Get back to the beat 'em ups, Capcom, it's what you do best (Breath of Fire (PC))

Member Name: Murf!

Product:	Breath of Fire (PC)
Date:	21/07/01 (74 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Animated monsters!, it's long, if you can muster the strength to get through it, equipment choices demand tactics

Disadvantages: Laughably crap plot, disgustingly awful soundtrack, strategy free battles

Capcom have made games that aren't beat 'em ups, believe it or not. This is one of them, and after playing it, you may well wonder if they should just get back to making another Marvel/Street Fighter game.

Lets examine the plot first. You start in a village, and guess what! It gets destroyed! Bet you didn't expect that one! Then there's some ill-concieved crap about the dark dragons wanting to take over the world, and you, a light dragon (not literally, unfortunately: there's a dragon morph further into the game than most will bother getting to) must save the world from the evil Zog. That must've taken them a good lunch-hour to come up with.

Once you've got all that out of the way, you basically go from kingdom to kingdom, go through the dungeon inside, and get pissed off when you find that with EVERY boss, once they run out of HP, carry on ragardless, having hidden extra health. Which brings me neatly on to the battles. Surely the idea of turn-based fights is to allow for strategy, right? Well, Capcom disagree, it seems. One boss (a knight early on), in particular, was bloody awful. It ended up as taking turns to hack at each other, then using a herb every time your HP gets low. Which is often, as your attacks take off half a cm of the boss' energy bar each time. Then, after 10 minutes of hacking away, you finally get rid of the last bit of his energy, only to discover that he has another 80HP left... and, of course, if you die, you'll have to do the whole dungeon again as well as the boss as save points are practically an enangered species in BOF.

You know in Mario Bros, the way that you get the crap about the princess being kidnapped by Bowser in the manual, then the only plot from then on is the bits where the mushroom people say that you've come to the wrong castle, and then you start the next world? Well, frankly BOF can be worryingly similar. I saved a kingdom from another town's earthq
uake-making machine, only to be told something like, "thanks. There's another kingdom east of here". No reason to go there is supplied, merely the hint that that is where you need to go. Compare that Mario like simplicity to, say Final Fantasy VI: take a typical dungeon, the MagiTek facility, for example. You aren't there just because it's the next dungeon; you're there to find out about the empire's nefarious esper processing plans, and try and foil them. Capcom could have writen 'world 1-4' in the corner and it would be fitting, as that's how the game works: you go around a town, find out what's wrong, do the dungeon, and then do it again in a different town.

The graphics are the usual squared-off type, where the areas and characters are made of grids. The soundtrack... well, if you want to play through this, you better be armed with a lot of decent CDs to listen to. This game deserves credit for *gasp* having animated enemies during battle, and the isometric battles look pretty good. Other plus points? Sorry, I've run out. Some would argue it's a long game, but who cares when it is so repetitive and dull? I stopped about 8 hours in, and I only went that far because I wanted to have grounds to review it. The lame plot is made worse by a dodgy 'translation'. Whoever 'translated' the game might want to learn English before he/she 'translates' another game, really. Too late actually, BOF II has just as crappy a 'translation'. Whoops.

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