In my review of Breath of Fire (“BOF I”), I mentioned that I’d heard its sequel is an improvement in every way, except the translation. Unfortunately, that wasn’t my experience. Overlong, monotonous, and often downright boring, Breath of Fire II (“BOF II”) is a slog of a JRPG that I don’t view as improvement. I kinda liked the first one, despite my many complaints. It’s a tightly packed romp with a decent — though thin — story, fun combat, beautiful sprite work, and innovative mechanics like the dragon transformations.
Breath of Fire II throws all that out the window in favor of a meandering tale that doesn’t go anywhere for most of its long runtime. More on the story in a bit, but first let’s talk mechanics, my least favorite part of BOF I. Yet somehow, they’re even worse in II.
For one, Capcom ruined the dragon transformations. Turning into various bad-ass dragons to fire off attacks was one of the original game’s coolest features, but now, they act more like expensive Final Fantasy summons, costing all of Ryu’s AP to cast and changing him back immediately after. This seems like a nerf, and it is, but you can still restore AP with items to cheese bosses, so I don’t get why they chose to make the mechanic less.. awesome.
Character fusions, this time done between a character and one or more fairies, instead of combining multiple characters into one, are cool… except they’re taken away right before the last leg of the final dungeon, meaning you have to backtrack through the whole thing if you want to keep using them. What the heck? I want to use my best stuff on the final boss, that’s the whole point of an RPG! Of course, I didn’t bother doing this and had zero problems since I’d raised my stats so much anyway, but it’s such a weird design choice. It’s as if Breath of Fire II is afraid of the player having too much fun.
There’s a lot of minor annoyances, like the infuriatingly slow walk speed — with no run option — or the spell Hush, which always fails. There’s an enemy that fully heals itself almost every turn. Hush would be a great strategy for that — it’s like Silence in Final Fantasy — but I never got it to work once. Why, though? This isn’t a boss battle; it’s not supposed to be that that hard, so why not give the player a creative strat to use? There’s also an AP-draining spell which doesn’t work on most enemies, even those who have AP. What’s the point of including a spell like this? I hate when games waste your time — it’s worth having niche spells in RPGs to accommodate people’s play styles, but there shouldn’t be spells that are good on paper but totally useless due to poor implementation. It’s even worse, because the devs could have made Drain work on a bunch of different enemies, so you don’t have to stock up on a crap-ton of restorative items. That would make the game more fun without breaking anything.
I’m puzzled, cuz you need huge stocks of healing items just to get through random battles on the overworld, let alone dungeons. With a sky-high encounter rate and no good healing spells, the early game wore me down quick, and it didn’t get much better once I unlocked more healing options, since I’d rather use my AP in battles. So I had to waste time and inventory space getting and holding stacks and stacks of Herbs and HelpBls — whatever that means.
One more example of time wasting — there’s a cooking minigame of sorts that lets you get super useful stat-boosting items, but you have to cook a ton of them to make a real difference. Sounds like a neat innovation for 1994, but there’s a small chance, around 1 in 8, that any dish you cook will result in a useless Charcoal rather than the item you wanted. It’d be a big improvement if Charcoal could be used in some hidden recipe to make something useful. (You can combine 2 Charcoals into an Herb, but this is pointless since Herbs are cheap and plentiful.)
Instead, this “feature” seems to only exist to waste the player’s time — and gold. That’s not quirky; it’s lame. On the other hand, very occasionally you might get an extra dish when cooking, which is a nice touch of the kind I wish this game included more.
The game’s balance feels way off, too. The last dungeon marks a giant difficulty spike, where party members need to top level 40 at least, but mine were in their early 30s when I reached it. Plus, there’s no good grinding spots. It takes hours upon hours to gain even a few levels at the spot with the highest XP-giving enemies in the game. I don’t see the fun in this. I guess you’re meant to get lost for hours, wandering aimlessly and exploring the entire map, since it’s rarely obvious where you have to head next, and sure, I used a guide when I got stuck instead of doing that, but even still, the massive amount of required grinding is unacceptable, even to this guy, who usually enjoys grinding.
See, on top of all that, Breath of Fire II is long, and feels longer than it is due to its monotony. I quite like lengthy RPGs when they can keep me interested — Dragon Quest VII or Xenoblade, for example — but this ain’t it. I’m not a big “story in RPGs guy”, but a good story — or at least good characters — could have saved BOF II for me, despite the hundreds of same-y battles with little reward. And I don’t blame the poor translation — I feel like I got the gist of the original Japanese despite the odd language choices.
The plot starts out with an enticing, mysterious opening hook that made me want to find out what the heck was going on. But it’s quickly forgotten, in favor of aimless wandering between towns with no overall goal and helping random NPCs I found it hard to care about. Seriously, I don’t remember any reason given for why Ryu sets out on his adventure in the first place. All the plot-relevant backstory hinted at by the opening gets thrown at you over fifteen minutes right at the game’s conclusion. This ending may be clouding the judgment of some who claim Breath of Fire II has a good story. It IS cool how it explains the intro scenes and wraps things up nicely, and it’s fairly original, especially for a JRPG. But, for the vast majority of the game, dozens upon dozens of hours, the story’s almost non-existent.
It’s not until two-thirds or even three-quarters of the way through that the main church storyline starts up, but it comes out of nowhere, with zero buildup. Why are we fighting the church all of a sudden? Huh? Ryu and the dragon clan do come into play at the very end, but until then, it doesn’t make much sense that Ryu would be involved or care at all. It’s like two different teams designed the story and the characters separately, then mashed them together at the end.
Speaking of characters, they’re mostly ass-ugly or too bizarre, even for me, and even for a JRPG. The thief Katt is my favorite, since she actually gets more than one or two scenes of characterization and has a few through-lines running for much of the game, but I can’t say the same about the others. Ryu’s best friend, Bow, is a derpy-looking St. Bernard furry.. thing, but not in a cool way. He just looks lame, and his design made not want to rescue him when he was accused of a crime or even have him in my party. Another party member, Rand, is some cow-man hybrid who also looks pretty dumb. And then his mother, who you meet later, is seemingly a normal human? But it’s clear he’s not adopted, so maybe her sprite is actually supposed to be a cow? Either way, they look completely different, and art choices like this take me out of the game. It’s like Capcom was trying to be as quirky and unique as possible without considering whether this world makes sense or is enjoyable to look at. Practically every town is populated by a new and freaky-looking animal-human hybrid, which doesn’t appeal to me. I blame the art direction in general, a big step down from the first game which pulled off similar fantasy races rather well.
Finally, and quickly, the music: it’s uninspired and bog-standard. There’s nothing you wouldn’t expect and nothing too memorable here. All the battle tracks are decent enough, and I especially love the final boss theme, but even still, it’s not anything special. That’s a letdown, since I enjoyed the first game’s soundtrack.
In fact, this whole game let me down. I’d expected a big improvement over the first entry, which I wasn’t super hot on, but this was a tiny step forward and a few giant leaps back. Maybe this series just isn’t for me, though. I’ll check out Breath of Fire III someday, but not someday soon.
What will come soon, though, is my review of Final Fantasy V. I’m almost through the series, and I’m looking forward to talking about this one. See you next month.
