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.