"Breath of Fire 3" - part 5

The last week I’ve been suffering at my computer desk trying to think of an interesting way of ending the “Breath of Fire 3” segment. There were thoughts of composing epic romantic poems that spoke of the games loveliness, I juggled the idea of a performance art piece that I could record and post on Bliptv, I even considered taking a programming class and making a modern remake of the title to prove my utter devotion and love. Unfortunately, most of these ideas seemed like an immense undertaking and seeing as how I am a lazy man, I threw most of those thoughts into the trash can alongside my screenplay for a television pilot about a Jewish Frankenstein monster living in New York City along with the pickled head of Hitler. The show was titled “Mein Stein”.

Truth be told, sometimes very little needs to be said when it comes to the things you love. You like them for a reason and that devotion is worn not so humbly on our shoulders. Still, before I give “Breath of Fire 3” a send off, I’d like to comment on the one area of the game that I found lacking; the presentation. It’s only fair.

I’m a little kooky when it comes to storytelling. I can give a pass to an otherwise worthless piece of schlock so long as the visuals and sound are top notch. “Breath of Fire 3” has the exact opposite problem. This isn’t to say that the visuals and music were BAD, but they weren’t anything special either, and that’s the real Achilles heel of the game.

While passable and definitely colorful, the visuals of “Breath of Fire 3” come across as a little under budget. One gets the sense that Capcom didn’t give the development team a huge budget and since it was their first attempt at making a “Breath of Fire” game for the Playstation with cutting edge 3-D technology, their naiveté was exposed just ever so slightly. Again, this problem didn’t bother me all that much, especially since it lead them to create the graphically beautiful follow-up “Breath of Fire 4”, which, for whatever it’s worth, is the most impressively gorgeous sprite based game I have seen on the Playstation and perhaps one of the best to ever grace consoles period.

The music on the other hand doesn’t receive the same leniency. I don’t see how or why a change from the SNES to the Playstation would require such a radical movement in musical themes, but there it is. Populating the various dungeons and intense moments of the game are jazzy piano tunes that don’t feel all that welcome in a medieval fantasy environment. However, despite this criticism there are a handful of tunes that get caught in your mind and will haunt anyone who has played the game for years to come. As a matter of fact, the song that is played towards the end of the game when the player finally confront the big boss is downright eerie and fits perfectly with the emotional direction the game takes at that exact moment.

So yeah, sorry to end on a downer, but whenever I write about games or movies I always try to pick out both the good and the bad. I feel more artsy whenever I do so.

Despite that ONE criticism (which isn’t even all that harsh when you think about it), “Breath of Fire 3” is simply one of those games that succeeds on all counts and does so because of its not so ambitious nature. The game isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel like the “Final Fantasy” series was trying to do at the time, but a game like this was exactly what the gaming community needed to offset that strange cultural movement. “Breath of Fire 3” was an almost perfect throw back to all the things that made previous generations of role playing games great and it added a level of complexity with the character customization and progression that would become the manifesto for future online gaming.

In many ways it was revolutionary, in others it was traditional, and for me personally it is a game that I’ll always remember. To this day I’ll periodically pick up the game after a generous amount of dust has accumulated and pop it into my Playstation to relive a small portion of my childhood. Nostalgia aside, the game holds up, and for anyone that is in love with turn based combat and obsessive levels of character control that can only be trumped by playing games like “World of Warcraft”, this game goes highly recommended.