Breath of Fire III

I want to start off this review by imagining if RPG series/companies were sodas. Yes, there’s a reason, so bear with me. Suqare-Enix, with Final Fantasy, probably represents the name brand stuff. Atlus, and its series, the Shin Megami Tensei (with spin-offs) might represent a competing main name brand, though one that’s a little less popular. There’s also Namco Bandai, with their Tales series, which might be considered like gourmet sodas by some, or recently Nippon Ichi, with their Disgaea and whatnot, might be an indie soda company. Or something like that. Whether or not you agree with those allocations, I think it’s pretty fair to say that the Breath of Fire series, by Capcom, represents the generic brand. The store brand. That’s not to say it’s bad, but it is pretty generic. Since I’m currently looking at Playstation games, I’m going to start with Breath of Fire III. I mean, that one even calls itself, on the cover “The Classic Role Playing Game.”

Breath of Fire III begins with a couple of miners facing down a dragon whelp that is not as extinct as the rest of the dragons. You take control of the dragon, and burninate your way through the mine; you get captured, and carted out into the world. From there, you assemble a motley crew of unique individuals, who help you discover the truth behind the eradication of the dragons that occurred hundreds of years ago. Ultimately, you have to save the world from a goddess bent on ruling the world with an iron fist. Yeah, that sounds like a generic story to me. There’s some pretty good moments along the way, and actually, the game does a really good job of making a sympathetic villain, but there’s not really any major twists, and there’s only a few minor twists at the end of the game.

As far as the characters go, they’re okay. Nina, the princess of Wyndia, has issues of having to be the perfect princess at the expense of being allowed to be herself. Rei, lovable rogue that he is, is fully aware that he’s an irresponsible individual, and worries about whether he can do the right thing. Garr, the holy warrior, begins to doubt whether the services he performed for his god where justified. Most of the characters are fleshed out pretty well, except possibly for Peco, who only gets a little development late in the game. The biggest problem I can see with the characters is that they’re played completely straight. There’s occasional minor humor involving Garr’s great size and strength, or Peco’s … weirdness, but the personalities of the characters aren’t really humorized.

Game play is possibly where things get the most generic. Battles play out where you enter commands for all your characters, and they and the enemies act in order of agility. Characters have a balance between fixed character classes and customizability. While each character gains certain spells at certain levels, and emphasizes certain abilities in their levels, you can apprentice them to a master, who will teach them skills and adjust what stats they gain as they level up. It’s the best of both worlds, right? Well, it doesn’t always work out that you can change a character to whatever you want, because the basic stats of the character rule out certain options. So, the masters only serve to possibly cripple a character with stats that make them balanced, but not useful. You know how in some games, “Everyone’s a Red Mage,” or can learn and cast all types of magic? The most interesting thing about this game is that instead, “Everyone’s a Blue Mage,” and can learn enemy skills that have been used against them. It’s subverted, since you can switch which skills each character has, but the concept is one of the more original ones. Ryu, the main character, can turn into dragons by accessing various genes, and one fun thing is that, depending upon what genes are selected, the dragon will have different abilities, including some unique dragons that are greater than the sum of their parts.

This game is surprisingly long for a one-disc Playstation affair. It could last you a good 60 hours or more if you’re methodical in hunting out every side quest and minigame. Plus, when you use different character classes for your characters, it changes how you can use those characters. But, on the other hand, unless you’re a contrarian and enjoy doing things you’re not supposed to do in a game, you won’t want to make your characters inefficient in their party roles. So, this game’s replay value is something like “Despite some good replay elements, it’s still only a game you’ll want to play once.” It’s kinda a shame, because it’s not a bad game, but there’s not much to be gained from a second playthrough.

The numerical rating is a good place to come back to my original analogy. Just because Breath of Fire III is the RPG equivalent of the store brand of soda, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad game. In this case, it’s actually quite a good game. The flow of the narrative is a little slow, but a lot of the more or less unrelated quests still have some important character or world development that occurs during them. All in all, this game gets a solid 8 out of 10. It’s hardly original, but it’s a good iteration of those things that have been good in lots of other games. That’s why you’ll frequently see this game on the list of games that you might want to try for my other reviews. It’s generic enough that it’s got some elements of most other games in the genre, and these elements are mostly handled well enough.

Quick Tip: When you’re walking in the desert, late in the game, DON’T READ THE DIRECTIONS IN YOUR TENT. They are wrong. Remember what the guy told you, and do that instead.

Fun Fact: That mural you see in the opening of the game? That’s depicting the characters from the first Breath of Fire. But there’s some characters missing…

If you liked this game, you should try one of these games. Breath of Fire IV has mostly the same systems, and a few cameos from III. Chrono Trigger is an excellent game, and though you don’t have much customizability for your characters, the characters themselves are great. Dragon Warrior VII does a lot of the things that Breath of Fire III does, like classes, and a pleasantly meandering plot.