Breath of Fire, at its core, is a classic SNES JRPG with a charming art style and a fun dragon transformation system. However, its story feels a bit generic, the combat gets repetitive, and the world can feel pretty empty at times. If you're a fan of retro RPGs with a nostalgic itch, it's still enjoyable, but newcomers to the genre might find it a bit dated.
I love this game, grew up with it, but I can't justify giving it a high score. The game can be frustratingly cryptic at times, can overstay its welcome both with individual story beats and overall, and has an OK story even with a retranslation patch.
With that said, the retranslation made some moments actually land, and overall I think this game is best experienced as an anime series where each play session and plot beat is like an episode - especially late game, some adventures can feel quite episodic.
Gameplay is a classic turn-based RPG affair, quite fun - AND PARTY MEMBER SWITCHING MID-COMBAT YAY. I think most people would agree this gets majorly one upped by its sequel.
With that said, the retranslation made some moments actually land, and overall I think this game is best experienced as an anime series where each play session and plot beat is like an episode - especially late game, some adventures can feel quite episodic.
Gameplay is a classic turn-based RPG affair, quite fun - AND PARTY MEMBER SWITCHING MID-COMBAT YAY. I think most people would agree this gets majorly one upped by its sequel.
Unplayable. I despise this game. I've written a full essay on why it sucks but the summary is - vile encounter rate, uninteresting, unambitious plot, and lack of advanced mechanics. It's so bland. Strong points are the graphics and enemy design. It gets a fair amount of leeway just from being so early in the history of video games, but seriously it is not playable without an emulator turning off random encounters
The most basic gameplay and story so it didn’t hook me. It was kinda cool playing a snes jrpg again but it was very apparent that it was not final fantasy lol
Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Megami Tensei. Not a single one of these franchises had a first game that aged well by today's standards, or even the standards of people who enjoy retro games. However, through the power of sheer ambition, these franchises would continue to learn, advance, and evolve forward into really solid games, paving the way for other companies to give their shot at the money bin that is their very own RPG franchise. At first, these other companies would use Dragon Quest 1 as the basis. But now that we're a few years into the SNES era, you'd hope to god that the influence would come from the more mechanically complex RPG's that have come out since 1986 passed. Dragon Quest V, FF4, maybe Shin Megami Tensei, hell, maybe get crazy and do something drastically different from all the other RPG's?
Here comes Capcom, copying the homework of Dragon Quest 1 in the year of 1993. God damn it.
Breath of Fire's complexity can be summed up like this: You can defeat the final boss by using auto-battle. In fact, the game's primary mechanic, being able to fuse and transform into more powerful creatures actively encourages you to mash the attack button. You know how in actual interesting RPG's, you get to summon powerful creatures but can only use them for a limited time? Right, so barely such a limitation is present here. Use the transformation spell once, and they persist across battles for near-infinite periods of time, decimating everything in their path. And because these transformations contain zero spells or special moves, all that there is to do is attack, attack, attack. Stock up on the surprisingly cheap full-heal items while you're at it, which the transformed creatures CAN use also, and thus you have won the game.
As much of a comedy as it is to say that "an RPG gets better 10 hours in," I've legitimately found that to be the case with some of them. So, having Breath of Fire start off as monotonous as it did, I gave it the benefit of the doubt and patiently waited until I unlocked every remaining party member. Not only did the combat never get more engaging, damage-inducing spells commit the cardinal sin of having fixed damage, and I honestly still can't tell if there were any elemental weaknesses in here. This is turn-based combat at its simplest, mechanically functional, but otherwise terribly disappointing in how every boss and enemy encounter is just begging you to use the most obvious strategy available.
The most ironic part of it all is that by the 20-hour mark, I was reminiscing to get back to the difficulty of the first 10 hours, where in the very least, there were less party members, and taking damage felt a little more threatening. There were also far less moments back then where I felt that the game was constantly trying to waste as much of my time as possible.
And I'm not talking about the encounter rates, though rest assured they're pretty awful, and the lack of a run button does not help. I'm talking about Breath of Fire's obsession with backtracking. First couple dungeons have no shortcuts back to the exit for example, so you gotta trek all the way back and fight more enemies along the way. I especially loved that one dungeon where you complete it to advance the plot, head back to a town, and then you're told to go through that exact same dungeon one more time.
The FETCH QUESTS. My god, the 2nd half of this game especially loves to interrupt your progress to the next area by telling you to go back to 2, 3, maybe 4 of the previous towns to get this item, to give to that NPC, to trade for another item. Actually, sometimes it doesn't tell you where the hell to backtrack to at all, I guess you have to either rely on your photographic memory regarding what that one NPC in that one town said, or look up a guide instead. These moments are rife in the 2nd half, making for some real blatant padding.
