Review #712: Breath of Fire II

 Not a case of bad breath, thankfully.

 It's great, yo! Breath of Fire II is a direct sequel to the first game, albeit taking place a few hundred years after the first Ryu, Nina and friends stopped the evil Dark Dragon clan. Just like with the first game, when engaging with this game you have to keep in mind that it's an oldschool JRPG, with wonky translation, vague hints and a bit of grinding. The translation in particular is quite a gem, making it hard to understand a few pivotal plot points, and featuring all sort of typos and grammatical mistakes, truly a sight to behold. Just as with the GBA port of the first game, this version of BoF II features doubled experience and money gains, which makes grinding much more tolerable.

 The plot is pretty great despite its poor translation. The intro alone is phenomenal, you play as a very young Ryu who, after a meeting with his father and sister, returns to town alone, only to find his family gone and nobody in town remembering him or his family. That's how the game opens up, and it only gets better. Just as before, the game features a rich and diverse amount of races, such as fishmen, frogmen and what have you, and even the party itself is made up of very different folk. Ryu, the half-dragon man, the winged Nina, Jean, a frogman, Rand, a armadilloman, Katt, a tigerlass, Spar, a plantman, Sten, the monkeyman Ryu's best friend, Bow, the dogman and, finally, Bleau returns as a secret character. Each character, save for Bleau, has their own character arc and mini-story arc, so you get to know them. You have to help Jean prove that he is the real Prince when an usurper takes his place. You have to help Rand's mother plow the field, and then rescue her, etc etc. You can even visit "Township" every now and then to talk with your party members and get their take on the situation. It's a very compelling cast of characters, aided by an interesting plot that has you fighting an evil church that's trying to get everyone under their cult. Fantastic stuff for its time! The translation is pretty bad, so bad that the reveal of what happened during Ryu's childhood gets a single, wonky line of dialogue that's pretty easy to miss if you don't infer what the character is talking about. So bad that later in the game you're told to find a certain character in "HomeTown", but she's actually in "Township", but even so, the plot was very, very interesting, it can get quite dark actually, and I loved the new cast of characters and how they had proper personalities now.

 While the previous game wasn't particularly bad looking, Capcom was really flexing their spritework skills. The sprites in this game are AMAZING, the animations are great. This game puts most other JRPGs of its era to shame. Just look at the very detailed battle sprites and compare them with Final Fantasy's rustic looking characters, there's no comparison. Heck, Final Fantasy had intricate-looking bosses.... that had 0 animations, not so in this game. Capcom had always had great artists working on their sprites, and this game is proof of that. It helps that Breath of Fire's art direction has always been on point.

 The brunt of the game is pretty much your everyday SNES RPG: Visit towns, talk to NPCs, figure out where to go next, travel the world, enter dungeons, fight in turn-based battles. Just like before, there's a day-night cycle, with some NPCs only showing up at certain times of the day, and citizens closing their doors at night. Each character has a different field action, like before, Spar can walk through forests, Bow can hunt, Sten can reach poles to carry the party over gaps, Rand can roll into a bal and avoid random encounters, etc, etc. That said, there's a single area where this game falters and the previous game didn't... switching party members. Y'see, in the previous game, if you needed a character, you simply had to press start, switch in whoever you needed and that was that. Not so here, you can only and exclusively switch party members at Dragon Statues. Statues which are found in some towns and not others. Say, you finally found where you had to go, you are on your merry way only to find that you need Sten to cross over gaps. Tough luck! Hopefully you have Jean or Spar in your party so that you can quickly warp into a town that has a Dragon Statue. It's incredibly annoying! My party was made up of Ryu(Fishing), Kat(Breaking rocks), Bow(Hunter) and Nina(Eventually can call a giant bird to fly through the overworld) which meant that I had to go back to the nearest Dragon Statue to swap members quite often.

 That said, Sten, Rand and Nina have their own solo sections during the story, so make sure to have each character at least at level 22 and their equipment update at all times. Rand's solo boss battle was pretty darn tough even at that level. If you save at the wrong place and wrong time you could possibly enter an unwinnable state, in which you can't backtrack to grind for levels and a win a fight you just can't win. As I said, this is an oldschool JRPG, so it's unforgiving like that, and you should probably have a guide at an arm's length to consult every now and then. While the hints in this game aren't as awful as the ones in the previous game, because at least now you'll always know the name of the place you need to get to, sometimes you won't know where said town is. "X character is at Bando", thank you, but where the **** is Bando?? I mean, you'll get where you need to be eventually if you explore, but it's nice knowing where to explore.

 Combat has seen some slight tweaks to make it more interesting. For instance, now each character has their own unique battle ability. Ryu has Guts, which makes him heal himself, the more HP he's missing, the more he'll heal. Nina has Will, which will either do nothing or restore 16 MP(INFINITE MANA!!!), Rand has Wake, which has a chance of reviving a fallen character, Spar has Nurture, which varies depending one how much flora is around the field of battle. Not every ability is useful, but it's a very neat idea. Ryu is a dragonkin, as per usual, but now his transformations consume all of his MP, and the damage it deals depends on how much MP was used, which means, that, yes, BoF's Ryu was way stronger than this Ryu. But this one wears pants.

 There's another neat addition, Shamans. Hidden throughout the game are 6 Shaman girls. Two you get through the plot, another one can be permanently missed. Shamans can be fused to every character but Ryu and Bleau, and each character can fuse with up to two Shamans. Fusions can have three different results: A passive increment to a character stats. A boosted increment if the Shaman and the character are compatible, which also changes the character's sprite colors(Pretty neat) and a massive improvement on most stats alongside an appearance change. Bow can turn into a massive armored creature, Rand can turn in a bundle of cuteness(Tanky as hell), Nina can turn into a more majestic version of herself, Sten can turn into a Djinn, Katt can turn into a devil-lady and Spar... Spar is special in that he has four different forms. That said, there's one small caveat....certain story events will undo the fusions, as well as the character dying. This is pretty darn inconvenient, specially when one of the story events during the final dungeon, the longest and toughest dungeon in the game, undoes all your fusions! Making returning to the Township a chore.

 Speaking of the Township, this is another neat new addition, your own town. Kinda. After a a short while you'll become the owner of the town 'Township', and you can invite up to six different NPCs into your town, each one boasting their own benefits. That said, there's no way of knowing what these benefits are, and once you invite an NPC into your town, it's final. Needless to say, get a guide and get the good ones, since some are almost useless.

 One final piece of advice, hoard your MP restoring items up to the very end. The final two bosses are the stuff of nightmares, even though I was overlevelled thanks to the increased XP gain rate, it was down to the wire, as I consumed every single MP restoring item and my characters were out of mana and close to dying... I managed to defeat it by the skin of my teeth. I thought I wouldn't make it through. Heck, the second-to-last boss is no slouch either and he'll kick your butt without a second thought. It's a tough game, oh boy, but the final stretch is one tough cookie.

 Talk about an improved sequel! Breath of Fire II is a fantastic game as long as you can get yourself in the right mindset to enjoy it. Be ready to deal with unfair fights, a rough encounter rate and vague hints on how to progress. But get yourself a decent guide at your side, and forgive its aged tropes and you can have a fun time with this one.
 8.0 out of 10