"Breath of Fire 3" - part 1

Nostalgia is a strange mistress. We all love to reflect upon her with our own past experiences and joys; Holding them up on some imaginary pedestal of immaculacy while systematically excluding any sort of scrutiny or honest criticism of the subject in question. As a result we tend to have polarizing opinions regarding the issue and focus less on verifiable proof and instead chose to either love it or hate it based solely on what epoch it fell into when it made its influence on our lives.

As a nerd I struggle with this. Looking into the nearest Hot Topic store will shed some light even to the biggest neophyte of geek culture that there is a borderline disturbing amount of praise and worship given to the classic video game era of the ‘80s and ‘90s. I too love this time in gaming history because when put under the microscope there was a lot of ingenuity and creativity that emerged from the natural byproduct of the limitations in hardware.

Take classic series like “Super Mario Brothers” or “Mega Man”. The reason people put so much weight and reverence into these titles is because they were very original and are still immensely enjoyable today. The game play was quick, exciting, and still unique in the current age of gaming that has spawned in the 21st century. Give me a copy of “Mega Man 2” or “Super Mario Brothers 3” and I will still gladly sit down and be thoroughly entertained for hours as I replay games that somehow managed to master the quintessential elements of 2D platform gaming; setting the mark of excellence for future games while also remaining entirely unique and authentic to their own core design principles 25 years later.

However, being the hardened realist that I am, I also have to accept the reality that nostalgia brings with it an unhealthy level of stragglers. Icons that never were all that interesting or fun to begin with. Plastic diamonds being tossed into a pile of precious gems to confuse us into thinking they had some noble qualities. Sadly, aside from 2D platformers, one of my all time favorite genres of games simply were not that good in their infancy. Time to face facts, old school RPGs were awful.

I’ll give you all a moment to storm off to your private message boards to write a flame or even allow you the chance to vomit into your precious Boba Fett Collector’s helmet, a natural evolutionary response to eject all possible toxins from your body when in the presence of something unpleasant. Now that you’ve collected yourselves let’s get back on topic, shall we?

Early RPGs were nothing to really write home about. Unlike platformers which had a solid formula from the get go thanks to several creative genius’ working in the field at the time, RPGs tended to be nothing more than derivative, grind-happy regurgitations of Gary Gygax’s immensely revolutionary Dungeons and Dragon’s pen and paper role playing game. Instead of sculpting an ingenious adventure filled with constant perils from the young and over productive imaginations of adolescence, you had a new system of games that were constrained by what could be programmed into a computer. There were suddenly boundaries, but rather than finding safe passage and navigating around these limitations many of the earlier entries simply extracted all that didn’t work and left the disheveled remains of the gaming experience for the player to pick through like some starved wild dog.

The first titles to emerge in the “Ultima”, “Final Fantasy”, and “Dragon Quest” series all had this problem. They were much too obsessed with grinding levels with primitive combat systems and were more fixated with a character’s level than any other factor.

To be fair, the character’s level is still the ultimate defining factor in determining a player’s over all power, but I’d like to think that as the years progressed we discovered many alternatives to this that have only since grown to legendary feats of creativity. An RPG enthusiast can now appreciate the complexity of micro managing and min/maxing their character’s various attributes. We now understand that there is a level of game play hidden to most of the uninitiated buried within the menu systems. There is choice to truly do whatever we want, and while it will never trump the power of one’s own imagination and the zero boundaries approach that a tabletop RPG can deliver, we did learn that there are alternatives that a visual presentation can afford us that are sorely lacking with dice and miniatures.

This isn’t how everyone sees things though. Sometime around the end of the 20th century there was a slow movement of a boulder that would soon pick up enough momentum to avalanche the entire geek community into laboring under false impressions of geriatric titles. Whenever a new entry in the “Final Fantasy” series is released people will often pine for a return to the classic formula. The sad truth is that no matter how awful some of these modern RPGs tend to be, they are still light-years ahead of the Nintendo standards of the ‘80s. In fact, I suspect that many of the early RPGs are mistakenly lumped together with the SNES titles of the ‘90s. “Final Fantasy” 1-3 are, without a doubt, the weakest entries in the series. However, a strong argument CAN be made that perhaps the series was at its apex sometime in the 16-bit era with “Final Fantasies” 4-6, with 6 being the poster child for almost near perfection in capturing the very nature of the “Final Fantasy” experience. When you wash away all of the pretty memories it becomes clear that the real rose amongst briars was the Super Nintendo age leading into the Playstation era, a brief moment in time, but one that echoes loudly even today.

I could spend all this time recounting all the clever innovations that emerged from the mid to late ‘90s but I simply don’t have the patience to do so. Instead I will talk about a series that meant a lot to me and still does. This was a series that seemed to generate the very image of the scale being tipped from banality to cleverness; “Breath of Fire”.