I will never forget the audacity of the backtracking required for the town of Scande. You head over there, elevator is broken. Hope you remembered that one NPC in that one town, 'cause you gotta talk to them to receive the parts required to fix the elevator. However, these parts are also broken, so go to this other town first, and fix the parts up. Now, head back to Scande. Parts are in place, elevator's working.
You proceed to have a slow, climatic ascent up the ominous tower via two seperate elevators, almost reaching the peak of the sky. Alright, here we go, you're inside this final-ass looking dungeon. Wait, why is this NPC blocking your way? "Hey, you should go back to this town and get the item first." Okay, uh, nevermind, guess I'm not gonna go through this dungeon yet?? You then have a very anticlimatic, and equally slow descent DOWN the elevators you just ascended, so you can do your 2nd fetch quest in a row in this random-ass town, with an item hidden behind a random-ass tree, then, you head back to Scande, slowly ascend the elevators AGAIN, and only THEN, you feel like you're making progress instead of aging 10 fucking years of your life.
As if the gameplay and combat design wasn't boring enough, the story isn't even there to keep you going. I mean, for starters, dragons? That's the best we could come up with as far general story theming and worldbuilding? It certainly doesn't help in making Breath of Fire stand out amongst the competition, but to be fair, the execution of such a story could've worked if given a better sense of dramatic scale.
Dramatic though, this is not, because presumably due to the limitations of the cartridge - further compounded by the english language not being as efficient in letter usage - Breath of Fire, at most, can only spare two lines of dialogue for every major story beat beyond the intro. Characters clearly meant to be expressing some form of emotion or excitement have a criminal lack of exclamation points or elllipses during many a scenes, making them sound like stiff, robotic husks reading off a script with only 2 hours of sleep under their belt. Bizarrely, the game often spared a considerably larger amount of dialog for its attempts at comedic scenes instead, and I think it might have mixed up its priorites in that way. This just isn't selling the epic fantasy adventure vibe at all, it feels like a phone-in rushing me from one scene to another, and yet still manages to get the game to clock in at 30 hours somehow.
The one real thing that Breath of Fire has going for it, is its presentation value, and I imagine it'd sucker in a lot of people back in the day just based off seeing some of its screenshots. The Capcom art and sound team are doing their best with what they've got, which isn't anything particularly imaginitive, but in the very least, looks quite nice and detailed, up to par if not beyond franchises like Final Fantasy. The soundtrack has multiple themes for the overworld and battles, that will change as the story progresses, some much appreciated variety. Most of it was composed by Yasuaki Fujita, the Mega Man 3 fellow, if you liked that soundtrack. Plus, there's even one song by Yoko Shimomura, shortly before she left for Squaresoft.
I could also give honorable mentions to the simple, but effective hunting mechanic this game has, where animals can be hunted down on the overworld with precise aiming, while ensuring you don't wander around too much in fear of triggering a random encounter and despawning the animals off the map as a result. It's an interesting little risk/reward system, where you decide how many walked tiles you can get away with to position yourself in front of the animal accordingly, before trying to take the shot and hoping that the animal hasn't wandered off by then.
All around though, I've been wondering about this game from the perspective of a japanese '93 kid. Suppose my mom's gonna buy me a game for Christmas, and I want an RPG because I want something fun that'll last me months. By the holidays of '93, some of the recent releases I have to choose from are Final Fantasy 5, Secret of Mana, Phantasy Star IV, oh hey, two remakes of Dragon Quest I & II just came out. That's quite a platter of choice from some fairly established RPG franchises. What does Breath of Fire have to offer that the rest of these cannot? Good graphics? Ooh, if that would be my main reason for buying Breath of Fire, then I'd feel very sorry for the hypothetical '93 me. But, you gotta hand it to them, in spite of everything else about the game being dull as hell, they would at least get you in that one department, and it's unlikely hypothetical '93 kid me would care. Well played, Capcom.
I won't judge the entirety of the Breath of Fire franchise based on just its first entry. As stated at the beginning, every influence it took from had its bad day as well. With that said, I'll excuse future Breath of Fire games for having no story depth, but they seriously need to step it up in terms of gameplay. I'd be hard-pressed to tell you to play this first game, but if you absolutely must, a romhack with a run button and double EXP gain would be highly recommended. Interestingly, I heard of a romhack called War of the Goddess, which has the aforementioned QoL changes, + a rewritten script. It's not intended to be a more faithful localization, but rather, a way of making the game's stiff script more entertaining and interesting to read, and I'm seeing a notable amount of good reviews surrounding it. If you're not a total purist, enhancing this game in any way possible would be in your favor, as you're in for a much duller experience otherwise.
Here's to hoping that Breath of Fire was sent off to mobile hell for no good reason, rather than because every other entry was just like this one.
