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.
This might be a 5 star game. If you wish vagrant story was a bit more accessible this is what u get.
I have really strong emotions about the concept art for this game. The game itself, eh. It's interesting, but hard for me to actually get through.
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.
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.
not a fucking chance i have the time or patience to beat this multiple times. its got a really cool vibe, and the character designs rock but the gameplay is the slowest thing ever and it wasnt worth finishing to me
I first played this in the mid-2000s after seeing it covered on G4/TechTV. I knew there was some creative new game plus trickiness to it, but when I game over'd for the first time and saw my story progress reset to 0%, I took the game straight back to Babbage's. Upon reacquiring it I scoffed at Child Me's lack of sophistication. Had I not heard the soundtrack by Hitoshi Sakimoto?? A beautiful looking and sounding game to Adult Me's eyes and ears to be sure. I even engaged with the Scenario Overlay system in good sportliness for the first 4 game overs I had upon replaying it. I love the understated plot and character writing. More JRPGs could stand to reduce their dialog to a more Dragon Quarterly proportion. However the bell curve of my enjoyment of the game mechanics quickly crested and fell. This game makes some interesting bets with using some rogue-like elements. But the static dungeon layouts leave out the hallmark of why I like to replay more proper rogues: variability. My taste for yet another wipe and reset through the campaign was dampened by the fact that nothing changes other than the extra secret cutscenes. And those cutscenes are good, just not enough to get me excited about retreading old ground for the third time. The combat animations feel sluggish, especially given the building intensity toward combos, once you've had to execute them hundreds of times already. I may come back for a higher D-Ratio run or two if my interest is ever sparked again. For now I'm glad to have given this a second shot. It's a good example of designers trying something weird and making something Not For Everyone. An effort we only see in the indie sphere circa 2020's.
Cool setting, great cutscene direction, and innovative mechanics, but I found the actual experience of playing the game agonizing. I think it was the combination of the very long battles, the strict resource management, and the looming threat of having to replay the entire game; I only made it as far as the ice caves.
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.
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.
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!
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!
Tengo que decir que el problema principal del juego es que tiene de nombre "Breath of fire" cuando no tiene mucho que ver.
La historia y la ambientación me parecen muy buenas dando un giro diferente, que cambiaran el sistema de combate no me pareció tan malo porque era estratégico y entrenido.
Los principales problemas y por los que deje el juego son los siguientes:
-sistema SOL que consiste en que cada vez que inicias juegos vas subiendo de rango, hay más escenas y cambia cosas. Idea buena, pero muy pesada.
-Tiempo límite, a partir de cierto punto vas a tener una barra de porcentaje que se irá rellenando incluso por el simple hecho de andar. Lo que hace que en vez de investigar te pongas de los nervios en avanzar porque si llega el contador al máximo a empezar de 0 (y ahí entra en juego el sistema SOL)
-Mecánica dragón, aquí la mecánica dragón es ser invencible a cambio de rellenarte de manera exagerada la barra de porcentaje. Lo que me gustaba de los otros juegos es la posibilidad de transformate en diversos dragones, aquí solo hay una forma y te penalizan mucho por usarla.
La historia y la ambientación me parecen muy buenas dando un giro diferente, que cambiaran el sistema de combate no me pareció tan malo porque era estratégico y entrenido.
Los principales problemas y por los que deje el juego son los siguientes:
-sistema SOL que consiste en que cada vez que inicias juegos vas subiendo de rango, hay más escenas y cambia cosas. Idea buena, pero muy pesada.
-Tiempo límite, a partir de cierto punto vas a tener una barra de porcentaje que se irá rellenando incluso por el simple hecho de andar. Lo que hace que en vez de investigar te pongas de los nervios en avanzar porque si llega el contador al máximo a empezar de 0 (y ahí entra en juego el sistema SOL)
-Mecánica dragón, aquí la mecánica dragón es ser invencible a cambio de rellenarte de manera exagerada la barra de porcentaje. Lo que me gustaba de los otros juegos es la posibilidad de transformate en diversos dragones, aquí solo hay una forma y te penalizan mucho por usarla.
This is a tough one for me to rate (which is why I haven't) largely because it feels like a game I can no longer really experience in it's "intended" context. It's a game that comes out before the current status quo of videogame oversaturation, from a time when you would buy a game and it would be The Game you were playing for the next month or so, and it shows in some of it's design. That's no longer the life I live sadly and so I'm not sure I was quite able to meet dragon quarter at it's level.
The game is clearly designed around multiple playthroughs, and as such the main game is quite short for an RPG. The counterbalance is supposed to be that the game is hard to beat on the first try, but in practice I only restarted once after the ice caves. If you avoid using your Dragon powers for the first half of the game, you can blast the remaining bosses pretty much turn 1 with impunity.
The combat is pretty satisfying once you've got a bunch of skills built up for the party but the animations (especially on Nina) are wayyyyy to slow for a game where you're chaining like six moves together with each character every turn. This plus the really fragmented combat encounters makes the game drag quite a bit unfortunately.
I really like a lot of the ideas here but the execution is a little off in my opinion. Way too much really important plot information is hidden behind restarting the game from various points or playing through the game multiple times, and if you end up not needing to restart that much, most of the villains just kind of come out of nowhere in the last hour of the game with no indication of who they are. I think that especially the scenes regarding Bosch and Nina should probably have just been part of the default playthrough since Ryu's relationships to those two form the core emotional arc of the game. Even so, the final cinematic was moving, and said core arc is a strong one.
The reason it's so hard to rate is that all of those above negatives are purposeful decisions by the developers to make the choice to use your Dragon powers tougher. I can skip some early game slog by using them, but that means I'll have to hold back later on. If I can just beat this boss without transforming, I can use those powers on a tougher boss later. Or I can go all out and burn through the D meter, and be rewarded with more story content when I inevitably have to restart.
Overall really cool on paper, but I just don't have it in me to slog through the whole thing again to see the bonus scenes right now. One day, with enough distance, I'll replay with my cleared data, so I'll just look forwards to that, I think.
The game is clearly designed around multiple playthroughs, and as such the main game is quite short for an RPG. The counterbalance is supposed to be that the game is hard to beat on the first try, but in practice I only restarted once after the ice caves. If you avoid using your Dragon powers for the first half of the game, you can blast the remaining bosses pretty much turn 1 with impunity.
The combat is pretty satisfying once you've got a bunch of skills built up for the party but the animations (especially on Nina) are wayyyyy to slow for a game where you're chaining like six moves together with each character every turn. This plus the really fragmented combat encounters makes the game drag quite a bit unfortunately.
I really like a lot of the ideas here but the execution is a little off in my opinion. Way too much really important plot information is hidden behind restarting the game from various points or playing through the game multiple times, and if you end up not needing to restart that much, most of the villains just kind of come out of nowhere in the last hour of the game with no indication of who they are. I think that especially the scenes regarding Bosch and Nina should probably have just been part of the default playthrough since Ryu's relationships to those two form the core emotional arc of the game. Even so, the final cinematic was moving, and said core arc is a strong one.
The reason it's so hard to rate is that all of those above negatives are purposeful decisions by the developers to make the choice to use your Dragon powers tougher. I can skip some early game slog by using them, but that means I'll have to hold back later on. If I can just beat this boss without transforming, I can use those powers on a tougher boss later. Or I can go all out and burn through the D meter, and be rewarded with more story content when I inevitably have to restart.
Overall really cool on paper, but I just don't have it in me to slog through the whole thing again to see the bonus scenes right now. One day, with enough distance, I'll replay with my cleared data, so I'll just look forwards to that, I think.