It’s not a bad game per se, it’s just that the story and it’s conclusion are all together lackluster. The entire journey, as with all breath
The 6 playable characters are rather flat and one dimensional outside of Rei and Garr (one is literally an onion baby with zero dialogue outside of pips and noises). Ryu, the protagonist, is a silent hero who only exists to further the plot, and serve as a push for the other characters. Teepo leaves after the opening. Rei is gone for half the game, if not more and returns having grown a little and being interesting with no explanation for his ‘ability’. Nina never shuts up with her expositions and they nerfed her archetype from 2 and made her a healer again, instead of a mage… so there’s no ‘dedicated’ mage this time. Momo requires the use of specific masters to make her viable, otherwise she’s just absolutely horrible with her basic stats and low accuracy. And Garr… is the grumpy old man who’s actually the most interesting and has the most growth throughout… as little of said growth there actually is to go around. And lastly there’s the little sentient onion, Peco… who also requires abusing the master system to make viable… so pass.
The world is rather bland and disengaging, offering you nothing of real note to travel through other than the typical forest, volcano, ruin, field. There’s very little to *see* when compared to previous titles. And it seems like the whole plot point about the world being ‘smaller’ due to a cataclysmic event, reeks of being implemented simply as a time/asset/resource limitation during development.
The soundtrack is subpar and I can’t even remember a single song I just HAD to find and download or purchase like with the other 4 BoF console titles.
The. Eat thing about the game is it’s battle system, the Masters, and the Dragon Genes.
No longer are there 4 chars in battle. It’s been reduced to 3 but your characters ARE given more options to go around for each, aside from Nina, honestly. It’s your standard RPG setup but the isometric views, as well as the character and enemy animations truly offer some amazing sprite work.
The Dragon Gene system doesn’t need a TON of explanation but rather than simply choosing a dragon form, or one-off summoning a dragon as in previous titles, you NOW have the OPTION of selecting different genes and mixing/matching them to create unique combinations. Sometimes it’s a dragon you’ve already seen with different colors but there’s a LOT of unique combinations, and this titles hosts the most unique dragon forms out of all the titles.
The Master System is REALLY a great improvement. Basically, you ‘apprentice’ a character to a master and said master will teach you new skills for competing sometimes obtuse tasks while apprenticed to them. Each apprentice also switches up your stats during level up but it always comes with a consequence to another stat.
Also, the mini game with Beyd. Just, no. Dumbest mini game I’ve ever encountered. You ‘fight’ him to level him up repeatedly, so he can take on someone else solo but it takes SO LONG and just isn’t really WORTH IT, as with basically all Breath of Fire mini games -_-
All around, the game has some good parts but the opening takes SUCH a long time to get going, and then the pay off from the opening events and the pay off in the end just simply aren’t really worth ‘the journey’ of finding out what the motivations/reasonings for the game’s antagonist even were.
Reading: Breath of Fire III
…
