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The Breath of Fire series has been an ongoing franchise since the days of the SNES. However, Capcom has a tendency to run their gems into the ground (Mega Man, Devil May Cry, Street Fighter, Resident Evil) and forget that originality is what produced the initial success of each series. It’s not until they question the validity of the current release of that series and ask themselves, “Are we pushing Poison in a Nirvana market?” And when this question becomes asked, we receive a masterpiece that breaks this chain of cliché. This game is Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter.

Although reviews from other sources gave much better reviews than expected, they were still a bit low for what this game deserves. The reason was most likely due to the difficulty presented in BOFV: DQ. Unlike the modern gamer, I remember the days of 8-bit where games were frustrating, where you wanted to throw your controller in hope that it might not make anymore enemies reappear when you accidentally backtracked. I on the other hand, welcome difficulty and realize that the more the struggle during the game, the better the payoff at the end. No matter how great the ending is, just finishing a difficult game is reward enough; but BOFV: DQ went beyond that.

Part of BOFV: DQ’s difficulty is in its new Scenario Overlay (SOL) system, which basically includes two things:


1) When you play the game over, you witness further development in the plot through additional In-Game Cinema (marked by a red SOL in the corner of the screen) that is not provided in your first run-through (No need to worry, the plot during the first couple play-throughs includes the bare-bones plot, which is plenty to keep you gaming.). The real benefit to this system is for people who significantly enjoy a game and end up playing through it several times. The best example of this is Resident Evil, Baldur’s Gate, and Silent Hill. I have a friend that has played through Resident Evil at least over 6 times immediately after he bought it, and I have another that did the same with Baldur’s Gate. My point is, if you’re going to play a game over and over you should at least be entitled to some variety in the plot to keep you gaming.


2) You can restart the game at any point in order to make use of this system, and if you die you are given several choices: You can either restart the whole game with all of you experience and equipment (which you can really chose at any time you want), or restart from the beginning of the game without all of your items and such. Come on now! What would you choose? Of course to make this system work the developers had to put some sort of restrictions on how the game is saved because gamers could just restart from their last save if they wanted to.


[Also to keep in mind, every time you beat the game you can restart with all of your party experience and your equipment. Your d-rating also goes up, opening up new paths in the dungeons. The ultimate goal is to reach a Dragon Quarter, which is not easy and would probably take years to achieve.]


To go hand in hand with the SOL system, is BOFV’s saving scheme. You can save 2 ways. One is a temp save; this allows you to save at any point. However you can only load that save once. Once loaded, that save is gone. So if you temp save, fight a boss and die you’re screwed. But, there is an upside: If you receive save tokens in the game you can save at any of the phone booths in the game, providing for a full save much more traditional of RPG’s. The phone booths are few and far in-between so when you see one, save!


Now that the most notable features have been presented to you, I can get to the lesser not so obvious change--the battle system. The battle system in BOFV is very similar to the newest Arc the Lad game for the PS2. BOFV’s system is a bit more complicated, and provides for a lot more concentration. To start, BOFV has no MP. Some people may shun at this initial exclusion, but I found it a welcome change. Instead of MP, BOFV uses AP. AP is kind of universal point system for battles. You deplete AP whenever you move, attack, or cast magic. This provides for an excellent way to battle tactically. You don’t want to move unless necessary because you can save your points for a larger attack the next time. The best part of this system is its combo system. It’s about time someone perfected the RPG combo. The main characters, Ryu, and Rin, can attack with strings of combos by using the AP system. You can start with a choice of 3 attacks then choose from another 3, and even yet another 3, giving you 3 levels of combos. With enough AP you can build up your combos to the third level attacks. When you build up to a third level attack, instead of starting at a third level attack you increase the percentage of damage being done on the enemy. This becomes extremely useful with bosses. Nina, your magic caster also uses combos slightly, but with a little more difficulty to perform. You have to have all three levels of a particular element in order to perform a third level combo-cast with her. The upside, however, is her use of magic traps. Right from the beginning of the game Nina can use magic traps, which are extremely useful in pushing away hordes of enemies.


With all of these excellent changes, comes one some small discrepancy: You can’t use magic to cure, which can be quite frustrating when you realize that you have a very small limit on how many items you can carry. Even though this may seem rather harsh on the gamer, it provides for a higher level of difficulty. Besides, if they allowed you to cure you could cure every turn with the AP system intact, providing for an extremely easy game. Maybe they should’ve created a cure spell, but only after saving enough AP for, say, 2 turns you could cure it would be beneficial. That’s just nit picking though.


