Remember, Breath of Fire came out in that innocent time before Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger did their part to redefine what RPGs were like. This game has separate music tracks for being in town, and being inside a house in that town. Your teammates do not have unique motivations for joining our hero they simply join the party because they figure they’re already in the instruction manual so, hey, why not?
It’s all just an excuse to kill hundreds and hundreds of random bad guys. Most of what you do in this game is nonsensical and unrelated to the plot. …and by the time you get over the river, or whatever, a third of the game has gone by. That item was of course misplaced in a dungeon, which is blocked by some other obstacle, which… The fetch quest can only be initiated by returning some lost item to some non-descript NPC. However, some obstacle blocks them, and they can only remove that obstacle by completing the accompanying fetch quest. Much of the structure of the game is as follows: your heroes define some objective, such as “get across the river” or “activate the stone giant”. Which is to say it looks and sounds like an SNES game, but plays like something that came free with a subscription to Nintendo Power. The original game is an 8-bit RPG done up in 16-bits. Prior knowledge of one is not at all required to enjoy another. The moral of the story is: start with whichever of the five games you think you’ll enjoy the most. If that confused you, try Googling some theories about the Legend of Zelda timeline. Instead of a linear story of BoF1 -> BoF2 -> BoF3, it’s almost as though the second and third games are both alternate versions of a sequel to the first. At no point, though, do the stories or characters of BoF2 and BoF3 intersect. BoF3, on the other hand, is all about the aftermath of that war, and what became of the world as a result. BoF2 references characters and events from the first game without going into much detail about acknowledging the war. There are themes and characters that every game has in common, and it’s clear the games are taking place in the same world (albeit eons and eons apart, in some cases)… but it’s impossible to “miss out” on part of the story by playing the later ones first.Īs an example of what I mean here: BoF1 is about a war between two clans of dragons.
You can’t plug the games together and say, “This is how the series goes,” and mean it. The first thing to understand about the five BoF games is that they do not form any kind of cohesive narrative. I thought this would be a good opportunity to provide an overview of the whole series. Since making all these Breath of Fire posts, and starting a topic about it on Talking Time, a few people have expressed interest in the series without knowing where they should get started.
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