Breath of Fire 2.

The Core Video Games Forum
1

Seriously, what the fuck? What do people LIKE about this game? I finally finished it, my fourth attempt at sitting down and just FINISHING this game over the course of eight years. Here’s my review, with a few added interjections in spoiler tags:

This game baffles me; so many fans of Breath of Fire agree that this game is the best in the series, stating things like story and characters as their reasoning. I will grant that there are some great ideas, and that the game’s script was probably a lot funnier than it seems - given that it was marred by a painfully bad translation - I doubt it could have been much more dramatically impacting.

The story starts with a cool flashback sequence, where the main character, Ryu, takes a nap out in the grassy field behind his home town (his sister insists that if he does, he might have dreams about his departed mother), and, when he returns, he doesn’t find his family everywhere, and no one recognizes him. After that, he leaves the town, some crazy demon finds him and says some ominous nonsense to him, and then the game moves to ten years later, where he is a ‘ranger’ (soldiers that does literally ANY task asked of them) with his friend, Bow.

While this sounds really cool, the game really doesn’t go much of anywhere after that. Ryu winds up having to go on a fetch quest - which, by the way, are more lengthy and absurd than any other installment in the series, which is saying A LOT - without Bow, that takes an absurdly long time - a good 1/3 of the game, at least - to finish it. Seriously. Like, you don’t get Bow back until after you recruit JEAN, for crying out loud…and it wasn’t even like you were really looking for Patty the entire time…you were just progressing the game naturally, and she happened to be in SimaFort. Along the way, you’ll meet people - playable and non-playable - who, while having interesting personalities, don’t ever say much, making them as boring as all get-out in the long run. Sure, there are one or two characters that get a fair amount of screen time; but while those scenes aren’t half bad, the fact that they’re so far and few between - and so undeveloped - just leave you feeling unsatisfied and wanting more out of the experience. For example, as ridiculous as all the stuff was that happened at SimaFort with Jean, I really enjoy the way they portrayed Jean’s character - he comes off as really dumb and oblivious to everything going on around him, but you can tell he’s a lot sharper than he lets off. Also, the events in HighFort were really cool. The way Sten and Trubo reminisced about the war…that scene gave me goosebumps. I could only imagine how powerful that scene would have been in GOOD english. This is especially true for the villains - all the main villains had a lot of potential to be cool; but, all of them were a complete waste, due to alarmingly poor development (although, there was one truly CREEPY scene in the end regarding one of the villains; but again, it was such a small taste that it was impossible to be satisfied by just that part alone). [SPOILER]I’m talking about in Evrai, where the preist, Habaruku, brutally murders Claris and Tiga, in front of a whole bunch of onlooker in the church, as they watch on, doing nothing but spouting the rhetoric of St. Eva. Holy SHIT, that was freaky.

And honestly, I hate how much of a waste Ray wound up being. If he had played a bigger part, it would have been really intense to have to kill him; however, you hardly knew him, so his little speech about how he had no choice but to die fighting for what he believed in did nothing for me.[/SPOILER]

The plot winds up being equally as contrived and ridiculous, so much to the point where it’s not worth talking about. When you find out the truth about all the things that happened in the beginning flashback sequence, you’ll probably feel cheated at how anticlimactic it all was. And, seeing as not much is added to the main story between the begining and the end, that’s a huge thing to mess up - that’s virtually the entire plot! Seriously? Some random demon just made everyone forget? That’s the BEST you could do? Barbuary wound up being nothing more than some guard dog of sorts at the end of the game? It was all just so underwhelming!

The gameplay never seems to change too much between all the Breath of Fire games; however, they do usually get better every time. I’ll say this: It DEFINITELY was not perfected in Breath of Fire 2. The battle system is very typical turn-based RPG fare, but the catch is that your main character (and other characters) can transform into various creatures. A big problem was that BoF2 messed this up a LOT, by having the Ryu’s transformations being really lame - a summon spell that takes all your AP to use - and having other characters be way too dependant on their transformations to be any good. The transformations for all other characters works by having them ‘fuse’ with a Shaman - a being with elemental-based magical powers. The problem is, you don’t start getting a lot of the Shamans until very late in the game. This causes even MORE problems, because there are a lot of characters who are just plain BAD without the aid of Shaman transformations. BUT! Even THEN, only one person can be fused with a Shaman at a time, so you’ll have to base your party off of which characters are compatible with which Shamans, so as not to have any character be completely dead weight. These things, along with the usual archaic turn-based RPG problems (Slow speed, high encounter rate, far too little Experience points and Gold gained from battles, characters not in your current party don’t gain experience), make Breath of Fire 2 a chore to play; in fact, at the time of writing this (February 2008), I have tried to complete this game three other times since the first time I played it (Summer in 2000)!

