Topic: Breath Of Fire Series

Hello everyone do you play any of the Breath of Fire Series games? Reason are they any good?

I've played Breath of Fire 1-3 and 5. 1 is good, but kinda generic in retrospect. 2 and 3 are more unique, but certainly more flawed as well. 5 is the best thus far. It's unique while not having a ton of flaws, though it's still not exactly perfect. I should play BoF4 sooner than later.

Funny. BoF4 is the only one I've played. From what I remember, it was a fairly decent PS1 RPG. Definitely not top-shelf, but still quite fun.

3 and 4 are both pretty solid. 4 has a really unique battle system and some of the coolest 2d of the entire generation - much less on Playstation.

2 is probably my least favorite cause the battle balance / math is mostly crap.

1 is suuuper nostalgia-mode for me, but is basically just a somewhat-clumsy dragon quest clone with character-specific overworld abilities. It's awesome if you're me - it's pretty busted-generic if you're anyone else.

5 is cool, but really weird and doesn't feel much like a BOF game. It's a cool tactical-style battler though.

I really wouldn't call 3 solid at all, honestly. I'll explain later...

The only one I played through was the first one which I did enjoy. I never could find the second one during the days of the SNES but I did play that one a bit on the GBA before I lost the cartridge. I saw 3 and 4 but by the time they came out I just wasn't interested in that series anymore.

3 is much more technically solid than 1 or 2, has a super-bizarre-but-interesting sound design, and the Dragon Gene system was really novel for the time. That, and it makes good use of iso / 3/4 perspective. It's a perfectly serviceable RPG. I'd put it in line with Wild Arms and a smidge above Suikoden in terms of playability / overall goodness.

Doesn't hold a candle to FF7, or any of the late-gen Squaresoft SNES stuff (or Lufia 2), but few things do.

Half the minigames were bizarre, and some of them were infused with some of worst design choices I've seen in an RPG. The lighthouse mission is a perfect example of how bad it could be. I can't remember specifically what I didn't like with the battle system, but I just remember hating it by the time I put the game down. The blue-mage-like system for learning new moves was especially a pain in the rear, though. The story was a poorly-written rehash of the previous two games with endless amounts of arbitrary filler - what could've been easily resolved in 10 hours was instead dragged out for well over 30 hours, just so they could force you to take yet another detour and introduce yet another mini-game, whose mechanics, setting, and story will probably never be brought up ever again. The characters were slightly less generic than usual, but I didn't find any of them to be likeable. In fact, the only thing I particularly liked about it was its soundtrack. That's not even mentioning the long loading times and frequent encounter rate.

Really, I don't think it was a very solid game at all. I played it this February and tried really hard to like it - despite the imbalances, BoF2 is one of my favorite RPGs - but end up hating it after a little over 30 hours with it.

Fair enough. I do remember the minigame content being super tacked on and busted - but at the time, minigames were so novel to me that I dealt with it. I thought the narrative was a lot more solid than it was in 2 - translation and subject matter - but that's admittedly been the worst aspect of the entire series (4 was okay, 5 was actually quite novel).

To each his own I guess... The damage values in BOF 2 are just such a crapshoot, the crit / miss rates are absurd... I just couldn't get over the gambley terribleness of every random number I saw in BOF2. That and the overly Capcom-y music.

I will say that 4 is what I consider the highlight of the series. Fou Lou storyline was really cool, the new larger, closer-to-final-fantasy numerical scale was a welcome addition, and they fixed the blue-mage style system from 3. And 4's music is amaaaaazing.

I'll definitely have to give IV a shot then. I actually already own it, just haven't played it yet. I'm keeping my expectations in check, though.

I played Breath of Fire 2 once. In retrospect, it was probably a mediocre game with some great story moments. The death of random encounters was the best thing to happen to the genre.

@CanisWolfred - a smart thing to do with any RPG, esp. ones from the disc-based era. I actually restarted it (BOF IV) tonight - about 2.5 hours through at the moment. I will say this one has a bit of bizarre, really-constant minigaminess, but thus far they're clever / varied / short enough that they aren't too big of an impediment.

Seriously though... the 2d in BOF IV is the most gorgeous stuff ever. The animation is so high frame it looks like a Saturn game.