Breath of Fire. If you have never touched this genre and want a plot, play 4 first. If you like that, play the others. If you want a mindless game, go get 1. It's on the Advance. My order goes as follows: 4,3,1,2. The plots, while could possibly be connected, don't have enough in common to want you to play them in any order. Just remember, while Ryu and Nina are in all of them, they are different Ryus and Ninas, so you don't get more powerful characters, a la Suikoden or Arc the Lad. Now on to the review.

Attention: If you want to get your Breath of Fire groove on, and can't find a copy of it for the SNES, or are a sad person indeed who doesn't own an SNES, then you can now find it rereleased for the Advance. Go buy it now, handheld style.

The plot of this game is very simple, but impressively interesting too. Unlike Final Fantasies, that don't connect from game to game, I believe that all the Breath of Fires do. At least we know for a fact that 1 and 3 do. It says so in the intro to the game. They took a basic plot, with cool Dragons, who fought, creating a light and dark dragon clans. The dark dragons of course were evil and teamed up with an evil force, the goddess Tyr, (aka Myria) to destroy the world. You, Ryu, are the last surviving light Dragon. After wandering around the whole world, stopping the dark dragons, gathering other animal-people to help you, and completing about a bagillion side quests, you do stop Tyr, FOR NOW. She says she'll be back, and unlike all the other final bosses, she is, in 3. For a game without much plot, it is extremely captivating to play. Since there isn't much else to talk about here, I'll go on to the facts.

Original stuff: Not much here. It's basically a rip off of Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest games. But since at this point, there were only like at most three of each, the world, and Japan in general, didn't mind games that were basically the same. They also didn't care for plots out the wazoo, neither. So Capcom wished to compete in the RPG world, and made a simple plot with Dragons, who are cool. The "original things" are the life bar on the enemies. For normal enemies this is great, and you know when they are about dead. For bosses it lies though. It goes down to the last dot, and stays there for a while, so you don't know when the boss is done. I like this. It's handy. The game also has your characters walk behind you, which I am pretty sure, but not positive, is a first for RPGs. The famous Capcom Minigames are only the hunting and fishing modes, where you can fish with your main character for whatelse? fish. They heal you. It's nice. And you can hunt with Bo for oxen and dear, that you can eat to heal you too. This continues thruout all the Breath of Fires. Oh yeah, and the main character uses a boomerang for half the game, instead of a sword. That's half original.

What liked: For a game without much plot, or graphic capabilities, this game was really fun. I recommend it for anyone who likes old-skool rpgs, like FF6, or Secret of Mana. It goes well in your SNES collection, or the new one for Advance as well. At the end of the game, each game designer got to choose one enemy to appear next to his name. That is really cool, I think.

What disliked: Sometimes I wish there was a plot to follow. Sometimes I am glad there isn't. Some of the bosses are really hard, and some characters are just dumb and not useful at all, except when you HAVE to use them. (aka Mogi and the fish guy, whats-his-face.)

What to expect: Addicting gameplay, a very normal rpg, in every sense of the term.

What not to expect: A masterful plot a la FF8 or 10.

Ratings on:

Graphics: 4 - Pretty weak even for SNES. Just look at Mario RPG. Much better. But that was a few years later.

Sound: 4 - Bad. That's about it. You won't die listening to it, but you will wish you had.

Controls: 8 - Descent. Rpgs don't need great controls. As long as the characters move I'm happy.

Style: 6 - Nothing extremely new, but some good ideas. And everyone, especially back in 94, needs another rpg in their SNES.

1st hour: 7 - Starts out hard.

2nd hour: 8 - Fun. That's it.

1st week: 7 - Still fun.

2nd week: 8 - Ditto.

5th week: 7 - Never great, never bad.

#1 reason I hate this game: I... I don't rightly know.

By Hawke