In my quest to play every JRPG from the ’80s and ’90s, sometimes I get bored of structure and decide to come up with fun ways of choosing what to play next. Recently I noticed I’ve played a JRPG for every letter of the alphabet except H, Q, and J. A fellow Youtuber happened to recommend Just Breed on social media platform X, so I figured, “that’s an odd name for a game, why not try it?” Well, “just breed” I did. And no, this ain’t some kind of sexy time or animal husbandry game; it’s a tactical RPG in the vein of Fire Emblem and on the same console—the Famicom—no less. Also like the first few Fire Emblems, it’s a Japanese exclusive, though luckily most of those have English patches these days, and the one I played by Stealth Translations seems to be pretty accurate. Good thing too, because there’s a surprising amount of dialogue in this game.
Right off the bat Just Breed feels inspired by Fire Emblem without straight ripping off Intelligent Systems’ beloved formula. The best TRPGs from the early-to-mid 90s all did this: Crystal Warriors had its elemental weaknesses; Majin Tensei brought a modern flavor along with SMT’s demons; Shining Force expanded the genre’s narrative potential while adding a traversable world … so how did Just Breed set itself apart? It came out right at the end of ’92, a full two and a half years after FE1, heck, after the SNES was already out — even in the West. With the Famicom in the twilight of its relevancy, Just Breed managed to deliver.
See, battles might look like Fire Emblem at first glance, but the main difference is you control multiple armies at once, each led by a hero unit. Once you move one member of an army, you have to move everyone from that army before you can choose another. This introduces a bit of micro-strategy in planning out turns, since one of your armies can easily get caught up in a tight space, stuck behind others that have already moved, if you’re not careful. I like that, but it comes with the downside of centering the screen on the hero of the army you’re currently moving at all times. That, in turn, limits the movement of your units to squares within their hero’s range of vision, often serving only to drag out battles as you slowly shuffle units around trying to reach the enemy. It’s an annoyance, but I’m guessing it’s a necessary workaround for the 8-bit Famicom’s limitations, and is easily relieved by emulator speedup.
To help with Just Breed’s somewhat awkward movement, healing spells can target anyone on the field from the get-go. (Intelligent Systems, are you taking notes? Your games’ healers are trash, you know.) You’ve also got a generous amount of multi-target healing spells, and since there’s no permadeath, you’ll get plenty of use out of them. Archers, too, aren’t totally useless, starting with a range of three and eventually gaining the ability to hit up to five squares away, giving these units a much different feel from how they work in Fire Emblem — nice.
Each army’s units share XP, meaning everyone in the squad levels up together, taking some of the pressure off the player to use everyone evenly over the course of the game. It’s a small distinction that’s only possible due to Just Breed’s army system but still a nice change of pace from other TRPGs I’ve played. You can cheese some stuff for sure, such as spells that guarantee multiple hits on random targets: if there’s only one enemy in view, it’ll get hit by every one and usually die a quick death that would make Davey Havok proud. Spells like this are already good for crowd control but become insanely destructive against bosses and other single units — I love when games shamelessly allow OP strats like that.
Just Breed truly shines in its presentation, however, serving up what might be the biggest JRPG on the Famicom. I ain’t kidding, there’s a ton going on here. This is a complete, fully-fledged JRPG adventure that happens to have tactical battles: I thought Shining Force was impressive for doing this, but Just Breed accomplishing it two years earlier — and on the NES — blows my freaking mind.
The story revolves around the Legend of Lambruvir, which tells of seven gurus who led their people to safer lands after defeating the great evil, Megagod. (Yep, that’s his name, apparently, not a descriptor.) It’s pretty heavy stuff that sounds more like religion than pure myth, and the antagonists certainly treat it as such. Your quest is to rescue kidnapped princesses across the world, beginning with Ellen, Princess of the Emerald. These lovely ladies happen to all descend from the gurus of legend and also happen to be set for sacrifice by the bad guys to resurrect Megagod. That’s more than enough for an old fashioned sword-and-board quest, if you ask me. This mission involves collecting sacred stones, swaying new army leaders to your side, flirting with royal poontang, and even being mistaken for the Messiah of the land — I told you there’s heavy religious themes here, didn’t I? The Japanese do that sort of thing in an interesting way that’s somehow more lighthearted and playful than what you get from Western media.