Here comes Capcom, copying the homework of Dragon Quest 1 in the year of 1993. God damn it.
Breath of Fire's complexity can be summed up like this: You can defeat the final boss by using auto-battle. In fact, the game's primary mechanic, being able to fuse and transform into more powerful creatures actively encourages you to mash the attack button. You know how in actual interesting RPG's, you get to summon powerful creatures but can only use them for a limited time? Right, so barely such a limitation is present here. Use the transformation spell once, and they persist across battles for near-infinite periods of time, decimating everything in their path. And because these transformations contain zero spells or special moves, all that there is to do is attack, attack, attack. Stock up on the surprisingly cheap full-heal items while you're at it, which the transformed creatures CAN use also, and thus you have won the game.
As much of a comedy as it is to say that "an RPG gets better 10 hours in," I've legitimately found that to be the case with some of them. So, having Breath of Fire start off as monotonous as it did, I gave it the benefit of the doubt and patiently waited until I unlocked every remaining party member. Not only did the combat never get more engaging, damage-inducing spells commit the cardinal sin of having fixed damage, and I honestly still can't tell if there were any elemental weaknesses in here. This is turn-based combat at its simplest, mechanically functional, but otherwise terribly disappointing in how every boss and enemy encounter is just begging you to use the most obvious strategy available.
The most ironic part of it all is that by the 20-hour mark, I was reminiscing to get back to the difficulty of the first 10 hours, where in the very least, there were less party members, and taking damage felt a little more threatening. There were also far less moments back then where I felt that the game was constantly trying to waste as much of my time as possible.
And I'm not talking about the encounter rates, though rest assured they're pretty awful, and the lack of a run button does not help. I'm talking about Breath of Fire's obsession with backtracking. First couple dungeons have no shortcuts back to the exit for example, so you gotta trek all the way back and fight more enemies along the way. I especially loved that one dungeon where you complete it to advance the plot, head back to a town, and then you're told to go through that exact same dungeon one more time.
The FETCH QUESTS. My god, the 2nd half of this game especially loves to interrupt your progress to the next area by telling you to go back to 2, 3, maybe 4 of the previous towns to get this item, to give to that NPC, to trade for another item. Actually, sometimes it doesn't tell you where the hell to backtrack to at all, I guess you have to either rely on your photographic memory regarding what that one NPC in that one town said, or look up a guide instead. These moments are rife in the 2nd half, making for some real blatant padding.
I will never forget the audacity of the backtracking required for the town of Scande. You head over there, elevator is broken. Hope you remembered that one NPC in that one town, 'cause you gotta talk to them to receive the parts required to fix the elevator. However, these parts are also broken, so go to this other town first, and fix the parts up. Now, head back to Scande. Parts are in place, elevator's working.
You proceed to have a slow, climatic ascent up the ominous tower via two seperate elevators, almost reaching the peak of the sky. Alright, here we go, you're inside this final-ass looking dungeon. Wait, why is this NPC blocking your way? "Hey, you should go back to this town and get the item first." Okay, uh, nevermind, guess I'm not gonna go through this dungeon yet?? You then have a very anticlimatic, and equally slow descent DOWN the elevators you just ascended, so you can do your 2nd fetch quest in a row in this random-ass town, with an item hidden behind a random-ass tree, then, you head back to Scande, slowly ascend the elevators AGAIN, and only THEN, you feel like you're making progress instead of aging 10 fucking years of your life.
As if the gameplay and combat design wasn't boring enough, the story isn't even there to keep you going. I mean, for starters, dragons? That's the best we could come up with as far general story theming and worldbuilding? It certainly doesn't help in making Breath of Fire stand out amongst the competition, but to be fair, the execution of such a story could've worked if given a better sense of dramatic scale.
Dramatic though, this is not, because presumably due to the limitations of the cartridge - further compounded by the english language not being as efficient in letter usage - Breath of Fire, at most, can only spare two lines of dialogue for every major story beat beyond the intro. Characters clearly meant to be expressing some form of emotion or excitement have a criminal lack of exclamation points or elllipses during many a scenes, making them sound like stiff, robotic husks reading off a script with only 2 hours of sleep under their belt. Bizarrely, the game often spared a considerably larger amount of dialog for its attempts at comedic scenes instead, and I think it might have mixed up its priorites in that way. This just isn't selling the epic fantasy adventure vibe at all, it feels like a phone-in rushing me from one scene to another, and yet still manages to get the game to clock in at 30 hours somehow.
