Barubari music. All I have to say.
Yeah, and apparently you have to say it more than once 
What’s the title of that track though? I’m on blualaguna and see nothing called Barubari
Jesus christ, I didn’t know I replied to this thread when it was originally made. Its funny to see I said almost the exact same thing. Man I’m consistent.
While Jean does suck pretty hard, the rest of the party isn’t so bad. Regular setup in BoFII is either making a party that can kill shit faster than it can kill you, or use Bow to actually have some useful healing. If he replaced Jean for Katt, it’d be a fairly good party and Nina’s magic has always been much more damaging than anything else for me with the obvious exception of G.Dragon.
The individual characters aren’t the problem. It’s the way they’re set up.
Having 2 casters, one semi-tank, and Jean, is a good way to not last very long in harder battles.
Switching Jean for Rand alone would make the game beatable at 45 instead of 55.
I know this because my little brother did it at 43-46 with almost exactly that setup (he didn’t use Nina).
For the record, his Jean is at 14. And rightly.
Ah yeah, I get what you mean now. Though I definitely wouldn’t call Ryu a “semi” tank. Both the Guts command and Guts revival make him nearly unkillable.
I’m talking about the game because I played it, and I didn’t play it because it was great, I can assure you that; I was surveying the entire series.
And although it has some bad points it easilly overshadows many rpgs of today.
I’d love to hear some of those many RPGs.
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.
You can say that for almost every single game on the planet.
Perhaps so. Maybe it was a TERRIBLE idea for me to assume that every character in a game should be usable.
Maybe I’m wrong, though. After all, this is a game where you can’t really customize your characters, so there are some character types you’re roped into using. Oh, but wait! I have two healers, and one of the best casters in the game. The majority of my party doesn’t even suck. No, I believe I had a hard time because I didn’t use Shamans. Even having to use the Shaman fusion bullshit is sort of a bad design decision, because you have to go out and find them, making them an optional part of the game. So, sure, my party is weak. A good game design would not have allowed me to die so hard with characters as solid as Ryu, Bow, and Nina in my party, though. Talk as much shit as you like, but it’s easy to know what characters suck in hindsight - no characters should suck in a well-made game, anyways.
This game was pretty bad imo. I liked BOF 1 a lot better cause you could switch characters anytime and character not in your party would gain exp. That said it was bullshit how in BOF2, you’d just your shaman trans for having low HP. The story was also a load of BS and I really didn’t it was improvement of first game at all. I usaully used a party composed of Ryu, Katt, Nina, and Rand
Come on people give Jean the love he deserves 
Personally i raelly like him and even more while on Sir Mackerel transformation.I had him learn the Missile and Freeze spell to have some offensive spell power nad he is quite decent .
Unrelated to the topic of BoF 2’s quality, but the name of the Barubary battle track is ‘A Crisis’.
A sweet track. Short, but sweet.
This is like saying “you should be able to just use queens alone in starcraft, otherwise I guess they’re not viable!”
It’s not that your characters suck. It’s that your party as a whole is unbalanced… Well, Jean sucks.
Hell I didn’t even say you shouldn’t use who you did 
But if you’re gonna critique a game’s grind-factor you better not be doing it just because you chose to play in an unconventional way, which you did. And hey, you beat it.
And man, don’t come back saying “I shouldn’t have to put effort into which characters I choose!” cause man, that’s just lazy gaming 
I thought the difficulty level was pretty high as well. Unfortunately, you have to actually have level-building sessions and grind for gold to buy the latest equipment.
The “only half the characters are decent” problem is not nearly as bad as it was in BoF 1. Gobi, Bo, Ox, and Mogu existed just to be able to fuse with Karn. I wonder if the developers made it so that they would be all the fusable characters because they were running out of time in the development of the game and realized they wouldn’t be able to make half the cast actually playable.
