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