The one real thing that Breath of Fire has going for it, is its presentation value, and I imagine it'd sucker in a lot of people back in the day just based off seeing some of its screenshots. The Capcom art and sound team are doing their best with what they've got, which isn't anything particularly imaginitive, but in the very least, looks quite nice and detailed, up to par if not beyond franchises like Final Fantasy. The soundtrack has multiple themes for the overworld and battles, that will change as the story progresses, some much appreciated variety. Most of it was composed by Yasuaki Fujita, the Mega Man 3 fellow, if you liked that soundtrack. Plus, there's even one song by Yoko Shimomura, shortly before she left for Squaresoft.
I could also give honorable mentions to the simple, but effective hunting mechanic this game has, where animals can be hunted down on the overworld with precise aiming, while ensuring you don't wander around too much in fear of triggering a random encounter and despawning the animals off the map as a result. It's an interesting little risk/reward system, where you decide how many walked tiles you can get away with to position yourself in front of the animal accordingly, before trying to take the shot and hoping that the animal hasn't wandered off by then.
All around though, I've been wondering about this game from the perspective of a japanese '93 kid. Suppose my mom's gonna buy me a game for Christmas, and I want an RPG because I want something fun that'll last me months. By the holidays of '93, some of the recent releases I have to choose from are Final Fantasy 5, Secret of Mana, Phantasy Star IV, oh hey, two remakes of Dragon Quest I & II just came out. That's quite a platter of choice from some fairly established RPG franchises. What does Breath of Fire have to offer that the rest of these cannot? Good graphics? Ooh, if that would be my main reason for buying Breath of Fire, then I'd feel very sorry for the hypothetical '93 me. But, you gotta hand it to them, in spite of everything else about the game being dull as hell, they would at least get you in that one department, and it's unlikely hypothetical '93 kid me would care. Well played, Capcom.
I won't judge the entirety of the Breath of Fire franchise based on just its first entry. As stated at the beginning, every influence it took from had its bad day as well. With that said, I'll excuse future Breath of Fire games for having no story depth, but they seriously need to step it up in terms of gameplay. I'd be hard-pressed to tell you to play this first game, but if you absolutely must, a romhack with a run button and double EXP gain would be highly recommended. Interestingly, I heard of a romhack called War of the Goddess, which has the aforementioned QoL changes, + a rewritten script. It's not intended to be a more faithful localization, but rather, a way of making the game's stiff script more entertaining and interesting to read, and I'm seeing a notable amount of good reviews surrounding it. If you're not a total purist, enhancing this game in any way possible would be in your favor, as you're in for a much duller experience otherwise.
Here's to hoping that Breath of Fire was sent off to mobile hell for no good reason, rather than because every other entry was just like this one.
This game is really good when you look past how slow and archaic it is, a lot of good aspects but it desperately needs a remake
About what I'd expect from first entry in a JRPG series. Bog standard story, nothing too exciting going on. Did use a patch to improve the translation and deal with the notoriously high encounter rate in the game. It does have some features that are way ahead of what you'd expect in the genre for the time such as swapping party members in battle and not losing progress on death. Those were pleasant surprises. Also a lot of the OST is from the Mega Man 3 guy which is a plus.
My favorite one in the series.
I tried. I really did. I got to the underwater area and realized I was not having fun whatsoever.
Usually with a game this old I can look at it and try to say "I'm sure this game was good when it came out, so I'll just power through it using that kind of POV..." but there's just so much that turns me off of Breath of Fire. I can assuredly say this game would have sucked ass to me had I played it as a young child.
Spritework and music were good I guess!
Usually with a game this old I can look at it and try to say "I'm sure this game was good when it came out, so I'll just power through it using that kind of POV..." but there's just so much that turns me off of Breath of Fire. I can assuredly say this game would have sucked ass to me had I played it as a young child.
Spritework and music were good I guess!
A game with a lot of good ideas but medium to poor execution. It suffers from common problems from old RPGs (simplified dialogues, a bit too slow, lots of random encounters, random dialogues from random NPCs being necessary to progress the history, and so on).
I hope CAPCOM remakes this game one day to fix these problems. For now, maybe the best way to play is to go with one of the hacks available for the SNES version.
I hope CAPCOM remakes this game one day to fix these problems. For now, maybe the best way to play is to go with one of the hacks available for the SNES version.
Gameplay péssima e datada até para os jogos da época, além de ter a proeza em ter uma escrita pior que kimetsu, tedio, tedio, tedio, tedio, tedio, tedio tedio, este jogo faz persona 1 virá uma obra de arte em narrativa e personagens, como conseguiram tal proeza?
Wow! This game had a lot of fantastic ideas and concepts! It was bogged down with way, way, way too many fetch quests. It was really cool though. Turning into a dragon was awesome.
Not a bad game for Capcom's first venture into the genre. Here are some of its main redeemable qualities (with their caveats):
+ Character design: Unique and memorable characters, some of them will see future iterations in the following games and remain loved to this day for their design and personalities.