Even FF6 had useless characters. Did anyone ever actually use Relm when they could choose not to? It’s unrealistic to expect a game to let you use whoever you want whenever you want. Some characters are just going to suck, and Jean’s one of them
Jean is probably the worst character in the game when not fused, but that party makes him even worse.
First of all, you have Bow. That instantly makes any other character playing the healer a complete waste, because nobody is even remotely as good as Bow, and he can do his job just fine by itself.
Second, you have Nina. Other than Bleu, no other character can use offensive spellcasting anywhere near as strong as hers, so there goes whatever shitty spells Jean has.
In the end, he’s reduced to a very crappy fighter that can’t hold a candle to Katt, Rand or Sten. The only half-decent multi-talent character in the game is Spar and even s/he isn’t good enough to warrant using if you figure out how to use the rest.
And yeah, c’mon, this is a pretty old game, you were expecting a fully balanced party? Two comparatively useless characters out of 8 is fairly good considering the time. And the guy’s a giant fat retarded frog for fuck’s sake, what incentive could there possibly be to use him in the first place?
In general, you only need another powerful fighter (Katt, Sten or Rand, I like Katt best myself since she fits perfectly with the shaman assignment) and the two back row casters being either Nina and Bow for a balanced party, or Nina and Bleu for the “Fuck it all, just nuke’em” strategy.
In FF6 you could make your characters into almost anything you wanted, though. Sure, some chars, like Edgar and Sabin, had uber-powerful special attacks, but for the most part the characters were clean slates that could be powerful or weak depending on how you built them.
Not at all. Using Queens alone is more analogous to playing just one character at a time. If I complained about that, yeah, sure, that would be stupid. But, to have two fighters, a white mage, and a black mage? That SHOULD be a balanced party. The party should be more analogous to what race you use in SC (although it’s a pretty crappy analogy anyways, no offense :P).
Either way, what I picked was, in theory, a balanced party. Now, if I picked something like Ryu, Bow, Nina, and Spar, then sure, I’d expect to die. Or if I picked an all fighter team like Ryu, Sten, Jean, and Rand. Those are unbalanced parties. I did neither of those; what I did was theoretically smart, but I was punished for it anyways?
Also, the fact that characters don’t level up when you’re not in your party is also a prime factor in choosing a party quickly; once you’ve leveled up enough to realize “Oh shit, Jean is not actually a good fighter”, your other characters are way, way behind.
In short: I made a party decision that should have been a good idea, and it was bad ONLY because Jean is just shitty. I couldn’t fix it by the time it was apparent, and that’s my fault? Yeah right!
Also, I had to do a fair share of grinding before I ever got Jean - you know, like in the parts of the game where you don’t have many decisions about your party? So fuck that. Jean didn’t give me an excuse to grind - the whole game lends itself to grinding.
That would probably be why I didn’t HAVE any other white mages, besides Ryu, who you can’t remove from the party.
Second, you have Nina. Other than Bleu, no other character can use offensive spellcasting anywhere near as strong as hers, so there goes whatever shitty spells Jean has.
ALSO why I didn’t have any other black mages. What are you getting at 
In the end, he’s reduced to a very crappy fighter that can’t hold a candle to Katt, Rand or Sten. The only half-decent multi-talent character in the game is Spar and even s/he isn’t good enough to warrant using if you figure out how to use the rest.
And I should have used my psychic powers to figure this out before I started using him?
And yeah, c’mon, this is a pretty old game, you were expecting a fully balanced party? Two comparatively useless characters out of 8 is fairly good considering the time. And the guy’s a giant fat retarded frog for fuck’s sake, what incentive could there possibly be to use him in the first place?
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Your ‘old game’ argument is completely erroneus, since there are plenty of games that had come out by then which had indeed perfected the ‘balanced party members’, or at least the ‘your party won’t suck as long as your group is balanced.’ Breath of Fire 2 is way behind a lot of RPGs that had already come out in that department, as was the first game. And furthermore, the argument is still based on the issue of HINDSIGHT, which I DID NOT HAVE, because it was my FIRST TIME PLAYING THE GAME!