While the story beats themselves may be straightforward, they’re presented via lush, crisp visuals and lavish cutscenes that almost had me thinking this was a SNES game given how animated everyone is. Hell, I doubt I could so much as name another NES game with proper cutscenes like these, yet Just Breed is chock full of ’em. Plenty of NPC interaction is available as well, and in another shocker for the NES era, it’s actually interesting for the most part. There’s even optional side content, like piano lessons! Beyond that, you’ll find yourself sneaking around town in disguise, raiding pyramids for legendary swords, or watching a drunk make a fool of himself in front of a bar’s top dancers. You might even notice your fellow army captains walking around town as “NPCs” you can talk to — kind of like an old-school prototype of Dragon Quest’s party chat.
This game positively bursts at the brim with more personality, flavor, and atmosphere than I’ve seen on Nintendo’s trusty first console. The only real downside of the whole affair is the mediocre, basic, and un-memorable music, which I’ve already completely forgotten at the time of writing this. I dunno, I’m sure some of it is good, check out the OST if you’re curious.
Alright, back to the gameplay real quick before I take my leave: at one point, your party gets poisoned by a naively accepted chicken dinner. The poison causes each squad leader’s body to spasm, making his movement erratic. In battle, it means sometimes a hero can’t move, which forces his other units to auto-battle. If you’re near enemies, that’s fine; everyone’ll attack in accordance with some reasonably smart AI. But if you’re not near any enemies, you’re screwed, because your hero stays still. Since the auto-battle AI routine executes at that point, the rest of your squad will cluster around your hero — useful normally when making forward progress but annoying in this specific case. What a clever use of a status effect, one that manages to be unique without being overly obnoxious — battles still work the same way; you’ve just got to be more careful.
I found another neat quirk in the +2 movement range accessory you get about halfway through — typically something like that would be amazing in a TRPG, but here it’s game-breaking. See, you can un-equip an accessory after a unit moves but before they attack. That doesn’t sound too useful unless you know that all of your units share one inventory. Experienced TRPG fans might see where I’m going with this: if you want to, you can trade the +2 movement item to other units and let every single one of ’em use it on the same turn. Now, Just Breed rarely reaches a difficulty level that warrants this kind of micromanagement, but I love when games include such joyously exploitable mechanics anyway. Games are for having fun; it’s OK to break them.
And while combat may be breezy pleasure, Just Breed does suffer from an equipment overload problem — there’s so much crap to buy at multiple points during the story, yet you barely have time to make the most of it. The last several stages don’t even let you use all your armies, and since spell damage is far superior to hackin’ and slashin’, upgrading my gear rarely felt worth the time spent tediously crawling through shop menus, despite being flush with cash by the endgame.
Minor quibbles with the combat aside, Just Breed moves at a fast clip, not requiring too much grinding … until the final boss, anyway. The dungeon leading up to this fateful encounter features a giant, Mayan-esque pyramid filled with a boss gauntlet. Getting through this ain’t too bad, at least not until the final stage, which introduces one last new enemy, giant dragons that can wreck your entire party in no time. That means — you guessed it — time to go grind. It’s really the only time where the pacing felt out of wack, as I simply couldn’t get through it until I gained a few more levels. Ah well, I can’t right complain about a final boss being tough, can I? All in all, Just Breed more than makes up for its limited shortcomings by providing the most unique TRPG experience on the NES.
Thanks for reading this (very late) edition of JRPG Journey 2024. Look forward to May’s retrospective, which will also be late, but will be much longer than this one. That’s because I’ve got a lot to say about Shin Megami Tensei for Super Famicom.
