Breath of Fire (no spoilers please!)

[danzibr]

I consider myself a fan of the series, yet have only played III (several times), IV (twice, maybe 3 times), and V/Dragon Quarter (1.5 times). With VI out in Japan, I've only played half the series!

To make myself more complete, I'm going to play the original, then II. So now my question is, with no spoilers, anything to know walking into the original and II? I started II several years ago and didn't get into it.

In particular, I think I've heard the translation for II is bad. Is there a mod which fixes it? Also, again no spoilers please, but anything glitchy or otherwise terrible mistakes to look out for? Kind of hard to give this without spoilers... but instead of something like, "After you recruit McStud in Lancelot, make sure you don't backtrack and save or you're stuck forever..." ya know what I mean.

Thanks!

[DiscipleofBob]

I consider myself a fan of the series, yet have only played III (several times), IV (twice, maybe 3 times), and V/Dragon Quarter (1.5 times). With VI out in Japan, I've only played half the series!

To make myself more complete, I'm going to play the original, then II. So now my question is, with no spoilers, anything to know walking into the original and II? I started II several years ago and didn't get into it.

In particular, I think I've heard the translation for II is bad. Is there a mod which fixes it? Also, again no spoilers please, but anything glitchy or otherwise terrible mistakes to look out for? Kind of hard to give this without spoilers... but instead of something like, "After you recruit McStud in Lancelot, make sure you don't backtrack and save or you're stuck forever..." ya know what I mean.

Thanks!

The translation for II wasn't that bad if I remember. I played both the originals on the SNES and later the GBA.

It's been a while. I remember there being a few cases where you have to do X to progress the story but X isn't exactly intuitive and without a you're stuck figuring out just which part of the world you need to go to. Typical JRPG stuff.

I remember in I you need to unlock all the main character's dragon forms, as the final semi-secret one when used against the final boss reveals the true final boss and therefore influences the ending.

[danzibr]

The translation for II wasn't that bad if I remember. I played both the originals on the SNES and later the GBA.

It's been a while. I remember there being a few cases where you have to do X to progress the story but X isn't exactly intuitive and without a you're stuck figuring out just which part of the world you need to go to. Typical JRPG stuff.

I remember in I you need to unlock all the main character's dragon forms, as the final semi-secret one when used against the final boss reveals the true final boss and therefore influences the ending.
Ahh, that's cool to know. Better make a save! Well, it's right before the ending, so uhh... I'll probably have a save :P

Thanks!

[JadedDM]

I'd just say to keep your expectations low. The first game is fairly simple in terms of plot and characters, especially compared to the later entries.

Oh, and I remember that the names are different in the first game. For instance, Wyndia is called Winlan. There's a lot of other weird localization issues like that.

Oh, and Chun-Li cameos in the first one, if you know the secret to find her.

[ArlEammon]

Breath of Fire II is definitely one of the best of the series, be prepared for a very dramatic introduction.

[Olinser]

Story wise they were pretty solid and have a good cast of characters, I enjoyed both games thoroughly, although the first game it was annoying that it required the ultimate dragon transformation (for which you got almost no information even EXISTED, never mind how to actually get it) for the 'Good' ending.

Gameplay wise the original was OK, but it suffered from some serious balance issues - some characters are just plain better than others, and the game is extraordinarily easy if you did any of the side quests, the final boss just being WEAK.

The dragon transformations were both too good and too crappy. The main reason is that their damage never changes. So when you first acquire them, they trivialize battles, but as you go further through the game, they become useless. The final dragon transformation is really weak because it caps at 999 damage, but it transforms your entire part to use - and it is quite easy to do more than 999 damage with your full party by the time you get it.

Then the 2nd game they got even worse, with each dragon becoming a single-use spell that used ALL of your AP for a single hit - making them useless for anything but bosses (and even then not that great).

Still, both games are good and I recommend playing them.

[Starwulf]

I loved BoF 1 & 2 when I was a kid. I remember in BoF II there was this one fight that is unwinnable(you're supposed to lose it), and I wanted to test it's limits to see if it really was unwinnable. I went in with a crap ton of healing potions, and a very over-leveled main character, and ended up(I used a calculator) dishing out over 100k dmg, 10x the amount of HP the final boss of the game has. A little annoying, but fun nonetheless, lol.