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Jean was the only character in the game that was legitimately funny. That counts for something in my book. Assuming the game had a well-balanced group of characters - which I did; how wrong I was - I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have the funny character in my group to round out my casters with a fighter.
In general, you only need another powerful fighter (Katt, Sten or Rand, I like Katt best myself since she fits perfectly with the shaman assignment) and the two back row casters being either Nina and Bow for a balanced party, or Nina and Bleu for the “Fuck it all, just nuke’em” strategy.
…Something I shouldn’t have to know in advance in order to enjoy the game. Yet again.
You never know how good a character is before using it, hindsight is never an issue, it’s lack of experimentation. Part of the whole deal of having forced party members for a while is so you get to know what they’re good or bad at, it shouldn’t really be in any way difficult to just check his stats in comparison with the rest and notice that Jean kinda sorta had pretty much nothing of value to add to the fighting strategy. He’s a crappy mix between Sten and Spar and nowhere near as good as either, I never heard of anyone actually using him for a bit and not figuring out that much.
The only character that excuse really works with is Bow and only because he’s the only one whose role isn’t immediately obvious until you level him up a bit and get his spells.
I mean, pick any Suikoden game for the best example. There’s a MULTITUDE of characters that range from retardedly broken to useless and you can’t really tell until you start using them. Figuring out which suck and which don’t and which work best when paired with whom is pretty much part of the whole strategy. Who the hell can guess Richard in Suikoden V is Orlandu on crack before actually picking him and making him fight a bit?
Which I loathe with passion because it’s basically saying “Well, screw any logic or planning, anyone can nuke God!”. It’s just really fucking lazy design. Even then VI was still to an extent trying to at least differentiate them via stats and skills, unlike XII where it really doesn’t matter at all who you pick.
I personally found barubari’s theme atrocious and symbolic of the game.
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The game doesn’t lend itself to experimentation - something that I JUST mentioned.
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The forced party members doesn’t do shit for you. Rand is inconvenient to use at the beginning of the game cos not a lot of equipment is available for him. Katt does good damage but can’t take a hit. Sten ain’t shit in the beginning. At the very least, Jean did decent damage and had a lot of HP when you first get him, making him, at first, a much more viable candidate in the beginning than the other three.
So, yeah, how WOULD I know who’s good or not without some experimentation? I don’t know, but I’ll tell you this - whoever is a part of the dev team that makes those games agrees with me, because after BoF3, they were sure to make it so that no party member not currently in battle gains experience, and even made it so you could swap party members in an out (By the way, I’m also counting MMX Command Mission, which was made by the BoF team, and is essential Breath of Fire with Mega Man characters); hell, at LEAST in BoF3, they made it easy to catch up characters with fairly minimal effort. So, it looks like empirical evidence is on my side.
Also, ‘what Sinistral said.’ Good grief, the fucking music in this game.
Depends on how you look at it, I suppose.
It’s been years since I’ve played through Breath of Fire 2 and listened to the theme in the actual battle. It really suffers due to its repetition. It’s too short, but the battle against Barubary can potentially take awhile; much longer than such a short sound clip suggests anyway.
Perhaps I’m a bit influenced by nostalgia, since I enjoyed BoF2 more when I first played it when it came out. After the ‘holy crap!’ surprise of facing a monster like Barubary at the start of the game, as I was still kinda new to JRPGs then it was probably the first time I was faced with a ‘you’re meant to lose’ battle. You barely have enough time to listen to one loop of it before he slaughters you at that moment, so I guess it kinda left an impression.
But do I like to listen to it over and over for 10 minutes? Not a chance. I had a less favorable opinion of the track by the time I finished the game, especially since he killed me once or twice on my first attempt.
But I still remember that ‘holy crap!’ moment, so yeah. It works better played during the few seconds it takes Barubary to swat young Ryu.