounter seriously, especially the bosses and early-game fights and I'm just in awe how it made me do that. Again the cutscene direction blew my mind and made me genuinely invested in the story and as someone who values gameplay over story I find that impressive. Videogames are so good dude.

(I really like this game, and only shelved it because God Hand has taken over my life.)

Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter is most well-regarded for its unique loop that preceded similar designs in Dead Rising and FromSoftware's Souls games. At any moment during Dragon Quarter, you can reset to your last save point (using the Give Up option in the menu, then selecting SOL-Restore), which are typically placed at the beginning of dungeon sections and before bosses, or to the very beginning of the game (using the SOL-Restart), while maintaining your equipped weapons and armor, all of your skills, your money, and any items you place in a storage locker.

Most importantly, your characters "D-Counter" gets reset to whatever it was before your last save. The "D-Counter" is a percentage on your HUD that is constantly on-screen, which raises slowly as you move, but balloons in huge chunks when you activate the "D-Dive," which transforms your main character Ryu into an extremely strong and invincible dragon form. What this means is you can save at the start of the dungeon, use the D-Dive form to very easily stomp your way through the dungeon, collecting all the new skills and equipment, then use the SOL-Restore option to go back to the start of the dungeon with all those new skills and weapons but with your D-Counter reset to what it was when you saved earlier. Besides the new abilities you gained from completely clearing the dungeon, you also learn how to get around—the route to go directly to the end of the dungeon, and what enemies are absolutely required to get there. Dragon Quarter's encounters can be very difficult and item draining—enemies hit hard—so this knowledge is as important as the power ups you've found. I've played through all From's Souls games, and found this loop really familiar.

After you do the SOL-Restore, you can use the new power-ups you collected to fight your way directly to the end of the dungeon. For the initial D-Dive dungeon or boss runs, I would also set each of my characters shield skill to use the "steal" skill, which collects items, equipment, money, and, most importantly, skills, from the enemies that attack them; then on the regular run, I'd switch the shield skill to the "counter" skill or higher defense, and use the new skills to strengthen my characters. Since you can usually save right before bosses, you have as many chances as you want to steal unique items or skills they might be carrying. You can use one of your characters to profile enemies and see what items they might have; this list is updated as items are taken from them. As well, you will also find single use items that raise characters stats—physical attack strength, magic strength, and health points—and these changes carry over after SOL-Restoring.

Items and unequipped equipment that are in your inventory disappear during SOL-Restore, but in some levels you can find an Item or Weapon Locker vendor and place them there to save them. Your inventory gets reset to 5 Heal Kits, 1 Tonic, and a Save Token, and in fact you could conceivably farm these by SOL-Restoring or SOL-Restarting, placing your refreshed inventory in an item locker, then SOL-Restoring or SOL-Restarting again. If you find any "backpacks", which add more inventory slots, since the last save, these are also removed when resetting.

Dragon Quarter doesn't ever force you to SOL-Restore or SOL-Reset. You can scrape by going from encounter to encounter without ever resetting, but playing this way is miserable. I know, because I played this way for about five hours. A few hours in, I never had enough money to buy enough health items to offset the level of damage my characters were taking; as well, the damage I was doing to enemies was in the low 10s, making fights a totally unfun slog. I eventually hit a wall during an encounter with a bunch of humanoid enemies that overwhelmed me. I wasn't doing much damage, I didn't have enough health restoration items, and I didn't have any money to get more. I bit the bullet and used the SOL-Restore option to go back to the start of the game. I didn't exactly fly through the game to get back to where I was, but it was significantly easier to get there.

The game is really balanced towards using the SOL-Restore method, and when going through a section again after using it, you are also shown a new cutscenes, denoted by the SOL icon beside the Skip Scene icon in the corner. These tend to show different characters perspective, filling you in on what the supporting cast knows.

I had a good time with Dragon Quarter, and I might pick it up again sometime. I like the characters and the dreary, depressing tone; the game wears its Evangelion influence on its sleeve. However, the downside to its fascinating loop is that you have double the JRPG to playthrough, and I just don't have time in my life right now to feel comfortable spending that time on a single game that I don't completely love. However, it is absolutely worth checking out, and it's easy to see why this game clicks with people so much harder than it did for me.