Sadly I've never gotten to play IV, it's quite expensive nowadays, and I didn't adopt the playstation console back in the day(I was a nintendo fanatic). Some day I'll find it for cheap though!

[Olinser]

I loved BoF 1 & 2 when I was a kid. I remember in BoF II there was this one fight that is unwinnable(you're supposed to lose it), and I wanted to test it's limits to see if it really was unwinnable. I went in with a crap ton of healing potions, and a very over-leveled main character, and ended up(I used a calculator) dishing out over 100k dmg, 10x the amount of HP the final boss of the game has. A little annoying, but fun nonetheless, lol.

Sadly I've never gotten to play IV, it's quite expensive nowadays, and I didn't adopt the playstation console back in the day(I was a nintendo fanatic). Some day I'll find it for cheap though!

You know you can just download an emulator and a ROM, right?

[Starwulf]

You know you can just download an emulator and a ROM, right?

Illegal, sorry.

[Calemyr]

Breath of Fire 1 and 2 are very old, but they hold up surprisingly well, largely because they don't rely on high tech graphics that look horribly by comparison the next year.

BoF 1 basically follows Light Dragon Clan child Ryu after the Dark Dragon Clan wipes out his clan. Together with a collection of seven allies, he works to figure out why the Dark Dragons would do something like that. The story is pretty typical, but pretty darn well done and worth a try. A couple interesting touches: the entire eight-man party is available at the same time, with you able to swap people in and out of the four man active group at will, and Ryu has the ability to fuse with one or more of his allies to create various kinds of dragons with different abilities.

BoF 2 still counts to me as one of the best games of the SNES days. When his priest father and kid sister suddenly vanish and his home town's citizens completely forget him, the confusingly orphaned child befriends a thief and goes out in the world to make a life for himself as a "ranger" which is basically an odd-jobs mercenary. When his best friend gets accused of a crime he didn't commit (technically), the quest to clear his name keeps bringing him into contact with a form of evil corrupting people into monsters. It is a much more complex and tragic story, centering largely on sacrifice and the dangers of blind faith. A couple interesting things here are the presence of "shamans", elemental girls who can fuse with party members to give them a statistical bonus or (if you use the right element or combination of elements) can transform them into something downright badass. This Ryu gains some dragon forms, but instead of replacing the party in battle, they're more like Final Fantasy summons, trading all of his remaining AP for a single hard hitting attack.

BoF 2 has some translation oddities, no question. It's from the SNES era where companies had a bad habit of handing translators a huge script, a tiny maximum word count, and maybe a month to get it done. These guys were rockstars to accomplish what they did, I truly believe that. But outside of a few odd phrasing choices and a couple jokes that don't translate all that well, and a rather slow burn narrative where the game spends the first quarter of the story on trivialities before you stumble onto the actual plot, BoF2 tells an excellent story with interesting characters. And it had the unmitigated brass to venture onto narrative fields that even most modern games wouldn't dare go near - if you read between the lines, at least.

In the overall storyline, though, the only major elements that come from the first games is Bleu, though I believe that in the PSX era her name was re-translated as Deis. I never got into the later BoF games, to be honest, because I felt they got too wrapped up in minigames and sub-systems and getting ever more unnecessarily complicated and inaccessible, but as I understand it Deis continues to be a pretty important character. I can only speak for her as Bleu, to which I can say she is never really critical to the plot (she was a secret character in BoF2), but she was frickin' awesome and that's really all I have to say on the matter.

Regardless of whether you read the spoilered bit or not, I will say this: you really ought to give it another shot. The stories told in both games (but especially the second) are surprisingly mature and I know I didn't appreciate them nearly as much when I was younger. They aren't graphic powerhouses, they aren't perfectly translated, and they really take their time to heat up, but they are both pretty darn impressive stories if you can muscle through the clumsy start.

[danzibr]

You know you can just download an emulator and a ROM, right?

Illegal, sorry.
Indeed, but some games (such as the BoF I'm playing now) have places which have a play-in-browser mode. Dunno if IV would.

Anyway. Thanks for the responses, all! I played the original (well, did so for a good hour last night), got Ryu to Wyndia, playing as Nina. I'm really liking it. Combat is simple, game was a bit grindy to beat that knight, but it's really cool to see the original forms of the monsters I encountered so much in III.

[Kris Strife]

In II, make sure to donate to the church on a regular basis.

[danzibr]

Donate to church, check.