The only other noteworthy gameplay aspect is ‘TownShip’, which is a town that you select a carpenter to build from the ground up, as well as invite other people to live there. There are a variety of people you can invite to your town, which provide cool things for you; however, only one person can live in a house, and everyone you invite is specified by the game to live in a specific house. So, if you want two particular people to live in TownShip, and they are both specified to live in the same house - which, by the way, the game does nothing to indicate this to you - you’ll have to choose carefully…except, you only have a marginal idea of what the person will do for you, if anything. While the idea was really cool, it was REALLY unrefined and crappy.

Other than that, what can I say about this game…The graphics were very cool, and I enjoyed the fluid, colorful look. Even so, I really disliked the character designs - they just seemed a little uninspired to me. Oh. A Dog. Oh. A Monkey. Oh. A Frog. Other than that, the music, done by Yuko Takehara (more popular for working on Mega Man games and 2D Capcom Fighters), is not bad, although some of the music feels really out of place, and almost even inappropriate for the game.

Anyways, the point is, this game take all of its good ideas, and buries them under a whole lot of very BAD ideas. The game is a chore to play. The dialogue is so bad that it hurts sometimes, and the characters don’t have much interaction, nor much to say, ever. Other than about three particular parts of this game, it was almost completely terrible, and I still can’t believe how some people can say this game is so good, even if it was the pioneer of a few original ideas (TownShip, or, building your own town; and, one of the first, if not THE first RPG to heavily involve religion in its storyline). Two original-yet-poorly-executed ideas do not make a game great. Do NOT play this game.

2

Even if you don’t play it, at least listen to the Tunland music “Crazy dance.” Best waltz-ish thing ever.

3

All I need to say is “Barubari music”.

I’m done here.

4

Speaking of fetch quests…

We need to speak to the Great Wise Tree! But for that, we need to get the Grass Man to help us. To get the Grass Man to help us, we need to catch an Uparupa. But in order to catch the Uparupa, we need some Owl Fruit. Not only that, but we need to find a way to get to Upa Cave by finding a way to allow the whale to let us ride it!

5

Hmm, Breath of Fire II. I loved it a lot when it first came out, but back then I was only just starting to get into RPGs, having only played FF6 and CT. And living where I was, there was only the one locally-owned rental store to get games and they didn’t have a big variety to choose from, BoFII was one of the only other main RPGs to play.

I love it not quite as much now, but I still have fond memories of it. Looking back, I can see that the game has its share of faults, pretty much everything mentioned. But there’s a number of things I love about the game.

The music. As Sinistral said, the Barubary (Barubari, however you want to spell it. Spellings of names wasn’t even consistant within the game itself! I swear, it seems the game’s script and monster names in battle were translated by different people…) battle theme was great. As was the standard boss theme, as short as it was, and Ryu’s theme, and the second and third map themes, ‘More Than Words’ was powerful emotionally, ‘Decadence of God’ creeped the hell out of me when I first heard it, and the ending theme had a nice happy tone to it.

Then there’s some of the actual in-game events which, as someone who was really only familiar with toned-down dramatic events of a handful of other SNES RPGs at the time, were actually pretty intense for the period. The aforementioned scene where Tiga and Clara are murdered in the church. Definitely one of the top scenes in the game. Also, let’s not forget Rand first sacrificing himself for the party to save them from the wall trap, only to be then saved by his own mother, and thus causing her to be crushed to death as a result. The stuff with Sten and Trubo in Highfort was great, but they could’ve stood to elaborate a bit more on their past. We can probably piece together most of what happened from the shoddy dialogue but there’s still a few holes in their story.

The Shaman stuff was tricky to get around. I always used a party of Rand, Katt, and Nina, since the three of them synced well with all the Shamans without needing any of the others. Use Earth and Water on Rand, Fire and Devil on Katt, and Wind and Holy on Nina for an uber party, with no Shaman wasted. Devil Katt also happens to be one of the most awesome things in the game.

The battle system could be frustrating at times, and I’ll agree on the point about Ryu’s transformations being mostly a waste this time around. I much preferred the Gene system in III, actually. You’re always playing catchup with levels (from Rand joining after finishing the basic work on the town and still being, like, Lv6, to freaking Bow still being the level he was at the start when he rejoined 1/3 into the game). It’s alleviated somewhat when you get the Whale and can reach the northernmost island for some serious powerleveling if you got patience. But when it comes to that, what’s the point?