I HATED this game. If others enjoy it that's obviously fine, but for me, I couldn't believe how quickly I soured on this game, as I heard good things about the Breath of Fire series. I didn't play this for more than a couple hours before I never touched this again.

Firstly, I am not a fan of dungeon crawlers. Secondly, I couldn't stand the gameplay. Limited saves too!? And worst of all, the whole idea of starting over an RPG from the beginning multiple times just to beat it is utterly ridiculous. I love my challenging games or roguelikes, such as Hades or the Soulsborne games, but this is just dumb.

Sad reality is that this was my first, and only, experience with the Breath of Fire series. I heard some of the earlier PS1 titles were fantastic, so maybe I'll go back and give those a shot someday.

Narrative: A stark departure from what most would consider a “Breath of Fire” game to be like, Dragon Quarter takes place in a dystopian future where humans are living underground after calamity struck the surface world and forced humans to retreat underneath the surface. Much of the world-building, lore and circumstances of characters are told through cutscenes seen as you traverse upwards from the underground world. Though most of the motives of secondary characters are told through cutscenes only seen through a second or more playthrough, the first playthrough itself is cohesive enough to keep you chasing to the end. The game's implementation of what essentially is a countdown to a game over gives further urgency of your mission as Ryu.

Art Direction: One of the high notes of the game, the character designers nail the and downtrodden atmosphere of the game’s setting, with many locales having industrial and dreary backdrops. Nina’s design in particular demonstrates the underground world’s draconian viewpoint of lower-class civilians with shackles on her hands and legs as well as her lack of proper clothing.

Gameplay: Though the game is considered to be more on the difficult side of JRPGs due to having a unique combat system with enemies that can 2~3 hit K.O. you, the system can be exploited to your favor and help overcome most battles with ease. Its mix of turn-based combat on a 3D realm in which your movement options using the same resource as your attacks make for a level of strategy required to succeed. Some later battles might seem a bit too brutal, especially on a first playthrough, but the game encourages you restart to carry over progress and ultimately overcome the more difficult challenges. In saying this though, you can complete the game on a first playthrough with some grinding and resource managing your consumables.

Overall: Dragon Quarter's bleak narrative and darker tone almost hit the highs that the title was going for, but the game’s production was rushed and thus some cutscenes further expanding the world’s lore and some mini-games were cut. Further clarification of some antagonistic characters’ motives would have been nice to have to further flesh out the world, but the game’s narrative and the gameplay mechanics that go in-hand with the narrative tools demonstrate a very unique game that is worth experiencing.

dragon quarter boldly relies almost entirely on mystique. one of the most cryptic rpgs i've played, it cleverly strips the formula down to its bare essentials and managed to cart me along with few moving parts - the story itself is relatively simple once you have all the puzzle pieces aligned, and the main thrust is, essentially, to climb your way from the bottom of the map to the very top in hopes of finding a world still suitable for life.

the gameplay itself is reminiscent more of strategy rpgs than it is anything previously in the breath of fire catalogue. it took some while to adjust to, as the game gives very little direction on the ins and outs of gameplay; it felt a little like learning the ropes in divinity original sin ii, which is initially overwhelming and punishing but feels satisfying the closer you get to mastering how to exploit the resources you have.

essentially, you have a knight, gunner, and mage, who also correlate to your tank, utility, and support respectively. you learn new abilities not from leveling up but from random drops and purchases through the esoteric ant colony system, which i'll touch on in a second. characters like lin have hidden combos that allow for added effects when layered properly. a lot of moves you'll find it most beneficial to skip your turn and accrue AP, especially later in the game when bosses begin blocking damage that doesn't reach a minimum amount of damage done per combo.

in essence, the experience is a dungeon-crawler with occasional checkpoints to re-up on supplies. there's a level of risk and reward to every thing you do, though; you could spend all your money right off the bat or put it in the bank to hopefully make dividends. you could also stockpile your money (or your bonus xp) if you start feeling like your run is losing steam and you're anticipating having to restart.