- Con: There isn't much character development.
+ Music: A very cool soundtrack. The main theme is awesome and you'll hear it a lot (it's in the overwold), it's a staple of the series. Unlike other RPGs, the best songs here are in towns, which is where you'll spend a big part of your time as well.
- Con: Dungeon songs are boring, and become annoying quickly. And you'll also spend a lot of time in these.
+ Abilities: Each character has their own unique abilities they can use either in the overworld or in dungeons/towns. Like fishing, hitting trees, and so on. Some of them allow you to find secrets hidden around the world, allowing for some interesting exploration.
- Con: Sadly, the exploration part isn't used to the fullest. Sometimes you're just forced to use a particular ability. And some abilities are used once or twice and then completely forgotten for the rest of the game (I'm looking at you big fish underwater ability)
---
Other problems with this game are:
- Story: Really poor and basic "stop the main villain from conquering the world" kind of story. There is some world building to what will become a bigger story later in the series though.
- THE GAME IS GRINDY: If you're gonna play on emulator I strongly recommend using a 2x experience patch. Otherwise you'll meet an extremely unbalanced grind factor where you'll have to circle around the dungeons for hours to be able to beat the bosses.
- Translation: I think Ted Woolsy just did the best he could with some horrible limitations. A lot of weird dialogue, mistakes and shortened text. Specially annoying are the shortened item names, you can't really tell what anything does in this game. For this I recommend the "War of the Goddess" sort-of-retranslation patch (it's based on Woolsy's script but improved).
---
I recommend playing this game first if you wanna get into the series. It'll be hard to go back to this game after you've played the 2nd one, which improves upon basically everything, and fixes most of these cons. It'll also make that experience so much better after you've already seen some of the characters and the world built in this first game.
+ Character design: Unique and memorable characters, some of them will see future iterations in the following games and remain loved to this day for their design and personalities.
- Con: There isn't much character development.
+ Music: A very cool soundtrack. The main theme is awesome and you'll hear it a lot (it's in the overwold), it's a staple of the series. Unlike other RPGs, the best songs here are in towns, which is where you'll spend a big part of your time as well.
- Con: Dungeon songs are boring, and become annoying quickly. And you'll also spend a lot of time in these.
+ Abilities: Each character has their own unique abilities they can use either in the overworld or in dungeons/towns. Like fishing, hitting trees, and so on. Some of them allow you to find secrets hidden around the world, allowing for some interesting exploration.
- Con: Sadly, the exploration part isn't used to the fullest. Sometimes you're just forced to use a particular ability. And some abilities are used once or twice and then completely forgotten for the rest of the game (I'm looking at you big fish underwater ability)
---
Other problems with this game are:
- Story: Really poor and basic "stop the main villain from conquering the world" kind of story. There is some world building to what will become a bigger story later in the series though.
- THE GAME IS GRINDY: If you're gonna play on emulator I strongly recommend using a 2x experience patch. Otherwise you'll meet an extremely unbalanced grind factor where you'll have to circle around the dungeons for hours to be able to beat the bosses.
- Translation: I think Ted Woolsy just did the best he could with some horrible limitations. A lot of weird dialogue, mistakes and shortened text. Specially annoying are the shortened item names, you can't really tell what anything does in this game. For this I recommend the "War of the Goddess" sort-of-retranslation patch (it's based on Woolsy's script but improved).
---
I recommend playing this game first if you wanna get into the series. It'll be hard to go back to this game after you've played the 2nd one, which improves upon basically everything, and fixes most of these cons. It'll also make that experience so much better after you've already seen some of the characters and the world built in this first game.
Grinding in the GBA version isn't that bad and you get so overpowered with unlockable forms that you can steam roll things. I thought it was decent time overall!
This sucks. Let's talk about it because it sucks.
There's no writing. I think there are moments that could constitute as writing, but there is a distinct lack of writing.
The music is ok. the dungeon music is not ok you will hear it every day for your life.
I did not see Ox have his kid even though the game said he was gonna have a kid. Ox saved the game as he was so manly and alpha male.
If this came out as a release for the NES it would be a 5/10, but the plot twist is you could be playing fucking Super Mario All Stars but for christmas you got this shit. I'm so sorry.
You can beat 90% of fights through autobattle.
Speedup required
I sold a key item on accident btw so don't do that. 8202DEA4 015F
I made this code to get the Fife back after I sold it. uhm. here it is. GBA version btw.
The late-game dungeons are kinda like bad. they have annoying mazes and take 10 years and are gimmicky and you should not play this game.
it has no pacing because everything is blocked behind key items. and those key items are obtained through walking to other towns and talking to people.
please play literally any other snes rpg or nes rpg or basically anything.
soldier 2 is a real g he took 1.3 million exp to level up which is ironic due to the fact that you will lose 1.3 million brain cells while playing the game.
fuck you breath of fire 1
There's no writing. I think there are moments that could constitute as writing, but there is a distinct lack of writing.