BoFII is definitely one of those games where people look back on it through rose-tinted lenses. It’s not as good as we remember it, but I wouldn’t call it bad either. Nostalgia plays a big part, though, and if you never loved it ‘back in the day’ then you’re not going to love it as much as its fans still do now.

6

I’ve said it before, BoFII would be an awesome game if it were remade with today standards. The foundations for a great title are there, they just got buried under the rubble that is Capcom’s managing of RPGs. They got a bit better with the years thankfully.

Though there’s a few things that didn’t bother me so much:

For starters, I never had trouble with the Shaman fusions since I used a Nina/Katt/Bleu party that not only combined perfectly, also nuked shit at an extremely cheap rate. I’ll admit that the characters aren’t good enough by themselves.

The northern island trick makes leveling to hideously overpowerd levels a synch, and can be done as soon as you get Grandpa, provided you’ve got a caster with Death.

The revelation of what happened in Gate wasn’t that anticlimatic to me, you knew something along those lines had happened and Barubary was still behind the whole deal, the other demon was merely the one to put it into action. What shock might be missing from that was completely overshadowed by the shitfest that was the resolution to Ryu’s missing family. Ganer’s rescue and posterior turning into Obelisk’s fuel gets points, but that’s outweighted terribly by “Oh hey, mom was aliv-Oh, she’s not anymore” and “Oh hey so she was my sist-Uh? Where did she go?”

That said, yeah, it’s a very, very bad game. It’s a pity, because there are plenty of scenes that could be pretty powerful had they been better scripted or… well, in actual English. Especially, Barubary seemed like he was more into Ryu out of amusement than duty, and it would have been interesting for the fight to be better fleshed out. Particularily, if Ryu had an actual personality and the whole “I’M THE HORROR OF YOUR CHILDHOOD” thing had any real meaning.

7

I have to say this is actually one of my favorite games. Reason being…

Atmosphere…

Decadence of God… The Necromancer priest, the game was even more so like Conan the Barbarian than the original Breath of Fire. It even had an entire castle dedicated to parodying the French! While I like the French, the idea of “Frogs” with French accents is appealing to me. Habaruku saying those evil words in the Church while murdering two innocent people, a Nymphomaniac witch named Nimufu, and one of the game’s first scenes, when Ryu is eaten alive, are all very cool things. Also, how a game like Breath of Fire can be like Conan the Barbarian AND be kid friendly at the same time, is baffling to most people. Its violent enough for people who like blood soaked shockers to enjoy. (I may be getting ahead of myself) or even for little kids(though not TOO little.)

8

RE: Music - I do agree about the music being good, although I still think that some songs - ironically, I think of the battle themes - seemed really out of place in the game.

RE: Shamans - The trouble of having to build your party around using the Shamans is one of my largest complaints. I had my party composed of Ryu, Jean, Bow, and Nina, and they mostly used the same few Shamans, which was a royal pain in the ass. So, I had to grind my party until they were in the 55-60 range to get through the last stretch of the game.

True enough…but it’ll never happen. It’s also still ridiculous that the game was already far behind other RPGs of its time when it was released…not as far behind as the first game, though…

Still shouldn’t be necesary.

[SPOILER]Yeah, except Barubary didn’t have ANYTHING to do with it. Think about it: If Evans, or Habaruku or someone else had been in that cave at the beginning, and Barubary wasn’t in the game at all…no one would have noticed. Barubary served absolutely no point to the game. That’s anticlimactic. As far as Ganer being the one to power up the whatever-the-hell-I-already-forgot-what-it-was-but-it-wasn’t-the-Obelisk-cos-that’s-in-the-first-game, I didn’t think that was a big deal. It was nice to see that he was still alive, but since Ryu doesn’t TALK, you never hear about how much he’s hurt by losing his dad, so it was hard to care one way or the other.

Another thing! Why didn’t Aruhamel just fucking kill Ryu when he went to the town? Was the super-contrived plan of waiting years upon years for Ryu to come back, so he could bring Patty to Gate to open the sealed doors SO important? Couldn’t he have just kidnapped her at any time and made her do that? For that matter, you see that the demons can simply accumulate so much that they can break through that sealed doors any damn way. It’s all just a bunch of horseshit to me.[/SPOILER]

9

Oh, BoF 2. GamePro ran a 3-issue special on that game and I wanted it so-frickin-much, but I had no money. Luckily, when I played it, it was on a hacked rom which allowed you to play with infinite hp. Things got tiring even without having to worry about dying, especially when you entered hell with its fucking encounter rate.