Another aspect of the battle system is the PET Positive Encounter and Tactics System (like there’s not enough systems already). Don’t worry this system may be a system, but it’s not nearly as “system-worthy” as the SOL system. The pets system is basically you encounter system. It dictates who receives the free turn at the beginning of the fight, you or your enemy. Basically you have to hit the enemies first while in “explorer”or “dungeon” mode. But the game provides you with items, such as meat, bombs, and other goodies to trick your enemies enabling you to hit them first giving you the tactical advantage in battle. In the beginning of the game, this becomes your only means of survival. These enemies will charge out of nowhere to attack you first, that’s why you have to be extremely cautious when stomping through these dungeons. It basically comes down to looking through the door of your next room and throwing an item in and then attacking. If you’re not cautious and respect this system, you will die.


Although this game hardly contains the epic plots contained in the Final Fantasy franchise. This game still provides enough story so that it doesn’t make you feel like you’re watching a plot thrown into a porno. The story, like I said before, is very bare bones. However, if you trudge through it more than once, you will see much more character development than you may have initially. This is why I recommend using the SOL system in the very beginning about 2-3 times. Fight through until you acquire Nina, then restart, and repeat. Don’t waste any Party EXP until you are on the final time you plan on finishing the game on. Basically the plot revolves around an industrial post-apocalyptic world where the people of the planet supposedly destroyed the planet’s environment forcing everyone to live underground. No one remembers how long you your people had been under, and no one questions it. Well of course until Ryu comes along. Of course Ryu has no desire to reach the surface until it comes to his attention that Nina can only live if she reaches the surface. That’s where his determination becomes apparent, and he fights his way to the surface. This industrial atmosphere is somewhat reminiscent of Final Fantasy VII’s Midgar, which welcome among any gamer I’m sure. This plot has many other conspiracies and sub-plots included, which lead to an excellent ending. Probably one of the greatest I’ve seen since FFVII--An even greater payback for finishing an even harder game.


[Another similarity BOFV shares with FFVII, is its inventive side quests. There really only two. One is an ant colony that you build and maintain in order to discover new abilities and items for your characters. You can also train the ants to perform several asks, even learning a musical instrument! If you dig far enough into the colony you will find the “Kokon Horay”, a mystery dungeon with 50 floors! As if playing the game over and over wasn’t enough!]


The difficulty of the game of course becomes easier as you go along, which I enjoyed compared to most RPG’s where I would have to build experience to level 99 just to finish. This is mainly due to Ryu’s dragon form. In most RPG’s if a character were to transform, it would either be through a limit break or through MP, or like in Shadow Hearts, SP. However, BOFV gives you the D-counter, which is basically a doomsday counter. If it reaches 0 before you reach the end of the game, you die. You have no worry of running out of time with the counter, because it counts down very slow--But there is always a catch. Every time Ryu uses his dragon form and/or attacks in that for, he uses a certain percentage point (it’s about 2% to transform, out of the overall 100%). Basically you want to conserve these points for the more difficult bosses and especially the end bosses. You will most likely not defeat the final boss without being in Dragon Form. However, if you conserve your points and can use your form on the last fight, it will be extremely easy and reward you for all of the effort you put into the game (this reward is very reminiscent of using knights of the round on Sephiroth, and/or killing mother brain with the hyper beam in Super Metroid). Either way, the dragon mode is extremely powerful, and no enemy can withstand more than 5 hits, which by the way can be done consecutively with the dragon form being that it has a high amount of AP. Not only is the dragon form strong, it’s very cool to look at.


The dragon form isn’t the only thing that is designed well; the rest of the game sports a kind of cell-shaded design better than a lot of other cell-shaded wannabe’s. Not only that, the game provides incredible music, the atmosphere of each level is excellent, and the character design is phenomenal. The game is basically a dungeon-crawler, so the atmospheres of the levels are very monotonous but articulate enough in maintaining an extremely varied industrial world. The music is so appropriate in every aspect, always emphasizing the mood of each moment in the game. And lastly the characters are so fragile and delicate, yet they are also very strong and resilient, the kind of characters that should cast an RPG. If I were to recommend any game, it would be this one. Never has a game kept me interested and wanting more than Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter. I’ve already started my fourth play-through and loving every minute of it (and still finding new paths, items and plots in the game). This is not a game for everyone, especially those that have grown-up with the Playstation generation. But those of us who are the generation of 8-bit, the generation of difficulty--this game is for us. If you were even considering playing this game, play it. If you are an avid RPG fan, you owe to yourself to play this game. If you don’t, stop playing RPGs because you clearly don’t know what one is. If you find yourself flying through today’s modern games, and appreciate a challenge, play this game!

By Jaycee