The music is ok. the dungeon music is not ok you will hear it every day for your life.
I did not see Ox have his kid even though the game said he was gonna have a kid. Ox saved the game as he was so manly and alpha male.
If this came out as a release for the NES it would be a 5/10, but the plot twist is you could be playing fucking Super Mario All Stars but for christmas you got this shit. I'm so sorry.
You can beat 90% of fights through autobattle.
Speedup required
I sold a key item on accident btw so don't do that. 8202DEA4 015F
I made this code to get the Fife back after I sold it. uhm. here it is. GBA version btw.
The late-game dungeons are kinda like bad. they have annoying mazes and take 10 years and are gimmicky and you should not play this game.
it has no pacing because everything is blocked behind key items. and those key items are obtained through walking to other towns and talking to people.
please play literally any other snes rpg or nes rpg or basically anything.
soldier 2 is a real g he took 1.3 million exp to level up which is ironic due to the fact that you will lose 1.3 million brain cells while playing the game.
fuck you breath of fire 1
There's a lot of SNES JRPG tropes that are manifested to the extreme here. The plot can get way too fantastical and some story beats feel like filler. Combat isn't very exciting and there's not a lot of quality of life features. But there's some beautiful spritework and nice music. Not a bad game for sure but I am left wanting more.
I was happy to finally try this on the Nintendo Switch Online collection. Great classic SNES RPG-ing that I always long for. Has some difficulty spikes that you just have to grind through (as was not uncommon in these early days), and maybe goes on a little too long. But still a very satisfying turn-based RPG
While Breath of Fire 2 was a game I had as a kid, the first game is something I'd never tried before. For this month's TR theme of Capcom/Konami games that aren't action games, I was thinking of playing the third game in the series, but I decided to finally get the first game under my belt first before going yet further into the series. It took me about 30-ish hours to beat the Japanese version of the game with the good ending on the Switch Online's Super Famicom service, and while I did use save states and rewinds, it was largely just for saving time to avoid needing to reclimb towers just because I thought an escape window was a door to another room XP
The game starts with the main character, Ryuu, being spoken words of prophecy in a dream only to wake up to his home being on fire and his village under attack by the Dark Dragon Army. His sister turns all the other villagers of the Light Dragon clan (including him) to stone in order to save them from the flames, and sacrifices herself to the commanding general of the Dark Dragon Army, Judas. Ryu, ever the silent protagonist, sets out at the wishes of his village's elders to avenge his sister's sacrifice and to save the world from the clutches of Dark Dragon Army and their emperor Zorgon.
The story is overall very standard and nothing very impressive for 1993. I picked the Japanese version of the game after spending an hour or so with both that and the English version and finding that the Japanese version had more entertainingly written dialogue, but it's still very much "on an adventure to save the world" fare. The fairly large cast of 8 characters (including Ryu) don't have a ton of character between them, with most of the lines being split between Nina, Danku (Karn, in English) and Deis (Blue, in English). The most interesting thing in the story to me was how much of it I could see as early echoes of what would become Breath of Fire 2's much better done character arcs. Karn would be developed into Katt, Ox into Rand, and Gobi into Jean were the most obvious of those. BoF1's story is humorous and generally quite light, which doesn't make it bad, per se, but it does result in fairly unsatisfying set dressing for what ends up being a fairly long game.
The mechanics are fairly simple, even for a JPRG of this era. Characters have normal attacks as well as spells, and that's just about it. Karn has some cool transformation spells he can learn from secret move tutors (they're what would influence the Shaman transformations in BoF2), and Ryu's dragon transformations work a bit differently than they do in the sequel, but there's really not a ton of variety here. BoF1 is quite an unambitious game narratively, and that extends to the mechanics of fighting as well.
The combat itself isn't really well polished, either. The random encounter rate is far too high, and the only saving grace is that most combats can be fairly painlessly solved with just normal attacks, and you also have an auto-attack button you can set that to work with. The bosses aren't really all that powerful either. Especially if you go for the good ending and get Ryu's ultimate dragon form, even the final bosses of the game are pushovers, with the only really tough boss I faced being a big green fishy guy right before you get your dragon forms. Ryu's dragon forms are boss killing machines, but even more than that, it just seemed like my party was always very powerful compared to just about everything I was fighting. It makes the game drag on even more on top of the already fairly meh-writing, and that's before we even mention the poor signposting that plagues this game's pacing as well.