the game's central gimmick is lies in its d-counter, which is constantly climbing but exponentially rises when you use ryu's dragon form, which can kill any enemy in the game in just a couple hits. each time you use this, though, you can expect to expend 5-10% of the d-counter. if the d-counter reaches 100%, your game is over, and you have the option of restarting completely and beginning with the bonus xp, items you've stored, weapons, and money, returning to your last save with this option (which sounds better than it really is - you lose everything in your stock, which could potentially softlock you right before the boss rush near the end, which happened to me!), or quitting and reloading your save without any changes. the save themselves are limited, requiring tokens to redeem when you reach a save point (which are few and far between). you can choose to play fast and loose and spend things as they come or reserve all these precious resources to the end.

despite the extremity, the game never feels truly cruel. it seems to rally around its central theme, finding freedom in a hopeless situation - this is an intensely lonely game, but shines with an occasional adolescent foolhardiness. dragon quarter really could have succeeded as a comic in the mid-00s or a late night toonami limited series. its darkness isn't purely aesthetic - it's quite baked into the plot, and some rather grim things buoy the sillier instances of action - but does get at a certain angst that permeated most forms of media around the time of its creation. its dedication, in my opinion, feels gainfully earned. dragon quarter goes to great lengths to make its psychotropic plot and undercurrent of zaniness work. it also, notably, features a storytelling device that requires failure to access its full story nearly two decades before hades, and an emphasis on playing the game multiple times with only minor changes two years before drakengard and, later, nier.

you don't have to traipse far on gamefaqs or youtube to see the sheer distaste gamers at the time had for this game, which speaks to the fact that dragon quarter has few-to-no contemporaries. as ardwyw points out in their review here, dragon quarter points out many of the phony aspects of not only the breath of fire series but of rpgs in general, and feels confrontational to the expectations of the people who play them. its existence as a "misunderstood" game pairs with its maudlin, emo aesthetic all the better; it's hard to say whether it's a love letter to rpgs or a scornful satire of them because of how carefully it toes the balance between these two modes. the game is fun and each battle feels unique, yet there are many instances when the rug can be pulled out from under you and, without some preventive save scumming through emulation, you'll end up on your ass.

it's notable that, were the music not as typical of rpg fare as can be, this game would be considered a horror rpg alongside parasite eve or koudelka. it seems pretty purposeful that hitoshi sakimoto was chosen for this, as his work for games like tactics ogre, final fantasy tactics, and vagrant story up until this point really defined what a medieval fantasy rpg feels like, the type of games capcom had been making in this series up until this point. instead, dragon quarter lacks any of those adventuresome, windswept elements - it's hard, mechanical, and sci-fi. all these aspects are remixed or stripped down as if to strip the veneer of illusion that goes into making a rpg, which is really a series of crunchy, quick numerical calculations being made in real-time.

this is a unique and maverick game that conspicuously has received very little mainstream reappraisal over the years. i bought it on ebay last year after having been interested in it for a while, and it was only around $27. it's odd to me that a game that so perfectly corresponds with the recent interest in post-modern expressions of rpg formulae could go so overlooked for so long. it's an uncut gem if there ever was one, unobserved and still interred waiting to be excavated from the bottom of a bargain bin.

Half of the review is obvious thoughts on the genre of the jrpgs to give some context

"This is a tiny tale of time"
A colorful punk brushstroke in the genre "JRPG". DRAGON QUARTER (DQ) was born as a response to its own saga and its own anthology, sticking to its more classic elements but readjusting the more established elements that seem to be stylistic features of a genre. that, at the end of the day, they are just comforts;
World.
Time.
Combat.
Movement.
economy.
Drama.
Difficulty.
Trips.