The original “Breath of Fire” game was one that I recall renting at some point in elementary school. Having waded out into the waters of RPGs and dipped my feet to see whether or not it was inviting, I began braving deeper and deeper out into the pools of sword and sorcery until I was sucked into the undertow. These hackneyed, exceedingly boring titles were changing. With “Breath of Fire” I noticed a heavier emphasis on story, similar to several other RPG titles at the time. They weren’t overbearing, but they did have a lot more depth to them than the traditional “defeat evil forces to save kingdom” scenario. Furthermore, the combat was changed up. Each of the heroes had their own personalities and character traits. Gone were the mindless drones who accompanied you because you needed a healer in the party or someone to do extra spell damage, these individuals were being presented to us with a loving care. You could tell the creators wanted for the player to bond with them and bond we did.

To further emphasize this relationship, the characters played differently too. Beyond traditional RPG class structure, each character had access to abilities that utilized several key techniques which blurred the traditional expectations of character roles. The main character could turn into a dragon for Pete’s sake! Even outside of combat the various player avatars could perform signature field actions on the world map, something that had rarely been explored on console RPGs until that point.

“Breath of Fire” was great fun for its time but since it was on the cusp of the RPG climate change it mistakenly got lodged into the side of the older games and was therefore never truly remembered with much fondness. It wasn’t until years later when the game was rereleased on the Game Boy Advance that I had any interest in purchasing it. Even then the purchase was more or less done to round out my “Breath of Fire” collection and to erect the proud geek banner that proclaims I had beaten each entry in the series. Still, the seeds were sown with that first one and what grew was an obsession that showed potential once the sequel arrived.

I definitely remember it was Christmas time and by now the Super Nintendo age of video game classics was well on its way to becoming the stuff of legends. While reading an article in my beloved “Nintendo Power”, I was suddenly reminded of the existence of “Breath of Fire” when a sequel was announced. Being immersed deeply into RPG fanaticism I requested a copy from dear old Sandy Claws and I couldn’t have been more thrilled.

Games like “Earth Worm Jim 2” were put on the backburner as I tore through “Breath of Fire 2” with great love and appreciation. In many ways it still carried many of the flaws from the first one, but all the revolutionary aspects of that first title were carried over and multiplied tenfold with the sequel. My expectations were shattered.

I was now playing a game where the characters had unique abilities, some of the characters were optional or hidden, picking the right gear wasn’t always as transparent as buying the newest stuff from the item shop or “Use water axe on fire demon” sort of thing. Players could micro manage a village with their spare time, go fishing, hunt some wild animals for spare resources, and even alter the events of the game by performing pivotal actions within the game’s major story events. The kind hearts over at Capcom even had the brilliant idea of introducing a system that allowed the player to fuse the spirits of shamans to their characters which not only altered their abilities but could radically change the characters’ overall play style and physical appearance if done properly. Best of all, it was challenging. Not challenging in the sense that older RPGs required the player to slay 1000 monsters and level up several times before beating the next boss. This game made you think, it made you bring the right party members for each encounter and it made you actually use the items in your inventory or be consciously aware of what trinket you had equipped and whether it was appropriate for the current battle. Even if you grinded a few levels you wouldn’t be guaranteed a victory if you played sloppy.

Perhaps the most intriguing element of “Breath of Fire 2”, an important factor in shaping the rest of the series, came from the plot. Unlike any game that I was familiar with at the time, this was a game focused on something taboo. The game openly criticized organized religious institutes and even questioned the behavior of gods. For a young boy with a frail mind, this was deep. Gone were the symbols of good and evil and in their place were moral ambiguities.

Needless to say I was floored. Never had I experienced something so great in my youth. I was completely enveloped in that game for a short period of my life and it meant a lot to me.

Years later when I finally got a Playstation (mostly to play the new RPG arrival at the time, “Final Fantasy 7”), I heard that a new “Breath of Fire” game was being released. I saw early shots and was confused. Despite the Playstation supporting 3D graphics, “Breath of Fire 3” relied on archaic sprites and had a classic design template that openly admitted to being a throwback to classic role playing, according to one add I saw in a game magazine.

Being naïve I had my doubts at first. After all, we lived in a post Final Fantasy 7 world where the savvy RPG was about breaking the envelope with futuristic steam-punk settings. As if I had a moment of clarity, I removed any sort of preconceived bias and decided to try it out. Call it sentimentality being stirred up from “Breath of Fire 2”, but I knew that I had to play the game.

I waited anxiously for my birthday to approach so that I could unwrap that gift and crack open the jewel case. What I played would forever haunt me as one of the greatest games I ever experienced.