The presentation in the game is quite nice, thankfully. A good portion of the music is pretty forgettable, but a lot of it is pretty darn good, especially the second main battle theme and several of the later town themes. The sprites are also very big and pretty. Breath of Fire 2 has a lot of really pretty big sprites in its isometric battle layouts, and that is something its predecessor doesn't slack on either. In a world where FFV was out but FFVI wasn't yet, BoF1's graphics still manage to hold their own on the SNES despite Capcom's relative unfamiliarity with the RPG genre.
As far as differences between the English and Japanese versions of the game, there aren't really many of note, ultimately. While the character of the dialogue is more entertaining in Japanese, I don't think the actual content of the story is that meaningfully different (other than foreshadowing the final twist a bit more). There are some character name changes, of course, and the art direction of Karn's Japanese counterpart is a prettttty racist black stereotype (the grey skinned, big lipped clan of people whose proficiencies are stealing and disguise was proooobably a good thing to remove in localization ^^;), other than that, things are more or less the same. I saw some claims online of a couple of balance changes around how often enemies can inflict status effects, but I personally experienced none of that. At any rate, I wouldn't say the game particularly needs a retranslation to the degree that BoF2 certainly deserves.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. BoF1's biggest sins ultimately just mean its a bit boring. While I personally like it better than something like FFIV that I played last year, I think a lot of FFIV's faults are a result of the reckless ambition in which it was crafted. BoF1 is a very unambitious game, and that makes for a colorful yet not terribly memorable experience. It's not a bad game by any means, but even among the RPGs just on the SNES, many people will likely find it difficult to stay focused enough with to finish it.
The game starts with the main character, Ryuu, being spoken words of prophecy in a dream only to wake up to his home being on fire and his village under attack by the Dark Dragon Army. His sister turns all the other villagers of the Light Dragon clan (including him) to stone in order to save them from the flames, and sacrifices herself to the commanding general of the Dark Dragon Army, Judas. Ryu, ever the silent protagonist, sets out at the wishes of his village's elders to avenge his sister's sacrifice and to save the world from the clutches of Dark Dragon Army and their emperor Zorgon.
The story is overall very standard and nothing very impressive for 1993. I picked the Japanese version of the game after spending an hour or so with both that and the English version and finding that the Japanese version had more entertainingly written dialogue, but it's still very much "on an adventure to save the world" fare. The fairly large cast of 8 characters (including Ryu) don't have a ton of character between them, with most of the lines being split between Nina, Danku (Karn, in English) and Deis (Blue, in English). The most interesting thing in the story to me was how much of it I could see as early echoes of what would become Breath of Fire 2's much better done character arcs. Karn would be developed into Katt, Ox into Rand, and Gobi into Jean were the most obvious of those. BoF1's story is humorous and generally quite light, which doesn't make it bad, per se, but it does result in fairly unsatisfying set dressing for what ends up being a fairly long game.
The mechanics are fairly simple, even for a JPRG of this era. Characters have normal attacks as well as spells, and that's just about it. Karn has some cool transformation spells he can learn from secret move tutors (they're what would influence the Shaman transformations in BoF2), and Ryu's dragon transformations work a bit differently than they do in the sequel, but there's really not a ton of variety here. BoF1 is quite an unambitious game narratively, and that extends to the mechanics of fighting as well.
The combat itself isn't really well polished, either. The random encounter rate is far too high, and the only saving grace is that most combats can be fairly painlessly solved with just normal attacks, and you also have an auto-attack button you can set that to work with. The bosses aren't really all that powerful either. Especially if you go for the good ending and get Ryu's ultimate dragon form, even the final bosses of the game are pushovers, with the only really tough boss I faced being a big green fishy guy right before you get your dragon forms. Ryu's dragon forms are boss killing machines, but even more than that, it just seemed like my party was always very powerful compared to just about everything I was fighting. It makes the game drag on even more on top of the already fairly meh-writing, and that's before we even mention the poor signposting that plagues this game's pacing as well.
The presentation in the game is quite nice, thankfully. A good portion of the music is pretty forgettable, but a lot of it is pretty darn good, especially the second main battle theme and several of the later town themes. The sprites are also very big and pretty. Breath of Fire 2 has a lot of really pretty big sprites in its isometric battle layouts, and that is something its predecessor doesn't slack on either. In a world where FFV was out but FFVI wasn't yet, BoF1's graphics still manage to hold their own on the SNES despite Capcom's relative unfamiliarity with the RPG genre.
