| Breath Of Fire 4 | |
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The successful breath of fire series of Capcom continues on the playstation console. With the newest inaddition bringing in some
unique changes. The fourth one in the Breath of Series tries to keep the tempo going. This is the only Rpg i am positive that is a
decent RPG.
As with the previous Breath of Fire Series, in Breath Of Fire 4 you play a mute hero named Ryu. You Begin your journey with Nina searching for her long lost sister or should i say kidnapped maybe. Anyways you find Ryu instead, as usual naked, with no such memmory. At first Ryu agrees to help, but eventually leads to finding what and who Ryu is. The story is pretty ordinary as you go though towns finding some information, and then fighting a nini-boss. The only thing i like about this is breath of fire, was the split side story of Fou-Lu, the half-twin of Ryu. Capcom has effectivuly developed a way to intergate these two stories. It makes the story seem a little bit more interesting, but i think orginailty lacks in this game. Almost similar to previous Breath of Fire series. The Biggest improvemnet i seen in the Breath Of Fire 4, was its graphics. Usually 2D-sprite character in a 3D world can spell disaster, but Capcom pulled it off. Actually i was pretty impressed, they combine so many animations with with the 2D sprite chararter animations, that is almost felt like the characters were 3D. I could probably say its like 2.5 Sprite. The world was also drawn beautiful with tedious detailing. i think the artists did a wonderful job. The dragon attacks are transformed into 3D polygon sprite. They are similar to FF7 summons. I liked the way they were summoned which was an improvemnet over the previous series. The sound and music, was noting spectacular. It was just average music and sound effects. Sometimes the music can be annoying, but at some other times it is fine. So it is like a mix bag between okay and not okay. Again just average music. The gameplay has been change alot since the Breath of Fire 4. This time you learn enemy skils by defending and then having the enemy using the learnable attack onto you. Inaddition you can all Six character at once in a battle. This works pretty well, as you have decent characters one can use, with countless combination. The way this works is that there are three in the front and three in the back. The three in the front execute their commands, while the characters in the back get healed. Of course when you have six characters, you can choose which three you want to you in the front. Therefor, many combination where you can mix up character to produced different combos. I liked this six character use, it is similar to Final Fantasy 10 on the PS2. Introduced are combos where you can link melee, status, magic and dragon attack together. The higher the combo, the higer the damage, and also reaching the requirement for some certain master. These master are character thoughout the world that will lend their knowledge and techniques to teach you new and useful skills. Overall i found this to be the better battle system thoughout the Breath of Fire series. The replay is only for those who truely love the game. I began to find it boring towards the end. Maybe because they were many sidequest. But there are plenty of replay values in this game. From getting every enemy skills, chracarter skills, evolution for dragons, catching every fish, mastering every think a master gives to you, and getting the high damage count for combos. The fishing min-game which seems to be a trademark for the Breath of Fire series is always fun. I guess it like chocobo for the Final Fantasy Series. Getting certain kind and amount of fishes allow ones certain rate items. So the replay is plentifull, i guess the story was not that strong in the end to keep me from playing again. ~Signing of is Yashin |
GRAPHICS: 10 SOUND/MUSIC: 5 STORY: 7 GAMEPLAY: 9 OVERALL: 7.8 |