Although I have always had a lot of affection for the cities of Japanese RPGs, the worlds they build seem to me like a lie, not diegetically, but as a sensation entirely. Normally these "worlds" due to their abstract nature born from 2D pixels are flat fields painted with deserts, plains, gorges, whatever you want, but their scale and ability to navigate never changes or affects, perhaps by convention, perhaps because RPGs are already too numerical and schematized to add more nuances to a navigation that, although it has aesthetic detail, is a process between combats and drama, which are also insufficient to transmit something cohesive, since the combats are usually linked to the context of the drama. In JRPGS, the characters are usually forced to travel the world as they become a kind of misunderstood fugitives for whatever reasons, they are in constant tension, sometimes pursued or in a race against time and they are supposed to be travelers, with resources and cargo. limited. curiously, the player can take all the time in the world, can go wherever he wants (with relative freedom), the combat is relaxed with enough resources and time does not advance, there is also nothing that translates or symbolizes some kind of mental or spiritual fatigue, if there are mana tonics and potions and such but that shouldn't cure stress or fear. And one thing, the protagonists, usually kids with great hearts, eager or not for adventure and wanting to discover the world, ambitious but without a clear vision of how the world works and how they want to be part of it ... Or depressed boys because Their giant and extremely cool sword weighs too much or the spikes of their hairstyles are not very perfect, whatever.

All of this will sound like obvious points, but exemplifications of some problems that lead to dissonant experiences for me, which should be an exciting and emotional adventure through a magitechnological world in which danger and joy come together and innocence gives way to Maturity ends up being a smooth and comfortable walk through a flat field where everything is static and the drama tries to deceive me, and all because JRPGs are supposed to be like that, that's the way the genre is.


Dragon Quarter (DQ) seems to be aware of this dissonant base and chooses to eliminate the "JRPG world" and its approach as it is popularly known, but sticking to some of the rules of the game.
it begins by eliminating the world, it does not exist. There are no green meadows or blue skies as far as the eye can see with a city looming around the corner, because there is not even a sky in the world that DQuarter takes place. people are forced to live in an underground world as deep as it is depressing, there are hardly any resources or space, the air is almost a precious commodity and only a dictated community order is what seems to work. It is not a world, but a succession of interconected corridors neither freedom nor space, there are no real cities or safe havens at all. In the middle of this dystopia is the protagonist, a young cop named Ryu (like all the protagonists of the BoF saga https://bof.fandom.com/wiki/Ryu) disappointed with life and living in the shadow of his friend ( cliche). During a mission he discovers that the government is experimenting with a girl (https://bof.fandom.com/wiki/Nina), he decides to rescue her and flee with her, acquiring the power to transform into a human-dragon hybrid that it becomes almost invincible, but with a high price to pay for abusing it.
With this starting point DQuarter establishes a drama accompanied by its mechanics and its formalities.
We are fleeing from a government and its army with powerful generals (bosses) crossing a world full of monsters, so taking distance between the pursuers and the obstacles seems to be the most sensible thing, the director Makoto Ikehara and his team opts to raise the difficulty and design a combat around space and the management of movement and resources, but without a board or squares, all on a proportional scale and moving away from pseudonaturalist spaces where to position correctly and wisely use the skills to efficiently attack groups of enemies and exploit improvised strategies to generate distance with us and between them is the key to survival, (combat has more complexities, but it is worth discovering them for yourself). But the most important element and that symbolizes both the urgency of time, and the deterioration of the group (those things that JRPGs tend to ignore) It's the D-Counter mechanic, which regulates the player's usage of the dragon transformation ability, penalizing and eventually punishing overuse of dragon related abilities. If the D-Counter reaches 100% before a certain event in the game, the player will receive a game over, so they can go back to the last save point or start the game again keeping all the equipment and experience, however When starting the trip again, new scenes and dialogues will appear revealing little by little, and with each defeat the truth about everything that is happening and suggesting more consistently the value of accepting defeat as opposed to those JRPGs with blue skies that seem to want to avoid let the player experience it.
DQuarter replaces joy and color for oppression and lack of natural sunlight, it is a game that replaces the simplicity of the classic turn-based combat system with a complex balance of movement, combo strings of attacks with various properties and is not afraid of being difficult or brutal, or remind you that death constantly stalks you through a HUD number. is not afraid to deliver a Cheat Code in the form of mechanics or risky narrative approaches.
It's a gutsy game in a very stagnant genre and an imperfect (lol) masterpiece, and its end, could not be anything other than a sight of a blue sky.