As far as differences between the English and Japanese versions of the game, there aren't really many of note, ultimately. While the character of the dialogue is more entertaining in Japanese, I don't think the actual content of the story is that meaningfully different (other than foreshadowing the final twist a bit more). There are some character name changes, of course, and the art direction of Karn's Japanese counterpart is a prettttty racist black stereotype (the grey skinned, big lipped clan of people whose proficiencies are stealing and disguise was proooobably a good thing to remove in localization ^^;), other than that, things are more or less the same. I saw some claims online of a couple of balance changes around how often enemies can inflict status effects, but I personally experienced none of that. At any rate, I wouldn't say the game particularly needs a retranslation to the degree that BoF2 certainly deserves.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. BoF1's biggest sins ultimately just mean its a bit boring. While I personally like it better than something like FFIV that I played last year, I think a lot of FFIV's faults are a result of the reckless ambition in which it was crafted. BoF1 is a very unambitious game, and that makes for a colorful yet not terribly memorable experience. It's not a bad game by any means, but even among the RPGs just on the SNES, many people will likely find it difficult to stay focused enough with to finish it.
Well, Square Enix has FF and DQ (aka the most influential JRPGs series of all times), Konami has Suikoden and so we finally go with Capcom with this.
While in 1993 we already got plenty of more interesting RPGs (FF V was released one year prior for crying out loud), this one doesn't really do anything bad or outstanding: it does its job quite alright: an alright combat system, an alright artstyle, great charming graphics, an alright soundtracl.
So, yep: it's overall a pretty alright game.
While in 1993 we already got plenty of more interesting RPGs (FF V was released one year prior for crying out loud), this one doesn't really do anything bad or outstanding: it does its job quite alright: an alright combat system, an alright artstyle, great charming graphics, an alright soundtracl.
So, yep: it's overall a pretty alright game.
nice basic rpg. stings a little if you think about ff4 but this was still super early and the soundtrack is pretty good in a capcom kind of way
Bem, de início fui curtindo, mas com tempo foi ficando maçante, a história é boa mas achei a narrativa e as jogabilidades bem chatinhas e isso pesou pra mim, pouca variação de trilha sonora também...
breath of fire is a good series. the first one is kinda basic but it started everything!
One day I'll power through this with some cheat codes on to speed it up or something.
It's Dragon Quest but worse.
Didn't play for long. Random encounters and a dull story. The combat system seems basic.
Didn't play for all that long. Perfectly generic in most ways. Combat is unsophisticated. Suffers from Walkthrough Syndrome. All this can be explained by it being pretty old. It may have been more compelling at the time of release but there is no particular reason to go back and play it today.
A very cryptic JRPG that requires a guide, but enjoyable once your characters really start to level up.
Perfectly fine game that is a fairly logical iteration on the effects of Final Fantasy IV for the genre. Gameplay is fine, plot is mostly fine albeit poorly translated. It's a perfectly competent start to the series that only sometimes has kernals of ideas the later games would expand upon.
LOS AÑOS LE HAN AFECTADO DEMASIADO
En su día probablemente funcionase al ser de los primeros JRPGs de la consola, pero a día de hoy jugar al primer Breath of Fire equivale a jugar uno de esos JRPG de la NES que simplemente consistía en aventura, mazmorras y combate por turnos.
Toda la historia del juego es una lista entera de clichés; guerreros de luz y guerreros de oscuridad, imperio maligno que hace cosas malas, aldea del prota arrasada, personaje importante del prota secuestrado y demás personajes afectados por el imperio que también quieren luchar y se unen al prota por un objetivo común.
FFII llevó el concepto de la lucha por el imperio a un contexto más interesante 5 años antes de este y no hay giros de trama interesantes como se hizo años después en The Legend of Dragoon.
Si cualquier jugador de JRPGs piensa en los tópicos del género cada vez que estos ocurren en los actuales, esto es como si se hubiese hecho un juego con todos y cada uno de esos tópicos pero con la salvedad de usar animales antropomórficos como personajes principales.
En su día probablemente funcionase al ser de los primeros JRPGs de la consola, pero a día de hoy jugar al primer Breath of Fire equivale a jugar uno de esos JRPG de la NES que simplemente consistía en aventura, mazmorras y combate por turnos.
Toda la historia del juego es una lista entera de clichés; guerreros de luz y guerreros de oscuridad, imperio maligno que hace cosas malas, aldea del prota arrasada, personaje importante del prota secuestrado y demás personajes afectados por el imperio que también quieren luchar y se unen al prota por un objetivo común.
FFII llevó el concepto de la lucha por el imperio a un contexto más interesante 5 años antes de este y no hay giros de trama interesantes como se hizo años después en The Legend of Dragoon.
Si cualquier jugador de JRPGs piensa en los tópicos del género cada vez que estos ocurren en los actuales, esto es como si se hubiese hecho un juego con todos y cada uno de esos tópicos pero con la salvedad de usar animales antropomórficos como personajes principales.
I'm kind of surprised this came out in 1993 because it feels very NES. Go to TOWN to collect ITEM that unblocks the path to go to next TOWN to collect ITEM etc. Fun enough though.