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.

It's been a bit since I played the original Breath of Fire, but I remember my key praises and issues. BoF2 doesn't really address a whole lot of those issues, sometimes making them worse, but it does manage to be an improvement in plenty of other ways. First and foremost, I barely remember the story of the original, and had to look up most of the characters. The writing for the first wasn't bad or anything, but I remember feeling it was very, 'by the numbers'. BoF2 actually has a pretty cool story, that was fairly original during the time of it's release. It starts as you searching for a thief to prove your friend's innocence, but flows into a fight against a religious cult attempting to rule the world. It's not terribly unique, but it does flow in an incredibly natural way. Furthermore, almost every character is given a decent chunk of the story devoted to them, which was nice because they're all pretty neat characters. Granted, they are almost entirely absent from the plot before and after their segments, but it was a solid effort regardless. The game is still incredibly grindy, worse than I remember the first being, and the encounter rate is miserable. Especially in the final dungeon, where, without casting a warding spell or using an item, you will run into a fight every 8-10 steps. Considering those fights are tough, I ended up abusing the rewind feature to secure escapes. The combat is pretty standard fare, though many of the later fights do require you to have a solid strategy going in. The final two bosses are great because they're super long and require near perfect choices. I died so much to the penultimate boss because I forgot to buy AP recovery items and couldn't use Ryu's most powerful dragon attack more than once. It was an intense fight because of this. I also really enjoyed the animation on the battle sprites, especially Nina's casting animation. But for everything I liked, there was some grind bullshit that hampered my enjoyment. The fact that I could make it significantly less tedious using rewind is a bit shit given I found all the grinding to be quite frustrating. There's an island specifically dedicated to grinding experience, and the trick is to use Bow's special move which has the potential to one-shot everything. On Switch you can just rewind to when you were selecting moves and keep doing this until you land a killing blow. I have no idea how many hours this saved me. Also, the translation is an absolute embarrassment. The script is translated so conservatively that many lines read as if they were written by children. It can be funny at times, but given the story is actually interesting, it sucks to see how they handled dialogue. 3/6

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.

Me enamore del juego, tiene una increible historia que ni Breath of Fire 1 y 3 tuvieron, ademas que se conecta con el primer juego, haciendolo aun mas creible su misma historia.

La banda sonora es magistral, digna de Capcom, los personajes son super carismaticos y te encariñas facilmente con ellos, ademas el concepto de tener tu propia ciudad, que incluso puede volar y puedes dejarla en casi cualquier lugar, ademas de puedes agregarle INN, tiendas y muchas otras cosas a tu ciudad, es simplemente algo que yo, con todos los JRPG clasicos que habia jugado nunca habia visto algo similar.

En tema de jugabilidad no es el mejor ni mucho menos, hay otros Rpg que lo superan en este aspecto por mucho, pero no es para nada malo su sistema jugable, ademas de que cada pelea te deleita con un hermoso pixel art, lo unico malo que le veria seria los encuentros random tan seguidos, pero fuera de eso todo esta genial, la cantidad de hechizos, el sistema de chamanes que tambien es genial, absolutamente un juego super recomendado y uno de los mejores JRPG de la Snes

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.

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?

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.

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.