Played a bit more, Ryu and Nina teamed up. Some of the random over world mobs are pretty tough.

[Wookieetank]

In BoF 2, you get to recruit NPCs for a thing later on. Recruiting NPC A can sometimes lock out NPC G for recruitment. If optimization is a huge thing for you, might want to look up a guide for who to recruit and who not too. Some are incredible useful, some do nothing, others are needed to be able to recruit specific NPC Z. Its a surprisingly in-depth process. BoF 2 also has 3 endings, one of which hinges on the result of a boss fight & a skipable sidequest (Surprise: its the best ending).

[danzibr]

In BoF 2, you get to recruit NPCs for a thing later on. Recruiting NPC A can sometimes lock out NPC G for recruitment. If optimization is a huge thing for you, might want to look up a guide for who to recruit and who not too. Some are incredible useful, some do nothing, others are needed to be able to recruit specific NPC Z. Its a surprisingly in-depth process. BoF 2 also has 3 endings, one of which hinges on the result of a boss fight & a skipable sidequest (Surprise: its the best ending).
Oooh, that's really cool, like Star Ocean 2? Yeah, I'm looking forward to this.

btw, playing as Ryu and Nina, about to get Bo I think (I haven't recently read anything about BoF, but I seem to recall the name Bo, and someone in a town was talking about a guy named Bo, just a guess). In particular, in the dungeon in the woods after making the saw.

[TaRix]

Oooh, that's really cool, like Star Ocean 2? Yeah, I'm looking forward to this.

btw, playing as Ryu and Nina, about to get Bo I think (I haven't recently read anything about BoF, but I seem to recall the name Bo, and someone in a town was talking about a guy named Bo, just a guess). In particular, in the dungeon in the woods after making the saw.

No, it's not that much like SO2; the exclusivity comes from NPC recruiting, not PCs. But when you can go recruiting, look all over the place. Some get recruitable when you've recruited x amount already (and not until) and possibly won't even appear until available.
Other recruitables which aren't mutually exclusive tend to show up in either out-of-the-way places or in previously visited places.

Oh, and brace for a whole lot of random combat. Really annoying by today's standards, but at least battles can resolve fairly quickly.

I don't remember if there was hunting in 1, but I know there's fishing to be done in many places.

[Calemyr]

Oooh, that's really cool, like Star Ocean 2? Yeah, I'm looking forward to this.

btw, playing as Ryu and Nina, about to get Bo I think (I haven't recently read anything about BoF, but I seem to recall the name Bo, and someone in a town was talking about a guy named Bo, just a guess). In particular, in the dungeon in the woods after making the saw.

No, not exactly. We're not talking about the party. At some point early in the game, you take refuge in an old building and, since you can't take more than three friends along on your adventures, the rest stay behind to repair the place into a sort of adventurer boarding house. Then they come up with the bright idea of recruiting a carpenter to build more houses in the area (you get a choice of three, who build their own specific styles of buildings and add a unique feature to the newborn township, like one has a wife that can cook and another plays an Othelo-like board game that can win you exotic gear if you're lucky). Once you have houses, you can then explore the world and find people who are looking for a new life to move to your township and live in the houses your carpenter built. These guys can do all kinds of things, from allowing you to change the graphics settings on your dialogue windows to opening shops of various power levels to helping you find hunting/fishing spots to simply thanking you for giving them a home. By the end of the game, the township can become your one-stop hub for everything you need, if you invite the right people.

[Greg_S]

Hooray for BoF! Agree wholeheartedly with the thread; BoF2 was ahead of its time, and it's a shame the translation isn't better. There is a retranslation patch out there which improves things dramatically.

I'll second Wookieetank on the TownShip guide, as the choices you make with it can make the endgame much harder to tackle. I don't know how to drop this next part without a spoiler, so I'll say this: when I was in middle school playing this on my SNES, I screwed up a key component in the good ending, which ended up affecting some things on the world map too. Do keep multiple save files so you can revert in case something goes wrong.

Last ones, putting in a spoiler just in case:

When you get the silver dagger, hold onto it. Certain ghostly enemies have an annoying property where they take half damage from almost everything except a few weapons. The silver dagger's the first of those, and it'll prove useful in killing them.

Don't bench Sten for too long. He's got a mandatory section about halfway through the game. Once you start it, you're stuck in the dungeon, and it's notoriously difficult if you're unprepared.