I liked how the game hinted at an actual world and wasn’t just 3 randomly placed cities on a map. The quirkiness factor was enjoyable too e.g. the battle against the giant cockroaches. Also, yes, the music was good. Now, the part of the story you saw and did not conjecture left a lot to be desired (use player’s fantasy at will), the interactions between characters could happen more often and be developed and who the fuck decided to leave out Bow so long?! Probably the guy who thought of canceling all your shaman unions when you get the lovey-dovey spell in the middle of hell, may all his saves get corrupted. Isn’t it funny we’re using spoiler tags for such an old game?

10

I am notoriously easy to please with video games, but even I had issues with the game. Most of them have been well documented already. One thing I’d like to add is how I fucking hated the Shaman system, and how the fusion wouldn’t just be cancelled if my guys died. It was cancelled if they got to low health. So basically, I need to keep my guys in tip-top shape to be able to use them to their full power, and they aren;t allowed to dip below at all or I misjudge when to heal them just a little, I need to leave the fucking dungeon, go ALL the way back to Township, and fuse again. THat blows.

11

That’s the problem with most of the BoF games with (in my experiences so far) the exception of III was that usually they have about 2-3 good ideas and out of about 15 bad ones. I mean did anyone even pay attention to that whole mood gem thing up in the corner of every dialog box. It was poorly explained that it’s no wonder why it never really saw any action throughout the entire game with perhaps 2-3 exceptions at the most.

I also though that the dungeons in this game rivaled that of PS2’s which was a real pain in the ass when after the first 5 hours of the game you’re sent onto a series of increasingly painful fetch quests for the next 45 hours before receiving another hour of story before grinding for 10 more hours in order to spend the last 5 hours running back and forth through the final dungeon (unless you chose not to save the world which will allow you to view the worst ending instead).

It did at least have multiple endings which was (and still is) fairly rare.

Having said that, I agree with everything else said in this thread (including the parts that contradict one another).

12

Don’t forget it also breaking if an enemy turns you into a Zombie, that’s also fun. Even from full health, an enemy using a Zombie attack can just break your fusion if it feels like it.

13

I actually liked this game a lot. Sure, the hero has no personality and most of the plot consists of extended ‘fetch’ quests.

But I just liked the feel of the game, a lot of the dialogue was pretty funny and original(even if poorly translated), the idea of Township, all the different characters you could use, etc.

Also, the whole idea of a false religion, obviously patterned after Christianity, trying to control people for evil ends was pretty darn sophisticated for its day. Looking back, I’m amazed that Capcom not only had the guts to release the game in the U.S., but actually got away with it!(I guess it was really unpopular). Consider that only a few years before, Nintendo had insisted on removing in the most innocuous religious references from FF6(for instance, Cyan tells someone’s he’s fasting before the battle with the Empire; Nintendo removed this!).

14

The only issues I had back when I was a kid was that there were a few places where you had to have a certain character do things alone. And I rarely changed my character setup. My other issue was that Katt was “#¤&”#%& strong, surpassing Ryu most of the time in attack power and most importantly, speed, but the “#%”% seemingly had lower hit points and defense than Nina, for cripes sakes (Thanks go to Capcom for fixing this with Rei.) I’ve tried to avoid using Bleu as she’s obviously broken, but it’s a breeze to just 2x Thwack/Slash and 2x Bolt X stuff.

All in all, my first “traditional” RPG and remains among my favorites.

And coincidentally, all the complaints about the bad English made me notice said bad English on my later playthroughs. But… to be quite honest, I don’t really care. I play the game through again, if a re-translation should surface.

15

I liked the game, but the encounter rate was annoying. The game was a bit tedious.

16

The only thing that made the final dungeon tolerable for me was Angel-Nina’s special ability, Banish, which made the enemies run away. Worked 95% of the time, and she was fast enough to usually get it off before any of the enemies could attack.

17

I mean did anyone even pay attention to that whole mood gem thing up in the corner of every dialog box.

Oh yes. It was orange half the time and one quest required it to be rainbow i.e. you had to do silly stuff to make Ryu feel better. You should have hadokened his ass.

18

Yeah eventually I figured out what the Dragon Tear did. Although this was at the end of the game so there’s not much point left :confused:

19

Well after re-playing BoF-2 on my wii’s VC i only have to say one thing.
The fact that we talk about this game fifteen years after its release shows it’s greatness.
And although it has some bad points it easilly overshadows many rpgs of today.
BoF 2 is one of the games that if remade right will be a great money provider for the company and a great game for us gamers.

20

I don’t even have words for how bad this party is. You can’t blame the game for making you grind when the only character at all in your group with any clout whatsoever is Ryu. Magic’s cool and all… but how did you get away with not using at least Sten? I never go anywhere without Katt and Rand if I can avoid it.

Abbreviated: Your dudes are soft.